Organization: Current Science
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Wed, 15 Apr 1992 20:32:51 EDT
Reply-To:     Graham Toal <gtoal%ed.ac.uk@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
 <WORDS-L%UGA.bitnet@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
From:         Graham Toal <gtoal%CURSCI.UUCP@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
Subject:      Re: nothing wrong
Comments: To: Words-L and the Bandwidth Hogs <words-l@uga.cc.uga.edu>

From: BUHITELA%SUNYJCC.BITNET@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU

:So far as I know, all language is linear,
:and forces linear thinking (ie, one thought must follow on another, and
:it becomes challenging to hold two thoughts at once or in fact to do two
:things at once. In a TV showroom with 30 tv's tuned to 30 channels, one finds
:oneself following first one tv/channel, then another.

I used to drive my parents nuts by watching two movies on two TV sets
at once at home.  They refused to believe I really was watching them
both.  The only difficult bit was balancing the two speakers at just the
right volume so that one didn't dominate the other.

:If confronted with
:parallel translations of a text (such as the Bible) or commentaries on a
:text (such as a midrash on the Torah), it still is difficult to keep
:multiple thoughts going at once. I stumbled upon the multiple parenthetical
:statements I with which I occasionally annoy the list a few years ago when I
:was trying to break out of the linear mode of writing (and thinking.)

I remember you doing this a couple of times, and it was obviously
flame-bait.  But in personal mail with my peers in the CS world we
quite often read each others mail with clauses four or five deep without
stopping to reparse them.  I think this is a facet of the hacker personality
though because people outside the discipline have commented if I've done
anything like that, so I don't now.

:This may be a limitation of our brain or it may be a limitation of language.

I think some research has been done on this, but I can't swear to it.
Apocryphally I suggest that the mental stack for nested clauses has a
depth of about 7.

:wading through Levi-Strauss.  Native Japanese speakers reportedly have
:their language center in the opposite hemisphere of the brain than any
:other known language.  This is true for non-Japanese who learn Japanese
:as a first language, but not for anyone who learns Japanese as a second
:language. (What difference in conceptualization this makes is open to
:conjecture.)

Beware of this sort of thing, especially when eminating from Japan.
There's a lot of politics involved in Japanese brain research/psychology.
There was a strong vogue about 15 years ago for Japanese psychologists
to claim that differences in the Japanese brain were responsible for
their so-called 'inability to innovate'.  Now that Japanese innovation
on the international scene is more recognised by the west, these claims
are rather embarrasedly forgotten.

:Probably some of the multi-lingual types here could offer personal
:examples of concepts they can understand and express easily in one
:language but cannot understand or express in another.

Could do, but I've had this discussion elsewhere last year so I'll
bow out this time.

:This leads rather alarmingly back to that statement about kids with
:ghetto dialects not being able to think up to speed with those who
:have "proper" English...

So you are supporting that hypothesis?  Or just insinuating support
for it without having to argue the case yourself?

:(clue)Les

Graham.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU