Introduction:
Human
being is the only creature who has language and communicate orally with one
another using language. One the other hand thought is the mental or
intellectual activity involving an individual’s subjective consciousness.
According to Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard, “Infants
are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects” that
means we have a mechanism which is built in and to talk or give any kind of
output we need to think. So we can say that, both things are controversial for
their own contribution in the human mind. Because in our everyday life we need
to talk to express our ideas and to express ideas or thoughts we need to think.
But the fact is we do not convert all our thought into language, some thoughts
remain unspoken and hidden in our mind and brain.
Different view about Language and
thoughts:
Language
and thought are two distinct issue in the field of linguistics. Different
linguists describe this two concern issue differently.
Wikipedia
define language as “the
ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication,
particularly the human ability to do so……”.
Noam Chomsky, a famous linguistics, in
an interview, interviewed by Wiktor Osiatynski, explain
language as“I think a very important aspect of language has
to do with the establishment of social relations and interactions. Often, this
is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think. There is a
narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication
refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that,
certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it
is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of
language. For example, language can be used to express or clarify one's
thoughts with little regard for the social context, if any.
I think the use
of language is a very important means by which this species, because of its
biological nature, creates a kind of social space, to place itself in
interactions with other people. It doesn't have much to do with communication
in a narrow sense; that is, it doesn't involve transmission of information.
There is much information transmitted but it is not the content of what is said
that is transmitted. There is undoubtedly much to learn about the social uses
of language, for communication or for other purposes.”
During the early
and mid-20th century, several linguistics, anthropologists, most
notably Benjamin Whorf and Eric Sapir proposed that Language is not merely an
interface but also plays a formative role in shaping thought itself. Whorf
stated that “ We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which
holds that all observes are not led by the same physical evidence to the same
picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or
can in some way be calibrated”
Language vs Thought:
There are
several causes that shows that thought process influenced by the forms of
language. Sometimes we use some words which are semantically general, so they
fail to make distinctions that present in the thought. Suppose in English when
someone told about his/her ‘Aunty’ without specify whether she is from which
side (mother side or father side or relative by blood or marriage) then it
makes different interpretations to the receiver. Sometimes it occur that sender
provide an information to the receiver thinking a thing but to the receiver it
comes as a completely different meaning and it generates misunderstanding to receiver,
that means while speaker generally mean what they say, they do not and could
not say exactly what they mean. From this it comes to us that language is
little bit hazy then the thought, it is rich then language.
On the other
hand a research conducted by psychologist at Vanderbilt University they show
that speakers of different languages notice different things and so make
different distinctions. When a Korean say that one object joins another, they
specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. But on the contrary An
American or English Speakers say whether the object is in or on another. These differences affect how adults view the
world. The two people from different country they see the same thing or events
but they describe it according their distinctions of their languages. But they
think that when a baby see something they just look at it and produce thought
about this events. But their expression depends upon their environment where
they grow up. Language actually produce in cognitive area of a human.
Human child of
their first year of life got that they have their own inner mental representation
that they can represent to the other. At that stage children began to respond
through different sounds or symbols. And they start their response slowly,
firstly their words do not mean much but slowly they start to talk to express
their feelings. At the stage of two year they nearly complete understandable
language, when they want anything. And the stage of six year the children
relatively can produce meaningful sentences, they can use nouns, verbs and
adjectives with bundle of vocabularies. Throughout this growing process the
mechanism work first that is thought or mental development without mental or
cognitive development a children cannot produce sounds that we call language.
Thought process develop interest to the children to articulate and to
incorporate the idea which he/she gets from the environment.
Dependency between thought and language:
Language is
generally a vehicle of expression which depend on profoundly on inferential
processes outside the linguistic system for rebuilding the abundance and
specify of thought. Language serves as
an engine of our conceptual life. Speakers mainly convey their words or
thoughts and produce structure of distinct languages. Despite the logical and
empirical negations, it is still rational to maintain that certain formal
properties of language casually affect thought but they are still important.
Language has an effect and which exerts more or less directly and sometime
permanently, by studying either the mental groups, shifting the limitations
between them and changing their distinction. Secondly the language is an edited
form of a mental representation. Before giving any information sender improvise
the information according to the aspects and then express their ideas. The
receiver only get juice one of a sentences of thoughts and the rest could be
remain for their further use or they become useless. Children began the life
with the capacity and feeling to distinguish among all of the
acoustic-phonetics by the languages encoded distinctions of meaning, a result
famously documented by Peter Eimas using a dishabituation paradigm. Suppose
when an infant try to hear a syllable such as ba, after some period of time the infants habituates that if it
utter any wrong word it decries and in
the right word it increase to some basic level, then they can identify the
reason behind increase or decrease. This effects are heavily influenced by
linguistic experience, only when true language is making its appearance-have
become insensitive to phonetic distinctions that are not phonemic.
According to
Piaget thought comes before language. To him the structure o thought and the
formation of it’s from basically depend on the coordination of sensory motor
schemas, not the language. And this will happen when a child reaches a certain
level of mental abilities, they produce sound through the procedure of
thoughts. This gives an urge to the development of thought for communication to
evoke an object even for communication. By this process the child acquire
languages and child’s language accusation strata from its mental development.
So the accuracy depends on the cognitive development.
Conclusion:
At the end of
the discussion, it could be said that thought process existences is admissible
without the presence of language. Language is one of the way to convey the
thought of a person to another person. Language cannot ascendance upon thought,
it is thought who has total ascendency on language. Though
language can act as tool to manipulate the thought, but it is the thought
process which also can decorate the language to an expectable one to a person.
References:
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Gleitman%20&%20Papafragou%202013_Relations%20between%20language%20and%20thought.pdf
https://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf
http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/lat.htm
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_10/i_10_p/i_10_p_lan/i_10_p_lan.html
http://www.sunetragupta.com/essays4.asp
https://books.google.com.bd/books?hl=en&lr=&id=B9HClB0P6d4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR4&dq=relation+between+language+and+thoughts&ots=TrHeTcl5Pq&sig=ftxzJ5Q_kU9E71gqMK8hbFjlsxM&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htm
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4176407?&seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1984----.htm
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