Conscious Language Evolution

Here is a thread I posted a couple years ago at the Multiplex.  I got some interesting feedback on it, but the conversation didn't develop very far.  I'd like to offer it here for discussion, if anyone is interested…

~*~

I was looking at Stuart Davis's website recently and came across photos of his artwork, much of which used an Asian-looking language he had constructed (which he calls IS, I believe).  I don't know any details about his language, but looking at his artwork reminded me of an experimental language I created about 20 years ago, when I was barely out of my teens.

Before I describe what I was up to with that language experiment, I just would like to ask:  What do you think of the idea of conscious language evolution?  Is there good reason to seek to create new forms of language that may more closely reflect and embody certain holistic, process-oriented, or even nondual principles?  I gave a talk on this subject after creating my language, and found that people were often interested in the idea, but had not given it much thought themselves. 

I was inspired to try to create a new form of language primarily by the work of David Bohm.  He believed that the structures and patterns of most modern languages tend to reinforce fragmentation and problematic, outdated modes of thought – particularly the reified subject-object distinctions and the heavy emphasis on static nouns rather than more open and flowing verbal forms.  His own approach to this was to create something he called the rheomode, a more verbally centered way of using English.  (Many of you may be familiar with this from his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.)

At the time I read this book (about 20 or 21 years ago), I decided to take up David Bohm's suggestions – inspired also by my own beginning inquiries into meditation and nondual philosophy – and I set out to create an entirely process-oriented grammar which emphasized verbs and perspectives instead of nouns and pronouns.  At first, I tried to do this with English, then decided to abandon the familiar and to just start from scratch.  (I'll post an example of it below).  I never finished the language, but I did get a good start on the grammar and I developed a 500-word vocabulary (with some principles in place for generating new words).

Now that I am familiar with Integral theory, Wilber-5, and Integral mathematics, the question I would ask now (that I couldn't ask then, when I was just reading Bohm and Krishnamurti), would be:  How might we create a more integral, perspective-centered, process-oriented, language which is alive to and more actively embodies the dynamics of (tetra-)enactment.

I think the language I created many years ago is a start, at least in terms of working this out in practice.  As I mentioned, I set out to create a verb-centered language, which entailed getting rid of nouns as a grammatical category, replacing them with particular forms of interactive verbal constructs and ambient locatives; and modifying verbs according to type of action or process (manifesting, becoming, creative/generative, causal, etc) and perspective (first-person, first-person shared, third-person objective, even third-person removed or “hearsay,” and so on) instead of using pronouns.

I'm not entirely satisfied with how I worked this out, and I think I would do a number of revisions if I ever went back to it, but I think it's interesting that this inquiry took me in the direction of perspectives as well as processes (which was the original aim).  Looking at Wilber's latest work, it might be worthwhile to go back and see how his ideas about enactive perspectives might find expression in this grammar (or another one).

What do you think?  Do you have any ideas how this might be done?  Do you have any ideas for how we might look at language afresh and experiment with newer, more integral forms?

I enjoyed thinking about this all those years ago.  I ended up actually entering trances and experiencing altered states as I tried to envision a radically new way of languaging experience.  (I think a good exercise is to expose ourselves to radically different languages, if we can find any, to help us more clearly see the presuppositions and “constructs” that drive our own ways of thinking and organizing the world.  I think an experiment of the sort I've been describing also can do this.)

Just for fun, here is a sample of text from my language:

Om-alu yε deoš amas ymer undεš mal šai uĵerište.
Le amεš ðirymer de'ilustote, aiu ymer ilustütu, le unas yð-ilist'auluš.
Le emas aĵ-ilus'emyš, aiu le an'yð-ilust-emüš erεgai.
Om-erĵuš ram ĵui emb-ur'emuš virðai, aiu ram ĵas yð-elθuš yr-aumai.
Le amεš čeu sumai, yð-daur'auluš, aiu yð- auluš ram de'uĵerošte ymer gelašte.

I can translate it and offer a description of how the grammar works in another post, if anyone is interested.  I have also created a new script for this language, where letters are built out of different strokes which stand for different modes and points of articulation, based on basic phonetic terms.  For instance, “B” is a voiced bilabial plosive stop.  There are “strokes” for each element of this description.  If you take away the stroke for “voiced,” then you end up with a “p.”  If you add a stroke for aspiration, you end up with “bh.”  If you take away the symbol for “stop” and replace that with aspiration, you end up with the Japanese “f”.  Etc.  I tried to make it both scientific and aesthetically attractive; if I can ever scan what I've written out, I'll give you some examples of what this looks like….

Anyway, that's all for now.  I just wanted to introduce something I worked on years ago, and to open up a discussion on the possibilities of conscious language evolution.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

While I'm open to, and interested in, approaching this question more generally, rather than just looking at my particular project, I'll post a translation of part of my text to give you an idea of what I was attempting.

I finished the initial phase of this project a few days before Christmas more than 20 years ago, and I wanted to “debut” it to my (equally weird) family on Christmas day.  So, essentially, it is a prayer for God to be in mutual presence with us on Christmas morning.

Here is the standard English version of the Christmas prayer I composed:


“We ask you, God, to be with us here in our house this morning.
May we walk in your light, and in that knowing, may we honor your saints.
May we realize your light within, and may we live to realize it in the world.
We thank you for our shared blessings this past year, and for the love of family.
May we always walk in beauty, honoring your way, celebrating your dawning on the Earth.”
 
Below, I'll give a breakdown of the parts of the first part of the text and then will attempt a closer English approximation of it.


English:  We ask you, God, to be with us in our house this morning.


Original:  Om-alu yε deoš amas ymer undεš mal šai uĵerište.


Direct translation:  to speak-to request-M3 (a.l.) God-G-d/sh here where house-Sp-d/sh while now morning-P-d/sh:w.


