You should. It's a wild ride through the history of the Roman Empire. Derek Jacobi is Claudius, John Hurt is Caligula (and believe me, the real thing makes Cartagia look like a kid with action figures), and Patrick Stewart and Brian Blessed are in it as well, among others I can't recall right now. Excellent stuff.
You might even be able to convey semi-complex thought with just images and sound--like this short film does.
Cool film, though I don't think it's a fair example for the language vs. thought debate, because it's built on what we, as a culture, already know. The fact that it doesn't happen to use language doesn't mean we aren't using the language we already know to process things like, "Hey, it's a floaty box! What's he going to do with that?"
Anyway, back when language was first developing, surely someone had to think (non-verbally), "I want to communicate the idea of 'food' [or whatever] without needing to point to it. Let me associate a sound with it." Thus, language.
That's exactly what I'm saying, actually. But the thing is, at that point, you're talking about extremely basic language, and there is very little thought that goes beyond the language available to the mind. You may come up with "spear", but only then can you come up with "throw" and put the two together. See what I'm saying? We start out from the fantastically mundane, and build on it, and only then can we start to form complex thoughts. I do think that language forms because someone gets tired of pointing to/gesturing about a rock and just makes a noise to go with it, but it takes a helluva long time to get from that stage to anything complex, and longer to get to something abstract. Without giving names to those mundane bits of information so you can build on them, though, you'd never get there at all.
I see this all the time with my ESL kids, where one of us may have a word or expression that the other doesn't have, and we find it difficult to explain to the other because of the linguistic gaps, whichever side they may be on. (Try to explain how to use articles, or verb tenses, to a kid whose native tongue doesn't have them and you'll see what I'm talking about in an even more dramatic way.) Sort of like the way the Iroquois had no word for "garbage" and no conception of the idea of throwing things away because it was not something their society ever encountered, so when first encountering the notion, they were baffled as to why anyone would not find a use for, say, every part of an animal they'd killed.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-04-18 10:42 pm (UTC)You should. It's a wild ride through the history of the Roman Empire. Derek Jacobi is Claudius, John Hurt is Caligula (and believe me, the real thing makes Cartagia look like a kid with action figures), and Patrick Stewart and Brian Blessed are in it as well, among others I can't recall right now. Excellent stuff.
You might even be able to convey semi-complex thought with just images and sound--like this short film does.
Cool film, though I don't think it's a fair example for the language vs. thought debate, because it's built on what we, as a culture, already know. The fact that it doesn't happen to use language doesn't mean we aren't using the language we already know to process things like, "Hey, it's a floaty box! What's he going to do with that?"
Anyway, back when language was first developing, surely someone had to think (non-verbally), "I want to communicate the idea of 'food' [or whatever] without needing to point to it. Let me associate a sound with it." Thus, language.
That's exactly what I'm saying, actually. But the thing is, at that point, you're talking about extremely basic language, and there is very little thought that goes beyond the language available to the mind. You may come up with "spear", but only then can you come up with "throw" and put the two together. See what I'm saying? We start out from the fantastically mundane, and build on it, and only then can we start to form complex thoughts. I do think that language forms because someone gets tired of pointing to/gesturing about a rock and just makes a noise to go with it, but it takes a helluva long time to get from that stage to anything complex, and longer to get to something abstract. Without giving names to those mundane bits of information so you can build on them, though, you'd never get there at all.
I see this all the time with my ESL kids, where one of us may have a word or expression that the other doesn't have, and we find it difficult to explain to the other because of the linguistic gaps, whichever side they may be on. (Try to explain how to use articles, or verb tenses, to a kid whose native tongue doesn't have them and you'll see what I'm talking about in an even more dramatic way.) Sort of like the way the Iroquois had no word for "garbage" and no conception of the idea of throwing things away because it was not something their society ever encountered, so when first encountering the notion, they were baffled as to why anyone would not find a use for, say, every part of an animal they'd killed.