Originally Posted by
RenDaHai
It was a reply to the statement quoted so some things were assumed.
I was wrong to compare to logic, it is too ambiguous. Chinese is also logically constructed, very much so, but in a different way.
Languages and Logic..... It is a kung fu forum so I wasn't going for anything more than general but here goes, for you sir;
First lets take it as read that language has a dramatic effect on the nature of consciousness. There is enough in recent and ancient literature about this concept so I won't elaborate on it here.
The Chinese language is laid bare for all who speak it. The word 'DianNao' for example. It means 'Computer'. But literate or not you know it is a combination of two concepts (also pictures), the two concepts are 'Electric (dian) and Brain (nao)'. This is the same for all Chinese words. So the derivation of a word is easy to see if you just think about it. Even within one character or concept and even if you are illiterate you will have some notion of the character (there are a limited number of syllables in Chinese, so without some knowledge of the character/concept the language is too ambiguous to use). The character 'good' for example is an image of a woman and a child together.
So any Chinese speaker can derive their words immediately and will remember them through this kind of logic. 'Heavens-breath' means 'weather' for example. Excellent. This will effect your entire world view since you will see more of the inter-relatedness in language between different concepts.
Now lets look at western languages. They are not constructed in quite the same way are they?
A possible beginning is the one represented by Socrates (through Plato) in the dialogue 'Cratylus'. In it Socrates theorises that before language we may have used motion in a miming way to explain ourselves. Letters are then created, the sounds represent a type of motion from the motion of the tongue... a rolling r, a smooth s, a hard stopping K. Ancient philosophers talked about the world in flux. If an object is not moving in space it is ageing or transforming (moving in time). So everything is moving. Things which move in harmony with the world are good, things which oppose motion are bad. Socrates then derives many words, starting with words for flowing river, by the nature of movement they represent with bad words invariably being jarring stopping motions.
Off course this is forgotten to us these days, the 'name giver' of English left little for us. So we have no simple way to derive our language immediately from thinking about the words.
So our world view has to be more categorical and reductionist than the Chinese view which is more about the relationship between concepts. Where our language is monadic and freezes things into static forms theirs is dynamic and focuses on the relationship.
SO I theorise (and I am not alone in this) that the Chinese language leads to a more holistic conscious awareness of the world than the western reductionist one. Thereby responding to the point I quoted in my original post.
Clear enough for you? I think this is going off topic but I would be happy to continue with any points as a private message.