I don't expect you to follow all of those abbreviations next to the words!  To make sense of the above gibberish, I'll explain each word of the sentence…


Om-alu, which I've translated as “We ask,” literally means, “to speak (in order) to request,” and it is inflected with the verbal ending -u, which indicates a mental class of action.  (There are several classes of mental action which can be indicated grammatically). 


yε is what I call an ambient locative.  This language has “scene setters.”  An opening phrase of a sentence can “set the scene” for what is to follow.  “yε” lacks semantic content, but together with “om-alu,” it indicates that what follows is a petition.


de-o-š: deo is a verb meaning God - not as a thing, but as Presencing - divine movement and activity.  (As some Hebrew mystics say, “God is a verb.”)  The verb is inflected, here, with the ground verbal class, which is usually reserved for spiritual verbs reflecting divine activity, but which can be affixed to more conventional verbs to indicate the highest or deepest expression of that line of intelligence or action.  This action is made personal, and related to “us” (me and my family) with the -š modification.  This verbal ending indicates shared first-hand experience.  So, instead of saying, “God be with us,” I am literally saying, “Divine presencing as a shared first-hand experience.”


amas ymer is a locative phrase which is commonly used in this language's sentence construction, and which literally means “here where.”


und-ε-š: undε is a word which means “to house” or “to shelter.”  The -ε indicates a spatial class verb inflection.  Und itself does not mean “house,” but is rather a modifier attached to eð, a root word used for all buildings; the class inflection would be -a, manifesting.  This is often done with non-natural or man-made objects when in the manifesting verb class: the manifesting root will often be something natural, like wood or metal, and an element attached to it will give it its shape in manifestation.  Here, -eð- is not a natural element, exactly, but refers to a hollowed-out space, as in a cave or a den (or a house or a church).  But back to the prayer:  undεš ends in the -š modifier, which we have seen before and which indicates direct, shared first-hand experience.  Roughly, it means “sheltering” (as a first-person plural experience or perspective). 


mal is a conjunction which means “while.”


šai is a tense-marker, here serving an adverbial function, to stress the following word.  It means “now.”


uĵer-i-šte:  uĵeri means dawning, the coming of morning, and so takes the -i, process-class inflection.  -šte is a verb modifier which indicates first-person shared witnessing of an external event.


Together, the above can be roughly rendered as follows:


Speaking to request: Divine Presencing (first-person plural experience) here where sheltering (first-person plural experience) while now dawning (first-person plural witnessing).


As you may see, or at least glimpse from the translation of just the first sentence, the meaning and feeling of the prayer actually shifts as you move it into a more process/perspective oriented direction.  Because it takes time to render all of this in detail, I'll leave it at this.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

I have started a related thread on the IPS forum, this one dealing more with Bohm's and others' language experiments:  Language, Postmetaphysics, and the Rheomode.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Of related interest is the constructed language, Lojban.  Here is some information on the language from several online resources:

Lojban was originally designed for the purpose of supporting research on a concept known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: “the structure of a language constrains the thinking of people using that language”. Lojban allows the full expressive capability of a natural language, but differs in structure from other languages in major ways. This allows its use as a test vehicle for scientists studying the relationships between language, thought, and culture.

The following links provide more information on the use of Lojban for testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

20. Lojban is supposed to be intended as a test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its negative form: “structural features of language make a difference in our awareness of the relations between ideas.” Is this simply another way of saying “Distinctions are more likely to be noticed if structurally marked”? If so, this is trivially true.
 
21. How can 'ease of thought' be measured? Measuring facility with predicate logic may not be enough to establish 'ease of thought'.

General introduction:

Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in both science fiction and computer publications. Lojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters.

The principal sources of its basic vocabulary were the six (at the time) most widely spoken languages: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds. The language has drawn on other constructed languages' components, a notable instance of which is Láadan's set of indicators. Also Toki Pona and Esperanto have mutuality with Lojban to some extent.

Lojban has a number of features which make it unique:

Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
Learn Lojban now or read the introductory brochure for more a more detailed description of Lojban.

And here's the first part of a recent film done in the Lojban language (with other parts available here):
.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

As a little background for any who may be interested (and that may not be many!), here are some of Bohm's thoughts on the influence of implicit grammatical structure on thinking and perception, including his rationale for creating his own experimental language form, the rheomode.  (Which also was the inspiration behind my own language experiments.) 

From Wholeness and the Implicate Order:

“What, then, will be our question, as we engage in this inquiry into our language (and thought)?  We begin with the fact of general fragmentation.  We can ask in a preliminary way whether there are any features of the commonly used language which tend to sustain and propagate this fragmentation, as well as, perhaps, to reflect it.  A cursory examination shows that a very important feature of this kind is the subject-verb-object structure of sentences, which is common to the grammar and syntax of modern languages.  This structure implies that all action arises in a separate entity, the subject, and that, in cases described by the transitive verb, this action crosses over the space between them to another separate entity, the object.  (If the verb is intransitive, as in 'he moves,' the subject is still considered to be a separate entity but the activity is considered to be either a property of the subject or a reflexive action of the subject, e.g., in the sense that 'he moves' may be taken to mean 'he moves himself.')

This is a pervasive structure, leading in the whole of life to a function of thought tending to divide things into separate entities, such entities being conceived of as essentially fixed and static in their nature.  When this view is carried to its limit, one arrives at the prevailing scientific world view, in which everything is regarded as ultimately constituted out of a set of basic particles of fixed nature.

The subject-verb-object structure of language, along with its world view, tends to impose itself very strongly in our speech, even in those cases in which some attention would reveal its evident inappropriateness… [He provides some illustrative examples here.]

