Does our language represent the changing nature of life?
June 10th, 2010I just read an insightful blog post
How Our Language Determines Our Reality
by Dr.Morty Lefkoe
What I have been contemplating resonated in a quote he used:
“As Ralph Strauch points out in his book The Reality Illusion:
Some languages are structured around quite different basic word- categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. A verbal form like “eventing” might better describe this word-category, except that such a form doesn’t sound right in English, with its emphasis on noun forms. We might think of Nootka as composed entirely of verbs, except that they take no subjects or objects as English verbs do. The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see. Even something which we see clearly as a physical object, like a house, the Nootka perceive of as a long-lived temporal event. The literal English translation of the Nootka concept might be something like “housing occurs;” or “it houses.”