Language

Joe Monzo wrote,

>Why? Because my training never told
>me there was anything else. The musical
>"language" I had learned up to that point
>shaped all of my musical thinking, and
>imposed constraints on my own perceptual
>cognition, of which I was totally unaware.
>Regular language works this way too.

I have to say I'm totally agreeing with Daniel Wolf on this one, but
let's flesh this out. Do you mean language imposes constraints on
perceptual cognition, or on other types of cognition?

[Erlich:]
> let's flesh this out. Do you mean language
> imposes constraints on perceptual cognition,
> or on other types of cognition?

Yes.

I can illustrate best by an example. Latin is
an inflectional language: it uses various different
suffixes attached to the end of a stem to form
a complete word. Each part, the stem and the
suffix, has a particular meaning: the stem is
the "basic" meaning of the word, and the suffix
provides such information as person, tense,
and mood, etc.

Chinese, on the other hand, is called an
"analytic" language, meaning that each word
is unvarying and can function as any part
of speech. Thus, in Chinese there is no
such thing as verb, noun, adjective, etc. The
functions of the words, and thus the meaning
of the sentence, is derived mainly from
the *positions* of the words in relation
to each other. (Interestingly, English was
originally inflectional and thru-out its history
has tended increasingly towards analytic.)

The point is that although both languages
can convey the same basic idea of something,
neither can translate the other *exactly*
because they work in distinctly different ways.
(A Chinese phrase which translates roughly
literally as "one road tranquil quiet" is the
equivalent of French "bon voyage", which
is a shortening of the French for "have a
good trip".)

No language can every convey every shade
of meaning that exists in another language.
Thus the difficulty of having computers make
translations - the rules are just too complex
for us to grasp at present, and may always
remain so.

To that extent, the Latin-speaking person can
never imagine quite the same things the
Chinese-speaking person can, and vice
versa, unless he learns the other language.

I'm not saying that it is not possible to create
a previously inexistent concept out of elements
or ideas that can already be expressed.
Every language continues to grow in this way.
But tellingly, new words are often borrowed
whole from other languages along with the
concepts they express, rather than created
anew out of familiar linguistic components.

And not included in this argument is the idea
that there are things imaginable which have
no way to be expressed in any language
the imaginer knows. This is why a lot of
musicians play music, and why artists paint
pictures.

- Monzo

|\=/|.-"""-. Joseph L. Monzo......................monz@juno.com
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I offer the following quote from chapter 12,
"Language and Psychology", from Mario Pei,
_The Story of Language_:

> Margaret Mead brings out the contrast between
> the normal American way of presenting the name
> of an object to a child or to a foreign learner
> ("This is a hat") and what goes on among certain
> New Guinea tribes ("We call this a hat"). The
> The American fashion of presenting the object
> and its name immediately sets up an inherent link
> between the object and its English name, with all
> other links excluded; the method of the supposedly
> backward Papuans leaves room for other possible
> ways of linguistically describing the same object
> and makes it psychologically possible for the child
> in later life to accept "chapeau", "Hut", "sombrero"
> as equivalent terms.

The point is that the actual thought processes
of the users of each language are radically different.

-Monzo
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