These considerations on the overall implications of sentence structures suggest another question.  Is it not pssible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than to the noun?  This would help to end the sort of fragmentation indicated above, for the verb describes actions and movements, which flow into each other and merge, without sharp separations or breaks.  Moreover, since movements are in general always themselves changing, they have in them no permanent pattern of fixed form with which separately existent things could be identified.  Such an approach to language evidently fits in with the overall world view discussed in the previous chapter, in which movement is, in effect, taken as a primary notion, while apparently static and separately existent things are seen as relatively invariant states of continuing movement (e.g., recall the example of the vortex)… [He first discusses some ancient languages, like Hebrew or certain Amerindian languages, which are primarily verbal.  Then he discusses his rationale for creating the rheomode.]

…At least in the present inquiry the rheomode will be concerned mainly with questions having to do with the broad and deep implications of our overall world views which now tend to be raised largely in the study of philosophy, psychology, art, science and mathematics, but especially in the study of thought and language themselves.  Of course, this sort of question can also be discussed in terms of our present language structure.  While this structure is indeed dominated by the divisive form of subject-verb-object, it nevertheless contains a rich and complex variety of other forms, which are used largely tacitly and by implication (especially in poetry but more generally in all artistic modes of expression.)  However, the dominant form of subject-verb-object tends continually to lead to fragmentation; and it is evident that the attempt to avoid this fragmentation by skilful use of other features of the language can work only in a limited way, for by force of habit, we tend sooner or later, especially in broad questions concerning our overall world views, to fall unwittingly into the fragmentary mode of functioning implied by the basic structure.  The reason for this is not only that the subject-verb-object form of the language is continually implying an inappropriate division between things but, even more, that the ordinary mode of language tends very strongly to take its own function for granted, and thus it leads us to concentrate almost exclusively on the content under discussion, so that little or no attention is left for the actual symbolic function of the language itself.  As pointed out earlier, however, it is here that the primary tendency towards fragmentation originates.  For because the ordinary mode of thought and language does not properly call attention to its own function, this latter seems to arise in a reality independent of thought and language, so that the divisions implied in the language structure are then projected, as if they are fragments, corresponding to actual breaks in 'what is.'…

It is clear, then, that in developing the rheomode, we will have to be especially aware of the need for language to properly call attention to its own function at the very moment in which this is taking place.  In this way, we may not only be able to think more coherently about broad questions concerning our general world views, but we may also understand better how the ordinary mode of language functions, so that we may be able to use even this ordinary mode more coherently.”

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Hey Bruce, I'm back, and my first order of business is to read Bohm's rheomode chapter.  Thanks for transcribing the above, though I didn't have an environment that allowed me to read it with the concentration I wanted.

My comments will follow soon.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Great, I look forward to it.  I have something I'm planning on writing related to this topic, so I'll post it here, or at least a link here.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

I've been too busy to write the blog entry I've wanted to write, so I'll just post a few excerpts here from stuff I've been reading on the web.  In particular, I've been reading about Bohm's activities in the last few months of his life, and what came out of that:  he helped organize a meeting between physicists and Native Americans to explore some of his thoughts on language, process, and perception.  He died shortly after the first meeting, but the meetings have continued on an annual basis.  Here are some excerpts from one of these subsequent conferences.

~*~

Dan Moonhawk Alford:  I have [written] a lot of stuff over the years on how Benjamin Whorf', who's known for the Whorf Hypothesis, which I now call “The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax,” [got a bum rap]. Basically, the problem was [that of] linear thinkers trying to understand a holistic thinker.
 
Benjamin Whorf pointed toward linguistic relativity – and there's a whole history that you can read in one of my papers called “Stealing the Fire.” Just do a search engine search on Moonhawk and you'll find it at some point. And relativity really has to do with–when the language that you're using to describe phenomena no longer adequately describes the phenomena, you want to change the language. When Einstein did it, it was [about how] you can't describe 4D spacetime with a 3D space language-, you have to change the language to do it properly. So, every language carries with it its own worldview that tells what the universe it lives in is all about. And this is as true of programming languages as anything else: you choose your programming language for doing easily what you want to do.
 
And we have the same thing in Native America. Where English and other Western Indo-European languages are noun-dominated, Native American languages are verb dominated-, they are relationship/process-oriented, rather than object-oriented: watching the dancing rather than the dancers – the dancers fade back- into the background as you just describe the rhythms and the motions of what is.

My Indian friends say that they can talk all day long and never utter a single noun. And this is real boggling to us English speakers. We couldn't even think of doing that. But when you have verbs that are like our English verb “slither,” where there's basically only one thing that slithers, you know what the subject is; and [it] you multiply that by many thousands, you can get an idea of how you can talk without nouns.
 
[Compare that with Whitehead's “All we know of an atom is its radiating … but there is no 'thing' there radiating!” – structurally similar: no nouns, no things.]
 
One other thing – well, let me just hit a few topics that are also of interest in quantum linguistics. Very specifically, speaking from the heart is qualitatively different from speaking from the head – and our society does the latter a lot, and we have to get to a certain place to be able to speak from the heart. This brings in, of course, ethics; it brings in intention- it brings women's ways of knowing into quantum linguistics.
 
The view of language that I have is an evolutionary, inside-out view of language that includes [rather than excludes] other life forms in Earth. And I propose it as a complementary view of language to go along with the synchronic view that Chomsky and others go by. I actually also, within this system, see complementarity itself as a cosmic universal. And it's the going back and forth between the two sides, trying to balance, that brings forth vibration.
 
