"A key question is whether language influences thought or thought influences language. Both positions have been advocated. The first is known as linguistic relativity. The rival position is known as universalism. It assumes that human thought is significantly similar across all cultures - that humankind shares a certain "psychic unity" - and that since language is a reflection of human thought, all languages are significantly similar as far as their conceptual categories are concerned. In its extreme version, this position asserts that linguistic conceptualization is essentially the same in all languages. ..."
- from the beginning of chapter 6 of "Language, culture and meaning: Cross-cultural semantics. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics, written by R. Dirven and M. Verspoor.

Earlier I talked about the question of language vs. thought, and having today read this article (chapter), which we will use during this course in English translation this autumn, I have further developed my reflection on language, and specifically I have thought more about my own experience with danish vs. norwegian. I noted how I "think more freely" when I speak danish; this was very very vague. I am more comfortable with Danish than Norwegian. Also, I think Danish is a much more relaxed language than Norwegian. More slang? Is that it? Or is it just the way they talk? It's like "Hvad så?" (almost = what's up?") which is more ... personal, yet distanced, than the Norwegian "hvordan går det?" (how are things?)

The Danes are Quite different from the Norwegians, yet I am very poor in showing the differences.. Hopefully, I will be more apt at this later.

The article, which I would really like to scan and put online for others to read too, but since the work is under strong copyright, I don't think that would be seen as "fair use"... But since the article is just a chapter of a book which one could buy (I haven't found the book on Amazon tho..), and I don't want to sell the material or in other ways profit from it, I would be more bound to doing this later - perhaps. In either case, I will explain some of the terms which are used in this article.

The importance of worldview (Weltsicht).

Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt regarded language as a prisma or grid spread over things in the world so that each language reflects a different worldview (Weltsicht). Herder and von Humboldt belonged to the German Romantic tradition, where this view on language was quite dominant. (I guess?). This perspective on language was taken to America by Franz Boas, the founder of cultural and linguistic antrhopology in the US. Boas and his students met Indians in the US and when they encountered languages like the Kwakiutl (a native American language of British Columbia), they found languages which are Very different from the European languages. An example used in this article is that in Kwakiutl one does not distinguish between one and many; as in "one stone" or "many stones". On the other hand, Kwakiutl specifies whether the stone is visible or invisible to the speaker, and so on.

All this I found extremely interesting!

Having studied philosophy earlier, I am inclined to be more interested in these, perhaps more philosophical aspects of language learning. I am afraid to say that phonetics is faar less interesting to me than these more abstract questions of, for instance, the relationship between language and thought. The article used several examples from different world languages, like French, Italian and Japanese.

Regarding the linguistic relativity (also called the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), here is a small quote

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages... We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way (...)

Dissecting nature... How do my words affect my thinking? How does our concepts help us to use the knife of thought in our dissecting? Where does the bed stop and the bedsheet start? Do we, because we have the word "bed-sheet", cut in the line between the bed and the bedsheet? If we did not have such a term as "bed-sheet", how would we then view the bed-sheet if it was lying on the floor? Would it be there? Of course it would be, a bed-sheet would not become im-material just because we didn't have a concept for it... But hmmm... trying to find a better example.. It's almost like not seeing the air/space before our nosetips. Objects and non-objects. How do we dissect?

Ethnocentrism is imposing the categories of our own language upon the description of another language. Do we often lower ourselves to ethnocentrism? Is it to be avoided, and if so, why? Personally I think (of course) we should be open-minded, and when speaking with others who have radically different ways of speaking or expressing themselves, we must take a compromising stand and try to understand some of the codes behind their language. (omg, I am rambling here...)

I see myself supporting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/linguistic relativity far more than the universalism stanze. I think that language DOES influence our thoughts, but of course, this is not absolute. We humans adapt, evolve, and in a growing multi-ethnic society we are (hopefully) also able to grow our vocabulary and make more flexible use of concepts from different sources.

Like Doris Lessing said:

"English is impoverished; it lacks words and concepts we need. Any writer who ha tried to describe certain processes and experiences has come up against it: the absence of words. There are ways around it -analogy is one- but the problem remains."

Doris Lessing here, of course, talks from a spiritual or artistic point of view. If she was to be an engineer or a marketing consultant, she would not have the same point at all. It's like Norwegian's two main dialects, "bokmål" and "nynorsk". While bokmål is a very good language for bureaucracy and technical terms (in my point of view), nynorsk (which is a far more rural / district-based language form) is much more poetical, almost musical. I will back up this point with examples later on.

Now, on to read some more American colonial history :)