Seasons

Have you ever had an idea that you just didn't have the words for? Those ideas are hard to hold onto, but not impossible. Usually to hold onto them, you have to find some way to put them into words. For some reason, I'm reminded of this exchange from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods:

"In Omnia, we have no word for slave."
"Yes... I imagine fish have no word for water, either."

hey, what a coincidence - 1984 is my favorite book!
-----------------------------------------------------
djfroggy - newspeak was a laguage of limited vocabulary, so of course it discouraged thought! what I was saying is that when a person knows a lot of words and has an extensive vocabulary, unlike 1984's "newspeak", deeper thought is possible.

DJ Froggy: Newspeak double minus good
---
They say that the thumb caused humans to focus on intricate movement sets requiring precision which caused our cerebral cortex to grow a little but then language and its increasing complexity of potential expression made for the sharp fast (fast, like 200,000 years that is) cerebral cortex growth in our evolution.

Or that is to say: it ent broke so dun fix eet.

Actually more to the point: The entire framework of our conceptual and actualized growth as a species and as individuals can thank increasingly complex language potential.

I am fairly certain that to restate that in its opposite form, future tense would also be trtue.

Has anyone else read Helen Keller's autobiography? She talks about the connection between thoughts and words.

I have not. Whats the concept she puts forth?

Basically that thought without words is very limited. She talks about the contrast before and after she learned language.

well, think about how toddlers make more and more associations between things they percieve as they learn more language.

Good point Colonel. It is true that language shapes much of how I think (though I know there are people who visualize more than I do or who think in music or-God help them-code, so they they do not depend on language as much as I). I have to wonder if language always deepens our understanding of the world or if it merely helps us to construct reality in a socially acceptable way.

I have just finished reading I,Cyborg an autobiographical book by Kevin Warwick, who is a professor of robotics. He has done experiemnts using various methods to hook his own nervous system up to transcievers so that he can communicate by sending his thoughts to a computer (and he can recieve various other types of informaition directly into his nervous system). He thinks in the future it will be more efficient to communicate by sending unencrypted signals directly from brain to brain, and that one day language will be obsolete. One of his later experiments involved hooking his wife up to a PC so that they could have "nervous system to nervous system" communications. It worked, and they seemd happy. May I add, his set up was temporary--cos, man,think of the boundry issues! Anyway, it's food for thought.