A bottle of wine, and some thoughts on language
So I’ve completed my second whole week of Spanish lessons, and I feel like I’m progressing fairly quickly. Adriana is a wonderful teacher, and is very good at explaining the reasons behind things… I suck at learning if I don’t have a foundation of underlying theory, and so I couldn’t have been more lucky in finding her.
The difficult thing about learning Spanish is that I have to learn how to think differently. One could say that Spanish-speakers and English-speakers think the same, and just express it differently through language… but I don’t think that there is any way that could be true.
In college, I used to try to come up with “good questions”… it was sort of a game. One of the questions from back then that has stuck with me is “Can you think without language?”. Until recently, I had continued to ponder this question, and even minored in Philosophy of Language while in grad school primarily because of my interest in this question.
Now I don’t think it’s that good of a question at all, for a number of reasons… but basically, I am confident that one COULD think without language, but WE can’t think without language… if that makes any sense.
What I have been thinking lately is this:
This isn’t to say that Spanish and English speakers don’t usually come to the same conclusions… but I think that the thought-processes are necessarily different.
Adriana said something to me that I had never thought about before, but it makes a lot of sense. She said that the reason English is such a successful language is not so much about cultural domination, but because it works.
That resonates with me--- a kind of “evolution” of language. A language that describes things in a more functional way will survive as other languages are replaced.
I also wonder though whether the structure of thought that English supports is at the root of our domination of other cultures, the environment, etc…. thousands of academic papers have touched on aspects of this--- but what I mean is a little different, and not something that I have seen published before… I mean the basic sentence structure, which provides an order and categorization for everything that we perceive, which in turn affects our interpretation, then action, etc…
These are just random thoughts though, me trying to make sense out of something that I don't understand, and not necessarily very interesting… no one is forcing you to read this :)
Poker is also a language. The thing that complicates poker is that the goal tends to be miscommunication.
It’s a very simple language though--- especially online poker… in live poker, you add a lot more information, through body language… but in online poker, there are only a few words arranged in very short sentences.
What makes the language of poker so complex though is that there are a wide variety of interpretations possible, and it’s your job as a player to figure out what your opponent means by their “words” AND how your opponent will interpret your “words”, and then take advantage of that so that they misinterpret what you “say” and make a mistake. It’s not simple.
The difference between playing against a bad player, a good player, or a great player has nothing to do with vocabulary. The vocabulary is very simple. The difference is in what the words can mean and how they can be interpreted. In actuality, a good player is the easiest to play against--- because their “words” typically mean fewer things than a bad/great player’s, and their interpretations are much more predicable and exploitable.
The difficult thing about learning Spanish is that I have to learn how to think differently. One could say that Spanish-speakers and English-speakers think the same, and just express it differently through language… but I don’t think that there is any way that could be true.
In college, I used to try to come up with “good questions”… it was sort of a game. One of the questions from back then that has stuck with me is “Can you think without language?”. Until recently, I had continued to ponder this question, and even minored in Philosophy of Language while in grad school primarily because of my interest in this question.
Now I don’t think it’s that good of a question at all, for a number of reasons… but basically, I am confident that one COULD think without language, but WE can’t think without language… if that makes any sense.
What I have been thinking lately is this:
- When you learn a language, it becomes the underlying structure for your thoughts.
- If you know a language, it’s impossible for you to entirely separate your thoughts from that structure/framework
- Spanish and English have very different structures.. especially in terms of sentence structure.
- Therefore, Spanish and English speakers must think differently.
This isn’t to say that Spanish and English speakers don’t usually come to the same conclusions… but I think that the thought-processes are necessarily different.
Adriana said something to me that I had never thought about before, but it makes a lot of sense. She said that the reason English is such a successful language is not so much about cultural domination, but because it works.
That resonates with me--- a kind of “evolution” of language. A language that describes things in a more functional way will survive as other languages are replaced.
I also wonder though whether the structure of thought that English supports is at the root of our domination of other cultures, the environment, etc…. thousands of academic papers have touched on aspects of this--- but what I mean is a little different, and not something that I have seen published before… I mean the basic sentence structure, which provides an order and categorization for everything that we perceive, which in turn affects our interpretation, then action, etc…
These are just random thoughts though, me trying to make sense out of something that I don't understand, and not necessarily very interesting… no one is forcing you to read this :)
Poker is also a language. The thing that complicates poker is that the goal tends to be miscommunication.
It’s a very simple language though--- especially online poker… in live poker, you add a lot more information, through body language… but in online poker, there are only a few words arranged in very short sentences.
What makes the language of poker so complex though is that there are a wide variety of interpretations possible, and it’s your job as a player to figure out what your opponent means by their “words” AND how your opponent will interpret your “words”, and then take advantage of that so that they misinterpret what you “say” and make a mistake. It’s not simple.
The difference between playing against a bad player, a good player, or a great player has nothing to do with vocabulary. The vocabulary is very simple. The difference is in what the words can mean and how they can be interpreted. In actuality, a good player is the easiest to play against--- because their “words” typically mean fewer things than a bad/great player’s, and their interpretations are much more predicable and exploitable.
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