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My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I
by ph0rque 16y ago
My native language is Russian. I learned English when we emigrated to US, at which point I was 9 years old. I also learned German as an exchange student when I was 17.
I can say that somewhere along my language learning experience (before I learned German), I learned to abstract my thoughts to ideas, then 'implement' them to whatever language I needed to speak at the moment.
- Jun8 16y agoThink about one of your "abstract" thoughts: What language are they in :-)
- axod 16y agoWhy do they need to be in a language? You could represent everything as images/video sequences.
- Jun8 16y agoAt least some has to be in a linguistic representation (check the Aydede article I linked above, it's interesting). Why? Because (i) You cannot represent everything using images, e.g. "brother", "justice", "tesseract", but more importantly (ii) it is impossible for image representations to support complex syntactic manipulations necessary for reasoning. As a very simple example, think about the syllogism that starts with "all men are mortal". How would you convert the deduction to a representation based on images. One final thing: The most common words in all languages are grammatical functions words, e.g. "the", "a", "every", etc. How can these be represented using images? This is why, no ideogram based writing systems have ever been devised (although people thought for a while that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters had this characteristic).
- villa1n23 16y agoThis answer seems to be Begging the Question. You can represent brother and justice, via imagery, but what you would be doing is using a token example, comparing and creating a type out of the two situations. Now communicating that idea without a linguistic representation would be near impossible(I can't imagine an easy way) but to apprehend it without a linguistic layer is possible. (ii) It could just be my own misunderstanding of what is being said, but does having a visual representation system, mean that symbols cannot be manipulated to interact, or does that by definition make them a language? Is this a functional definition we are working with? As well, with words like "every" "the" "a" it sounds like these things are objects to you, and not emergent connectors inherent in a linguistic system, they exist by virtue of the language existing. A visual system may not have need for such conventions. Many of these questions or examples assume an almost external objective (at least thats my interpretation) existence of linguistics, but this is coming from a linguistic mind, and assumes the necessary existence of it.( hence my begging question comment at the beggining). I held much the same view, until I experienced ineffable idea's and concepts in non linguistic form. Anecdotally, one can try salvia or dimethyltryptamine and gain the qualia experience of a thinking or experience without linguistics. Good points, but I feel Impossible is too strong a conclusion based on whats been said. :)
- philwelch 16y agoChrist, I couldn't. I'm terrible at visualization and many of my abstract thoughts cannot be visualized.
- ph0rque 16y agoEquations :-). But seriously, I think of e.g. freedom as that feeling you get when you're on a tropical island with the wind blowing through your hair. Much more interesting than thinking of "freedom" or "Freiheit" or "свобода".
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>I think of e.g. freedom as that feeling you get when you're on a tropical island with the wind blowing through your hair. Really? How do you then differentiate freedom internally from the literal feeling you are using as a metaphor for it or say from an idea like "tropical breeze"? What's your internal token for "tropical breeze"?
- ph0rque 16y agoNot sure where you're coming from... I just do. Remember, I can read my own thoughts, and I know which meaning my thoughts are referring to.