Posted by Martin G. on July 14, 1999 at 16:30:07:
In Reply to: Re: "What a word's worth" - Part 2 posted by Martin G. on July 14, 1999 at 16:16:35:
Now, taking into consideration that complex feelings and attitudes have a verbal substrate - the sentence one tells oneself - can you say that the language used influences your thinking?
I suspect this is a "Which came first - the chicken or the egg" kind of question, given that we inherit many of our feelings and attitudes.
So back to Vance - I quote again:
"And should you plan to seek ex-planetary markets, a corps of salesmen and traders might be advisable. Theirs would be a symmetrical language with emphatic number-parsing, elaborate honorifics to teach hypocrisy, a vocabulary rich in homophonics to facilitate ambiguity...." [page 81]
The above is almost a perfect (given the judgemental spin] description of Japanese. Yet the Japanese are better known for samurais rather than traders.
My own opinion is (for what it's worth) that it really don't matter whether you speak Valiant, English or Japanese; that your personality will shine through independently. And yet, and yet - language still plays a part in reinforcing, and sometimes in determining, thinking.
Another post on this soon.