I've talked here, in [conference] comments, about how I see analogs [to physics] in linguistics because of a common base of twentieth-century structuralism between physics and linguistics. I've talked about superposition [phonemes] and the collapse into certain sounds; how time and subject/object distinctions are verbal hallucinations that we project onto reality and then see it out there and think it's really out there…
 
A2: Brief Sketch of Bohmian Science Dialogues and Navajo Road Trip


Before I turn things over to the panel, I'd like to give you a brief sketch of Bohmian Science Dialogues, which the people here attended. This began in the early 1990s when Leroy Little Bear, a Blackfoot leader up in Canada, had read David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and his writings on dialogue, and lie conceived of the idea of starting a dialogue between quantum physicists and Native Americans. He got David Peat and David Bohm both interested in this, and in April 1992 we had our first Bohmian Science Dialogue in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
 
My view of the consensus that came out of it is this: that linguists and Native Americans and physicists and psychologists and others all came to this Dialogue to discuss what reality is made up of and what reality is. And each came with their own favorite realm – let's just say it that way: the physicists the quantum realm, the linguists the meaning realm, the Indians the spirit realm, psychologists the mind, I guess. And after just a few days, we started seeing a consensus emerging, that if we were talking about these favorite realms, there were certain fundamental principles that they had in common that they did not share with the Newtonian realm. So, for instance: everything that exists vibrates, in a primary frequency domain, the only constant is flux in these realms; everything is interconnected in these realms, and in a part/whole relationship, a holographic organization.
 
And by the time we left, we realized that these seemed to be different facets of the same diamond, different paths leading into the same place, and that when physicists use the word “quantum,” it was like when the Indians used the word “spirit” and when linguists used the word “meaning” – that they were all [labels for] the same invisible realm. And the scientists went away shaking their heads, wondering, first, how come Indians had preknowledge of this realm that they weren't even supposed to know about, and, second, why their languages seemed better suited structurally to talking about eventings in that realm. Big puzzle.
 
So, we've had five other dialogues since then, and last weekend was the seventh Bohmian Science Dialogue, that we held in Albuquerque. Very quickly- We gathered together a number of Native American leaders [who, with] these people here, sat down at an actual round table, an inner circle with an audience on the outer circle, and we talked, as Leroy Little Bear moderated, the way he has all of the other dialogues. We talked about many interesting things, some of which may come out from these people…

Panel [Excerpt]

John Erskine: Of the four physicists on this panel, I'm the experimentalist. What I want to do is bring you three pieces of data that I've picked up during the Dialogue and the Navajo road trip. But first, let me tell a little bit about myself. I am a nuclear physicist and I spent the first part of my career at Argonne National Laboratory working with particle accelerators studying the structure of atomic nuclei. The second half of my career was in Washington, D.C. in the government office that provides the funding for most of basic research in nuclear physics in the country. This is the Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy. In that office one of the main motives for doing research is looking for physics beyond the standard model. We are interested in questions like: Does the neutrino have mass? How are quarks confined in the nucleus? What is the detailed process of nucleosynthesis in stars? So, coming from that background, I was alerted when I first saw emails from Moonhawk that told about the field of quantum linguistics, and the possible opportunities to learn new physics from the way that Native Americans speak and live.

From the Native American experience I learned that the Native American languages and modes of conscious are very different from the usual Western consciousness. And I could see that by studying these differences we might learn something important about the collapse of the quantum wave function in the human brain. This was a possibility. Consciousness is weird. We need help in trying to understand consciousness and, if possible, to put it on a physical, scientific basis. And so, learning about the Native American worldview and studying their type of consciousness, we might learn new ways to sort out this weirdness. I think of this as studying physics beyond the standard model.
 
Let me give you several pieces of data, examples, to give you a feel for the differences between Native American and usual Western ways of thinking. The first example is about horsebackriding. This comes from Amethyst First Rider. In English, when we say “the man rides the horse,” our language forces us to think in terms of a subject, the man, and a verb phrase, “rides the horse.” We get a clear visual image, but we pay a price. In Blackfoot language, the emphasis is on the physical feeling. It's a kinesthetic language, mostly verbs. So, in Blackfoot, to convey the same meaning, what's said is something like this: The way your body talks to you as you feel the movement of the horse beneath you – that's the verb. The verb conveys the kinesthetic feeling of the horse under you. And then comes a bunch of verb modifiers which tell about the rest of the information in the sentence, such as details about the man, the speed of the horse, how long he's been riding, and, other things. The primary thing is the feel of the moving horse underneath you.
 
A second example is about the Blackfoot language itself. This comes from Leroy Little Bear. Leroy says there is no Blackfoot language – it's just 800 variations on “to be.” He makes it up out of root words as the experience flows through him.
 
The third example is again from Amethyst. She says there are no metaphors in Native languages. It only sounds that way when translated into English. In English, the meaning of the word is generally not connected to the way the word sounds – mostly arbitrary assignments. Not so in the Algonquin language, of which the Blackfoot language is a member. Can you imagine a language in which the names of trees are assigned by the sounds that the leaves make in the fall of the year, when a gentle breeze is blowing?
 
Moonhawk: At an hour after sunset.
 
John Erskine: Yeah, okay, add that – even more specified: an hour after sunset.
 
Moonhawk: That's because the wind comes from a certain direction.
 
John Erskine: Mmm hmm, [affirmative sound]. And the next year, if there has been no rain, the name may change slightly, because the leaves are a little different. There are no metaphors. What's going on here is that Native American culture seems to be consciously trying to match their language as closely as possible to the lived experience of the natural world.
 
At this conference, we are all struggling to understand the circumstances which bring about the collapse of the wave function for the conscious human observer. Real data at this point is almost beyond our reach. We need to look at all possible kinds of data. I believe Native American modes of consciousness are uniquely different and should be explored. Perhaps a place to start might be to look at the fundamental awareness of the Native American, which is his sense of relatedness to all things. As they say, all my relations, or we are all related.
 
Andy Hilgartner: Mitakuye Oyasin.
 
John Erskine: [affirmative sound]. And these phrases indicate the notion of the Old Language, which Moonhawk told us about in the Cheyenne Tower of Babel teaching. So, it seems to me that somehow it may not be so difficult to pull this sense of universal relatedness out of quantum theory, or somehow to learn how to express quantum theory in a way that would vividly show up the Old Language which Native Americans tell us is very primary.
 
Moonhawk: What did you tell us at breakfast about 'moccasin'?
 
John Erskine: Oh. Oh, that's rather beautiful. Yeah, David Begay, the Navajo Dean of Dene' College. We were sitting around this large hogan in one of the college buildings, and talking about things. David said everything in Native American is always balanced between the masculine and the feminine, Father Sky and Mother Earth. But then he said the word “Mother Earth” is a poor translation of the Navajo, it just doesn't get it at all. And then he gave us a couple of concepts. One of them was something about the earth beneath one's moccasin, or the feel beneath one's moccasin. And he had some other phrases. So I thought about these things, and I tried to translate it into English as good as I could, using a verbal form, and what I came up with … now, if I can just remember what I told you this morning at breakfast, [pause], if I can get it into the right grammatical form [pause] “Lifts the moccasin gently.” There it is: “Lifts the moccasin gently.”
 
Moonhawk: “Supports.”
 
John Erskine: “Supports my moccasin gently”. [pause]. That conveys to me the sense of being lifted. There's a feeling sense to this and yet it's alive. In Native America God is not a noun. It has to be in some verb form.
 
[“ends side 1” – tape turnover]
 
Sarah Voss: I appreciate John's bringing up the idea that I heard for the first time at this dialogue, that there might be no metaphors. I'm having a really hard time with that idea. Because virtually everything I think and everything I do is metaphorical, in that I was trained to some degree by critical realists who say that the only thing that there is for us, the only way we really have of communicating with each other, is via metaphor. And so this was a novel idea, for me, to consider.
 
Let me share a little bit about how I came into being a part of this dialogue. It was the word “quantum linguistics” that did it. The curiosity of that. Because, that's a metaphor. [some light laughter] – and nothing I have heard since I've been involved in this has changed my thought on this. It's not that linguistics is done with quantum techniques. It's that quantum techniques and the characteristics of quantum world apply metaphorically to the linguistic view and offer a different view, an alternative view to the … Chomskyan? … linguistics. I'm not a linguist, here. What I am actually is a minister. I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister, and, before I was a minister I was a mathematician. And when I became a minister, I tried to relate mathematics to spirituality, religion, and have been trying to do that ever since. And I found I could do that by reconceiving my notion of mathematics, as a language.
 
Now, I heard last night Linda sing this wonderful song about how “mathematics is the language of science,” and I think she was singing to the choir, in this case. I also think that mathematics is a language of religion, of spirituality, and I'd say that history supports that. And, as I've done my research and looked at that, I've left off what I call either the qualitative aspects of mathematics or perhaps the metaphorical aspects of mathematics. And so, I was drawn into this discussion because I have worked so much with those qualitative aspects of mathematics. Quantum mind is a mathematical metaphor. There's a mathematical metaphor embedded in that notion, that mind, or consciousness or whatever else you want to put into that concept, is in some way like quantum physics. There's some connection to it, there's some characteristics, and I'm still trying – one reason I'm here Is I'm still trying to sort those out, to understand what those characteristics they are and how they can relate to our popular society, because I think our popular society is very interested in these notions. And so I'm trying to be at least somewhat accurate in what my own understanding is before I try to lift up these metaphors, and perhaps I then won't be accused of misappropriating them, which is of course always a concern whenever you take metaphors out of any area. or words or nouns out of any area, and apply them to any other area.
 
So! To get this around though to what I found in this experience – and it has been an experience! It's been a wonderful experience! And to also bring it back, I think, to your question, Moonhawk, about: do I, having been through this, think that there's any reason why physicists should lift up or should try consciously, intentionally, spending some time understanding Native American viewpoints on this? And the answer, the brief answer, is Yes. And I could stop there, but I won't. Because I think I need to share a little bit more about how I got to that – because it wasn't immediately obvious to me that physicists who speak English and mathematics and maybe something else, as far as that, but that's what I've heard here [chuckles] is English and mathematics …. I don't have any sense at all that everyone's going to rush off and learn Native American languages in order to do their physics. That doesn't make a lot of practical sense to me.
 
So what else is there that could be a reason for you even to spend some time with it, if you were a physicist? And I think that comes from a different perspective, and that goes back to the original thing that you said when you set it out, Moonhawk, as being that quantum linguistics is a complementary aspect to Chomskyan linguistics, and Chomskyan linguistics being the way that we are used to understanding our English, that we think in English, etc., etc. It's part of our culture, the way we think and look at things. And I realize that, at least what I've gotten from this is not that quantum linguistics means Native American languages, because I don't think they equate, but rather that quantum linguistics is an alternative way of examining or experiencing language, any language – English language, the Native American language, whatever language, maybe even mathematics [chuckles a little]. And that this bring in different characteristics. There's the same kind of characteristics that the physicist among you here are working with in the quantum field, where things interact differently. They are in a relational mode. They don't do the things that classical physics has done.
 
And so what happens is, when you attune to some of the differences in the language, even if you can't speak it – and I certainly don't speak any Native American, other than English, if that's a Native American language –, you begin to understand the differences. It allows you to get outside of the box of our normal language and that opens us up, and allows new kinds of experiences. What John said about Amethyst talking about the horse-riding: as she expressed that, she talked about feeling it, and she said it's not visual for her. When she pictures a horse, riding a horse, what she does not get is this mental image. I get mental images as soon as somebody says “riding a horse,” that's what comes, is a mental image. The very concept of not doing that is difficult for me to get around. And that's the same kind of thing that I think is happening in the difference between classical and quantum physics, as I understand it. It's difficult to grasp it.
 
Now, I'm taking it on faith that the Native American language has some things more in common with the flow of the quantum physics – but I am taking it on faith, after this little bit of experience. And it seems to me like it would be worth exploring some of that, in some way, and helpful to the physicists.
 
Steven Gamboa-Eastman: I just want to add a couple things. First of all, I just want to say, Moonhawk mentioned it, but it was the Native Americans who essentially sought us out. Leroy Little Bear and Sa'ke'j Henderson and those people sought out David Bohm. They went to the Fetzer Foundation, and got the money and did that. So. I think that's a very important point, that they sought us out. And I think the reason that they sought us out was because they feel that the Earth and our species is in imminent danger from the environmental catastrophe that we have created here, and my work around Chernobyl and in the human communities there certainly drove that deeply into my own mind – that urgency was required, that this was not a time of business as usual. So, I just wanted to mention that they did that.
 
And one of the things that we discussed over the weekend were some of the similarities, for example, between some types of sacred spaces and Hilbert space, rules for quantum mechanics, quantum mechanical primitive things. We discussed the collapse of the wave function and other things and tried to relate that back and forth. In my theoretical work, I use a lot of topological stuff, so I'm trying to think that way. So, I think they have not only a point of view and a language system which is extremely flexible, and unstatic, because it can create words on the fly to specifically delineate exactly the meaning that you have at this moment with this particular thing. Like, for me, the thing about the wind through the trees, it's very poetic, but it's very precise, and it's kind of like an address system. It's way of grounding yourself and fixing yourself in the world. And I think that that's of fundamental importance because, as everybody can see, we're developing rapidly some extremely powerful technologies and there are others that are sort of just being whispered about that may take place soon. So, all of these things should be grounded in the planet as a basic reference point and frame of reference, and then maybe some of these things will be able to help us overcome the deficit we've created. So. It seemed like there were some very interesting and concrete ways of approaching problems that have resisted solution up to now by expanding beyond the formalism itself into like taking into account things like intentionality, creation, how to create things…

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

For anyone who has followed this thread, now that we're well into it, you might want to check this out as well.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

lol

(Btw, I clicked the link but got only an empty webpage.  Was the link posted properly?)

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Bruce, have you been at the hard stuff?

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

I'm almost finished reading the rheomode chapter!

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

One of the interesting things about the contingency of life on planet earth is that, while we can imagine living differently in quite some variety of more or less consequential ways, we don't know what qualities, or trade-in problems, we would have discovered on any of those roads not taken.  I think Steve Forbert once put this conundrum this way in a line in a song he wrote: life is strange; yes, but compared to what?

On the other side of imaging lives not lived is, for me, the rather serious question of just how different could things have been.  Relating this to questions Bohm asks in his rheomode chapter, could we, realistically or at all, have chosen a differently structured language?

My intuition, and nothing more for I haven't researched language evolution, tells me that language could not have developed appreciably otherwise, and that the thing-denoting linguistic structure of modern grammars is probably of or close to the order of a necessary development and stage.

I appreciate Bohm's attempt to jog the thing-natured element of our language, and I appreciate the creative imaginal leaps that interacting with Native American languages can bring.  FWIW, I was quite taken with descriptions above of the kinesthetic languagings certain NA languages foster.  On the other hand, those languages affected me from my vantage point of having developed mental and material structures corresponding with the thing language that has been my heritage, and I doubt a typical NA whose first language was kinesthetic would respond similarly.

That said, I suspect, on again nothing more than vague intuition, that language development, in the main, would lead eventually into an is-based thinging language, and that that stream of development is competitively superior for the specification abilities it offers, these being very important for scientific and power structure developments.  I'm sure Mister Chomsky would agree.

I appreciate Bohm's concerns, the main of these being that a thing-based language compels one, expressly and impliedly, “to discuss the observed fact in terms of separately existent things of an essentially static nature.”  Let's look a little more closely at this problem.

Basically, the nominative voice—the noun—is the root source of Bohm's main concern above: a noun is a person, place or thing, or basically, a thing, and thing-thinking is separative (until one realizes True Nature).  One might ask: does the noun correspond to anything in nature?  One answer to this question is that any posited correspondence but repeats the nominative structure: the correspondence is the noun, which is a mental frame that causes one to “see” noun-like things.  That answer possibly has merit, but I cannot tell, if any, how much.

Another answer might say: a noun corresponds (actually corresponds) to regularities observable in the vast holomovement Bohm so eloquently describes.  Thus in Bohm's words:

… all is an unbroken and undivided whole movement, and … each 'thing' is abstracted only as a relatively invariant side or aspect of this movement.

* FWIW, I don't ascribe to the oft cited 'everything is movement.'  Because each word (in my linguistic world) implies its opposite, 'everything is movement' renders 'movement' meaningless.  Does the fact that something is move?

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Hi, Tom, sorry it has taken me a few days to respond.  It is sort of a dogma among many linguists that there is no such thing as a primitive language, at least not among any of the existing ones in the world today.  The argument is that all human languages exhibit comparable complexity and expressive power – with some 'tribal' languages even exceeding the complexity of languages like English or French.  But it seems that linguists may be looking primarily at certain grammatical elements and relationships, rather than at the, say, Piagetian orders of cognition that you're describing.

Vygotsky has an essay on the relationship of language and thought that is relevant here, I think:  The Connection Between Thought and the Development of Language in Primitive Society.  I will post an excerpt from it below, and then will add a few comments afterwards.  If you're at all interested in the topic, the full essay is worth reading, if only for the interesting examples of linguistic conventions among different 'primitive' people.

