[lit-ideas] Welsh "Glas" (Was: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:34:11 EDT
Krueger asks John McCreery
> John -- if you didn't have a word for "red" would you still see the colour
> of an apple, a tomato, blood? Or, because you didn't have the word for it,
> would your brain simply stop processing data?
>
This reminds me of Welsh 'glas'
ENGLISH WELSH
----------------------------------------------
blue -------------------------------
--------------------------------------------- glas
green --------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------
We may assume that an English-speaker and a Welsh-speaker perceive _the same
*thing*, a bluish-greenish sea (like the Atlantic off the coast of
Gibraltar).
"Glas", the Welsh-speaker says.
This translates as _either_ 'blue' or 'green', or 'blueish green', or
'greenish blue'. The next step would ask (but I won't since I avoid homunculi)
whether in the *mental representation* of the Welsh speaker there is a separate
_predicate_ for 'glas'. Why, the Welsh speaker may ask the same thing about the
English speaker.
So it's best to treat _thoughts_ whatever they are, as pretty
_inarticulated_. Indeed the idea of 'articulated thought' seems anti-Ockhamist.
It's only
_sentences_ that are *articulated*, and they come in different shades,
lenghts, and lingos:
'Glas'
'That's blue'
'No, that's green'
'Greenish blue, I'd say"
'More like blueish green, if you ask me"
Etc.
JL
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