Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: "T. Peter Park" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 18:10:23 -0400

Dear Alfred,
Yes, you're right, you expressed it more concisely and elegantly than I
myself did--it's our brains that create the nouns, by perceiving certain
bundles of qualities as holistic unities. Our brains do it in the first
place--and then language reinforces this by "sanctifying" some of these
brain-created unities with words--granting, too, as you point out, that
language may "sanctify" them either by trating them as nouns (English)
or as verbs (Nootka)--but, remember, a Nootka "it houses" or "it's
housing" is as much an arbitrary brain-created unity imposed on a vast
complex flux of individual perceptions as the English "house," German
"Haus," Latin "domus," Russian "dom," or Greek "oikos"! 
You also expressed my own other point beautifully: Locke and Hume were
correct in stating that there is no perception of the world outside
except by our senses, but that this performs in an integral way, not in
a sequence--at least the result of it when processed in our brains!
Locke and Hume were correct in pointing that all we ever perceive when
we see, taste, feel, or experience a skunk, apple, or kiss is a bunch of
sense data, certainly no invisible, tasteless, odorless, colorless
"apple-itself" or "skunk-itself" somehow holding together the
sense-data--but, as typical products of 17th and 18th century European
culture, it did not occur to them to add that our brains are "wired" so
as to perceive these sense-data compresent in an integral way, nor to
remind us that we normally do not experience these sense-data in a
sequential way--though if we specifically want to do so for some reason,
we certainly are capable of thinking and speaking about them in a
sequential way. As I myself said in my original essay, survival needs in
the African veldt 100,000 or 1,000,000 years ago would have militated
against our ancestors perceiving their sense-data of leopards and snakes
in a sequential way! 
Pax,
T. Peter <[email-masked]>
Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting) wrote:
> 
> --- In [email-masked], "T. Peter Park" <tpeterpark@e...> wrote:
> 
> > ... in his chapter on "Language and Neural Codes," Prof.
> > Smith wrote:
> >
> > <<What is the poor brain to do to bring these different, mutually
> > incompatible classes of information [visual, auditory, olfactory,
> > tactile, etc.] together for some common processing step? There is
> no way
> > that these disparate inputs can be fed into any common processor
> without
> > being translated into a code that is capable of handling all of the
> > modalities at once. What might that code be? It cannot talk about
> sights
> > or sounds or smells. Such information would be meaningless to all
> but
> > the specialized portion of the sensory brain that had always been
> > committed to each of these senses. It cannot, in short, be a code
> that
> > deals with sensory signals emitted by some outside agent. It must
> be a
> > code that refers to the thing *itself*, not the stimuli it emits.
> The
> > new code symbol would not be "small, black and white, furry," nor
> > "pitter, patter, snuffle, stomp," nor yet "awful, acrid smell!" The
> code
> > would have to be a symbol that stood simply for *skunk*--a symbol
> for
> > the external reality itself, rather than a set of partial sensory
> > reports *about* the outside world. Sensory codes consisted entirely
> of
> > adjectives, and this universal cross-modal code introduced *nouns*.
> By
> > the same cross-modal process the nervous system developed a code
> that
> > integrates individual messages from muscles, stretch receptors, and
> > again the eye, to move beyond the body with a symbolic code that
> refers
> > to space and [pp.143/144] movement in the world outside of the skin,
> > rather angles of joints and stretch of muscles. Thus verbs were
> born.>>
> >
> > This, I think, helps beautifully to account for my own observation
> that
> > all known human languages without exception possess nouns and verbs
> as
> > well as adjectives, words for objects and actions as well as words
> for
> > qualities or individual discrete sense-data. If Curtis Smith and his
> > theories about cross-modal sensory processing are correct, the very
> > existence of language requires the existence of words for objects as
> > whole *Gestalts* and not just stringings-together of their various
> > qualities. To use Curtis Smith's own example, language from the very
> > beginning necessarily included words like "skunk" and never ever
> used
> > stringings-together of quality-words like
> > "black-white-furry-pitter-patter-stinky" more than perhaps to a very
> > limited extent! A language composed of adjective-chains like
> > "black-white-furry-stinky," if it had ever existed, would have
> defeated
> > the whole purpose of language--and could not perhaps have even
> existed
> > in the first place, as I see Curtis Smith's argument! Curtis Smith's
> > theory of linguistic origins, by the way, also suggests that, in
> talking
> > about the psychology of human sensory perception and the origin of
> our
> > mental concepts and complex ideas, the Gestalt psychologists may
> well
> > have gotten it more nearly right than John Locke and David Hume!
> 
> T. Peter, I totally can agree with you in this final conclusion: It's
> our human brain that creates the nouns. We don't perceive those
> "bundles" of stringed qualities unwinding the coil (the Gestalt!)
> into a string of "black-white-furry-stinky" or even a "red-
> smooth-soft-causing pleasant emotions...", but as one whole, parallel
> impression (=image) of a "skunk" (Stinktier) or a "kiss"
> (=soft mouth kissing). Locke and Hume are correct for sure stating
> that there is no perception of the world outside except by our
> senses, but this performs in an integral way, not in a sequence - at
> least the result of it when processed in our brains!
> What is more interesting to me, is: why are there languages like
> Nootka expressing "real" nouns (e.g. house) in a *verbal*
> category? This cannot be due to natural human perception (see above),
> but rather to a metaphysical (better: physical)
> comprehension of our world outside! Did they really have deep insight
> in physics (the *fact* that all material is nothing but a
> "flowing" (panta rhei!) process - a stream of electrons etc.)?
> 
> co'o mi'e .aulun.
> 
> http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
> Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - ***/*™ "Tieh Meng Hen"
> My Poetry
> 
> 
> 
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