It seems like philosophers have been thinking about the act of language for a long time and it's strange to me that I haven't begun to really think about this until I got into this 102 class. I'm not sure what I can say about language as an act of creation but the one thing I do wonder a lot is who created our words? And why did they pick them? What gave these people the power to say what color is green or which one is called blue? When I begin to read the quote from Socrates it made me think that he's implying you must know words to even think. I may be confused on what point he was intending to get at but just because someone does not have words certainly does not mean they do not think. I think it means they think in very different ways than we do such as signs, visions, or symbols. Every person still has a soul whether or not they have sight or hearing.
Even though you may have lost sight and hearing, you still have the ability to feel and to smell. It is psychologically known that your smell is directly connected to your memory. Therefore someone may not be able to see signs and hear words but that does not mean they do not think. They associate smells to events. Let's say you are blind and deaf but you touch a hot stove and then touch an ice cube. You know there is a difference between the two objects you touched and even though you don't have a word for hot or a word for cold you still feel the same thing as someone who knows the words hot and cold. What I'm trying to get at by this example is that your thoughts are not only connected to your words and I do agree with Max Muller saying words are our most important signs. But I think they seem so important to us because it's all we mainly use. Words are just as important to us as signs are to deaf people.
The example with feeling the hot verse the cold brings me back to the point of describing language as an act of creation. Someone has created these words so we are conditioned to know that the feeling we feel when we touch something hot is the word hot. The feeling doesn't change even if the word does. The same goes for any word we have. I may have taken these quotes out of context but that is what I get when I read them. My main point that I believe is that you are born with a soul and you have thoughts and are human even if you are unable to see or hear.
1 comment:
Great reflection! You're raising perhaps the most philosophically important question in linguistics: just what is the relationship between the sign and what it signifies?
As soon as we say that language defines the world--which it clearly does in some ways--we have to ask, "How? And to what extent?" As you point out, there are clearly some realties that exist beyond words, like hot and cold. But there are other that are more completely tied to language, like "friend." Friends are certainly real, but just what makes them friends is an rather relative and language-based set of relationships.
On another note, it's perfectly correct to speak of signs in sign languages as "words." A language like American Sign Language (ASL) is a completely valid language of its own (that's actually closer to spoken French than to spoken English), and it has nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc, and all the grammar that goes with them. Outside of a sign language, of course, a sign like pointing is not a word.
Post a Comment