~*~

The Connection Between Thought and the Development of Language in Primitive Society

We find that same path of development in another equally crucial sphere of the psychology of primitive man – language and thought. As in the case of memory, here again it becomes immediately apparent that primitive man is different from civilized man not only in that his language is poorer, cruder and less developed, as it unquestionably is. At the same time, however, the language of primitive nun impresses us with its vast wealth of vocabulary. Such languages are so very difficult to learn and understand primarily because they far surpass those of civilized peoples in terms of the wealth, abundance and luxuriance of various designations completely lacking in our language.

Lévy-Bruhl and Pensch rightly point out that there is a close link between these dual characteristics of the language of primitive man and his extraordinary memory. The first thing that impresses about the language of primitive man is precisely the vast wealth of designations at his disposal. Concrete designations pervade such languages; concrete details are expressed by means of a vast quantity of words and expressions.

Gatschet writes, “We intend to speak precisely, whereas an Indian draws as he speaks; we classify, he individualizes.” [15] For these reasons, the speech of primitive man, in comparison with our language, truly resembles an endlessly complex, accurate, plastic and photographic description of an event, with the finest details.

The development of language is accordingly characterized by a gradual tendency for this enormous abundance of concrete terms to disappear. The languages of the Australian peoples, for example, have practically no word: denoting general concepts, whereas they are inundated with a huge number of specific terms, painstakingly distinguishing the features and the individuality of objects.
Ayer, referring to the Australians, says, “They have no general words, such as tree, fish, bird, and so on, but exclusively specific terms applicable to each species of tree, fish and bird.”[16] The same absence of words for tree, fish and bird, accompanied by the use of proper nouns for all objects and creatures occurs in other primitive peoples.

Tasmanians have no word to designate such qualities as sweet, hot, hard cold, long, short or round. Instead of “hard” they say “like a stone”; instead of “high”, “high legs”; instead of “round”, “like a ball, like the moon”, adding an explanatory gesture. Similarly, on the Bismarck Archipelago there are no words for colors, which are designated in the same way, by naming an object that brings them to mind.

According to Powers, “In California, there are no species or breeds. Each oak, each pine, each kind of grass has its own special name.”[17] All of this generates the huge wealth of vocabulary of primitive languages. The Australians have separate names for almost each small part of the human body; for example, instead of “hand” they have several separate words denoting the upper part of the hand, the front of the hand, the right hand, or the left hand etc…..

Such detailed plastic description is both a big advantage and a serious shortcoming of primitive language. It is a big advantage because this type of language creates a sign almost for each specific object, and with remarkable accuracy gives primitive man virtual duplicates of all the objects he has to deal with. Understandably, therefore, bearing in mind the way of life of primitive man, shifting from such a language to a European language would mean being instantly deprived of a most powerful means of orientation in life.

At the same time, however, such a language endlessly burdens thinking with a host of details; it does not process the data of experience; it reproduces them in an unabridged form, just as they are in real life. In order to convey the simple thought that a man killed a rabbit, the Indian has to describe the entire scene of the event in fine detail. This means that the words of primitive man have not yet become differentiated from things, and are still closely linked to immediate sensory impressions.

Wertheimer describes the case of a semi-primitive man who had been taught a European language but refused, during an exercise, to translate the sentence “The white man killed six bears”.[19] A white man is incapable of killing six bears, so the expression itself seemed impossible. For such a person, language is still understood and used exclusively as a means of reflecting reality, and is far from acquired an autonomous function….

The unusual abundance of verb forms in the languages of the North American Indians was described many years ago. Dobrizhoffer thought that the language of the Abipones was the most frightful maze imaginable. According to Benyaminov, the Aleutian language has more than 400 inflections, for tense., declension, and person, each of which corresponds to a particular and precise shade of meaning.

Many authors agree that it is a pictorial or graphic language, and emphasize its tendency to “speak to the eyes”, to draw and depict the meaning to be expressed. Different expressions are used to convey motion in a straight line, motion to the side, or along a curve, or some distance from the speaker. As Lévy-Bruhl notes, “In a word, the spatial relationships that the Klamath language expresses so precisely may in particular be retained and reproduced by the visual and muscular memory.”

The prevalence of the spatial element reflects a tendency of many primitive languages. Gatschet found that considerations of space and distance prove to be exceedingly important in the representation of primitive peoples, and quite as fundamental as those of time and causality in our own thinking. Any phrase or sentence must express the relationship between objects in space…..

Thinking that uses this language, just like the language itself, is thoroughly concrete, graphic and pictorial and full of details; it also functions on the basis of directly reproduced real-life situations. Lévy-Bruhl refers to the inadequate power of abstraction involved in such use of language, and also to the peculiar “internal pictures” or “image-concepts” which are the material for such thinking.

We can safely say that the thinking of primitive man, using such a language, is eidetic – a conclusion also reached by Pensch on the basis of his own research material. In his opinion this language points to a sensory memory which has at its disposal truly vast numbers of visual and auditory impressions, and this pictorial function of primitive language is direct evidence of the eidetic nature of. primitive man. As the cultural development of language and thought progresses, the eidetic propensity recedes, taking with it any interest in using the language to convey separate concrete peculiarities.

Humboldt has rightly observed that when using these languages, one feels transported into another, very different world, as the perception and interpretation of the world that they suggest really is profoundly different from the mode of thinking of a civilized European.

Thurnwald, who fully concurs with these findings, notes that by virtue of its lexical abundance, the language of primitive man cannot be described as poor in expressions. In concreteness of expression it surpasses the language of civilized man. “It is, however, too closely tied to narrow activity in a small space, and with the circumstances in which the small group speaking that language lives. The language of primitive man is a mirror image of the special traits of the life of that group.”

The language of a group engaged in agriculture will contain a vast number of terms for coconut in the various stages of its growth, or for the different strains of corn. The nomads of Central Asia distinguish between their horses by sex and color. The Bedouin use similar designations for camels, and other peoples for dogs, while having no generic name for these species of animals. Thurnwald sees the concreteness of primitive language as a manifestation of vigor and expressive power, but also as evidence of its bonds to the particular, and its inability to express anything separate or general, or to define a relationship to other things. In the absence of abstraction, the language is dominated by a numerative listing of objects.

