All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

[robinbloke]

Communication again; pondering the little things that make conversation (in my opinion) the best medium for expression. I.e. communication whereby anything other than direct logical fact has to be conveyed. For facts, probably text (book/electronic) is best¹, you normally need to work through them at your own speed and pause now and then to digest it all.
Language. I have a standing argument with a friend (on which we agree to disagree, but every now and then it returns to conversation and we try to convince the other again) that language affects the way we think.
The basis for my argument comes from two directions; firstly that certain languages contain constructs and/or concepts that are not available to other languages. Two examples of this are object/gender representation (i.e. an object is male/female or sometimes 'it'), or letter/number representation (Hebrew). English has neither of these ideas and as such certain nuances of conversation and/or subtleties using these ideas cannot therefore be used. For example, to make a joke regarding (say) a table and working the gender of the table into that joke is not possible in English.
The second basis for my argument comes from my programming background; I know that several coding languages can be used to produce exactly the same result, however the logic flow of these languages and their structure is entirely different - therefore although the result is the same the process is different. This, I argue, is the same for spoken languages (to a degree) as well. Chinese has an entirely different structure and methodology to French, but you can say certain things with both of them. The structure underneath is different.
But this aside, the nuances of communication, just a pause a glimpse, a wrinkle of a smile; they can all hint at what we think. We communicate but we're not always saying what we're thinking - sometimes this is a good thing, we don't want to express everything or just hinting at something can be enough. Sometimes I can catch these hints and start to wonder if I imagined them, or if someone had meant something else, or a dozen other things. Despite conversation being the best form of communication it's still replete with flaws.
[deleted for tangency, end of oil = end of civilization?]
Maybe life needs que cards, maybe it needs subtitles or perhaps just little popup help boxes that you can select for 'for more information on this conversation' or 'for a better explanation of why...' at appropriate points.
Or maybe in 30 years time you'll be able to transcribe your life to a *VD and scan back through it all with exactly those things there, check back your life and watch your memories unfold before your eyes, scenes from the past brought back to life once again.
Me? I'd skip to the outtakes in the special features section.



1 As opposed to ‘the best’; a hideously overused phrase that irks me a lot.

Comments

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

This touches on how people perceive things. What is red to you? It might well be what I perceive to be green for example. Synaesthesia is an obvious (exaggerated) example, where people experience sights as sounds, or vice versa.

I would suggest that thought and communication are like the set of irrational numbers. Language is like (a subset of) integers. (Different languages represent different subsets.) You can express an approximation of a rational number fairly simply as an integer. You can even spend some more time and effort and express it more precicely as a rational number - but most of the time you have to do with an approximation.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Ah the joys of set theory... But I like that analogy. :)

[jonnyargles.livejournal.com]

maybe in 30 years time you'll be able to transcribe your life to a VD

Herpes for me, please.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I do not see how your two arguments support the claim that language affects the way we think. The first one, that different grammatical constructions and categories exist in different languages, and may facilitate expressing some concepts rather than others, does not mean that the language causes the thought: why might different cultures not conceive of things in different ways, and create linguistic forms to reflect their mental conceptions? If I invent or discover a thing, and want to refer to it in language, I can create a word for it. I do not need to know the word for a thing before I can conceive of it. With regard to your specific examples, I would also point out that English _used_ to have three genders for nouns, in the Old English period, as well as many morphological features which have since been lost (primarily due to internal linguistic changes i.e. sound change eroding final syllables). Similar changes have happened in many other languages and are still observable in the present day.
I don't think there's any evidence for changes in the way populations think corresponding to massive structural changes in their languages. Also, a person can learn to think and communicate in a second language, and translate between languages. If our thoughts were entirely constrained by our first languages, it would be impossible even to learn another language: no translation of the other language's concepts or constructions would be possible. (The example of "letter/number representation" in Hebrew I don't understand - despite learning some Hebrew; what do you mean by this?)
For the second argument, that different languages can express the same thing in different ways - I certainly wouldn't disagree, but why does this mean that the speakers conceive of the statement in different ways? In Irish, I would say "Ta se anseo" to mean "He is here" - the Irish has the verb before the subject, the English has the subject before the verb. I don't mean anything different by the different constructions; I don't internally conceive of them as implying that "he" is any less "here" by putting the verb in a different place!
So I can't go along with a strong linguistic determinism argument. However, I can accept a very weak form of it: the structure of a language may bias its speaker in the direction of some categorizations of the world rather than others. Experiment has shown that babies raised with a language containing noun classifiers based on shape of object, tended to group objects according to their shape; however, babies who were exposed to a language lacking noun classifiers (American English in this case) grouped the same objects by colour. I can imagine that such preferential ways of dividing up the world could persist into adulthood. But I do not think this precludes American English speakers from conceiving of shape-based classifications of objects, or from acquiring a second language which uses such classifiers; it may simply be a little less obvious or natural.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Also, what do you have against the phrase "the best" and what distinction do you make between "text is best" and "text is the best"? They seem to mean much the same thing to me, in this context anyway.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

I'll reply to your other message later;
It's an overused conversation phrase, people will be discussing something or other and say "The best time that ever happened was..." and roll into their anecdote. Five minutes later they'll say the exactly same thing. I find it irksome.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Do you object to them saying of several things that they are "the best" at something, when only one thing can really be best? If so, I understand your irritation, but don't see why leaving out "the" removes the problem. If text is described as either best or the best for conveying facts, this still means you can't say five minutes later that something other than text is (the) best for conveying facts. (But maybe that's not what you meant after all, and I've misunderstood.)

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

As you describe at the start there;

It's just because those two words are usually at the start of the stories :-
"The best time..."
"The best one..."
"The best ice-cream..."

etc.