Do you ever think about how deeply our thinking is fixed by language? I know Plato talks about that from time to time, and Shakespeare loved puns so much his contemporaries and readers/playgoers ever since have groaned at some of his wit. But I think there's something to the sounds of words, an inherent onomatopoeia, a thought-onomatopoeia if you will, and I don't think it's too much to say, as Nietzsche did, that certain concepts we have--big things like love, God, health--are oversimplified in our mind by the very structure of our grammar.
/end masturbatory academic spiel.
sorry. but i don't hardly see you guys anymore, and i can't talk on this level with the high school kids, though i enjoy visiting their classes.
ps tam, you have to blog about your writing program at liceo! please, when you are done with exams at least
I didn't know that about Nietzsche, it sounds fascinating... like a natural tendency to attract too abstract concepts to our understandable categories. It has a lot to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that says that our way of perceiving, understanding and explaining the world is completely conditioned by out language and the categories we use to analyze it. the text has many examples that are just so enlightening! you should read taht text if you haven't, its quite short :) I'll write about the writing program as soon as i can, i promise!! :D
Do you ever think about how deeply our thinking is fixed by language? I know Plato talks about that from time to time, and Shakespeare loved puns so much his contemporaries and readers/playgoers ever since have groaned at some of his wit. But I think there's something to the sounds of words, an inherent onomatopoeia, a thought-onomatopoeia if you will, and I don't think it's too much to say, as Nietzsche did, that certain concepts we have--big things like love, God, health--are oversimplified in our mind by the very structure of our grammar.
ReplyDelete/end masturbatory academic spiel.
sorry. but i don't hardly see you guys anymore, and i can't talk on this level with the high school kids, though i enjoy visiting their classes.
ps tam, you have to blog about your writing program at liceo! please, when you are done with exams at least
I didn't know that about Nietzsche, it sounds fascinating... like a natural tendency to attract too abstract concepts to our understandable categories. It has a lot to do with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that says that our way of perceiving, understanding and explaining the world is completely conditioned by out language and the categories we use to analyze it. the text has many examples that are just so enlightening! you should read taht text if you haven't, its quite short :)
ReplyDeleteI'll write about the writing program as soon as i can, i promise!! :D