The reverse influence of thought on speech, noted by Thurnwald, is very important. We have already seen the extent to which the structure of mental operations depends on the resources of the language. Thurnwald has shown that when a language is borrowed by another people, or when two languages merge, the vocabulary itself is easily transferred from one tribe to another; but the grammatical structure is altered by the “thinking technique” of the people taking over the language. The thinking processes themselves are also closely dependent on such thinking resources.

Primitive man has no concepts, and finds abstract generic names completely alien. Primitive and civilized man use words in quite different ways. Words can be put to different functional uses. The mental operations performed with the aid of a word will also depend on how it is used.

A word can be used as a proper name, or a sound linked by association with this or that individual object. In this case, it is a proper noun helping the memory’ to perform a simple associative operation. As we have seen, to a significant extent, primitive language is situated precisely at that level of development.
As we have seen, the language of primitive man contains large numbers of proper names and tends to specify to the maximum extent each individual property and object. In this case the actual way words are used also determines the mode of thinking. This is why, in primitive man, the operation of memory takes precedence over thinking.

The second stage in the development of the use of words occurs when they function as an associative symbol not of an individual object, but of a set or group of objects. Here the word becomes a sort of family or group name. Besides its associative function, it also performs a mental operation by helping classify different individual objects, placing them together in a set.

The resulting new combination, however, still remains a group of separate concrete objects, each of which, on joining it, retains all its individuality and uniqueness. In this phase, words are a means for the formation of sets. Our family names are a typical example of this function. When I talk about a family name, say, Petrov, I use that word to designate a certain group of actual people, not because they share some common feature, but because they belong to a certain common group.

A set differs from a concept by virtue of the relationship between the individual object and the group name. By looking at an object I can say with full Lbjectivity whether it is a tree or a dog, because ‘tree’ and ‘dog’ serve as the signations of concepts – in other words, generic groups to which, by virtue of substantive features various individual objects belong. I cannot, by looking at a man, tell whether or not he is a Petrov, because in order to do so it is simply necessary to know, as a matter of fact, whether he goes by such a name. The individual thus remains, as such, in the set, but the set comprises different elements, united not by some inherent, substantial connection, but by an actual, concrete affinity which exists as a matter of fact.

To a large extent primitive man is at this stage of set-based thinking. His words are proper names or family names, that is, signs for separate objects or signs for sets. Primitive man thinks not in concepts but in sets. This is the most substantial difference between his thinking and ours.

When Lévy-Bruhl characterized the thinking of primitive man as “prelogical”, and simultaneously capable of making the most divergent connections, he saw the basic feature of that thinking in what he called the “law of participation”. This law holds that primitive thinking is not governed by the laws of our logic, but has its own special primitive logic, based on quite different representational links.
This special type of connection, characteristic of primitive logic, permits the same object to participate in different sets, and to form an integral part of wholly different connections.

This means that the law of the excluded middle is not valid for primitive man. For him, the fact a man belongs to the set “man” still does not mean that he is not a parrot; he can belong at the same time to the set “man” and to the set “parrot”. The Indians of the Bororo tribe, for example, used to claim that they were red parrots. They did not thereby mean that after death they became parrots, or that parrots were transformed Indians, but that Indians really were parrots. A connection of this sort is impossible in logic based on concepts, where the mere fact that a man is a man ipso facto means that he is not a parrot.

Such thinking and such logic, as we have seen, are based on sets, which in turn are based on concrete connections. The same object, of course, may have vast numbers of such concrete connections. The same man may belong to different family groups; his family may make him a Petrov, and his place of residence may make him a Muscovite, etc.

All the peculiarities of primitive thinking may ultimately be reduced to one basic fact: primitive man thinks in sets, not concepts. As Werner has put it, “Any primitive concept is at the same time a visual picture.”…

~*~

This essay seems to confirm, on the one hand, your intuition that primitive language structures and patterns may reflect features of concrete operational thinking.  It also appears to support, however, the basic thesis that underlies this thread: the (enactive) relationship between language/grammar and thought/experience, indicating that Bohm's project (or related ones, such as e-Prime or Lojban/Loglan) may have merit or be worth pursuing further.

In discovering the highly verbal, embodied/concrete languages of the Americas, I believe Bohm glimpsed, at least, the possibility, not of a return to concrete operational thinking (a pre/trans fallacy), but an opening beyond the horizons of the presupposed structures of our thought, towards a higher-order grammar that is similarly verbal and embodied, but in post- form, not pre.

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Nice find, Bruce.  I'll print it and give it a read.  

Re: Conscious Language Evolution

Interesting article, Bruce.  Vygotsky et al draw quite a picture of primitive languages as even more mirror-like and representationalist than later languages like English. Some quotes regarding primitive languages from the article:

endlessly complex, accurate, plastic and photographic description of an event with the finest details

practically no word denoting general concepts

no word to designate qualities

huge wealth of vocabulary

it is almost impossible to count the number of nouns in such languages

he does not know how to express himself abstractly

the words of primitive man have not yet become differentiated from things, and are still closely linked to immediate sensory impressions

speak to the eyes

the language of one primitive tribe has ten thousand verbs, further augmented by the use of numerous prefixes and suffixes

the languages of primitive man conveys images of objects and transmits them exactly as they present themselves to the eyes and ears

thinking that uses this language, like the language itself, is thoroughly concrete, graphic and pictorial and full of details

the language of primitive man is a mirror image of the special traits of that group

the concreteness of primitive language … is evidence of … its inability to express anything separate or general, or to define a relationship to other things