Outside Reading: Spoken Language

In this course, we have explored different aspects of Primal Religion and the influences of it on religion today. The topic of spoken language is integral in the discussion of these early practices. A friend of mine that majors in Linguistics at William and Mary graced me with a conversation about language when I told him about this aspect of our class. 

There are a ton of differences in language that influence our livelihood today. We don't notice it too much in every day life because we're so absorbed in our own context. Even the foreign language we tend to learn in America are closely related European languages that aren't too different structurally. You can only think in the terms that your language has provided for you...

Most languages I know are built around complex verb conjugations that allow description of events with a lot of precision. In some cases, you even need to refer to the way in which you learned about an event. Some languages have distinctions in the person (like 1st, 2nd, 3rd person)- these distincitons convey whether they include the person you're talking to or not. When these details are a required part of your language, you're naturally going to be thinking about those things. 

Languages in Africa have whole systems of classifying nouns that classify based on physical or spiritual properties. A system like that is naturally going to have many more connotations about relations and functions of objects. Family terms are different in lots of language - for example, in some, the word for brother/sister is the same as the word for cousin. The words you use to talk about your family can affect how close/distant you feel about them relationally. 

One of the most interesting topics in this line of thought is time - In western language and thought, time is very commoditized. To Americans, time can be "saved" and "spent"... We adhere to schedules and view time as something linear. In other languages and cultures time can be viewed as cyclical or free flowing like a river. Christianity asserts that time is something that solely resides on earth and this life as we know it, but God sits outside our concept of time. Time isn't thought of in terms of discreet events and blocks but as interconnected patterns and symbolic events, like the passage of seasons. A culture is inextricably tied to the language spoken in that culture... Different languages aren't just different vocab words for things, but completely different ways of describing and viewing things. 

From the conversation with my brilliant friend, we came to the conclusion that you can only think in the parameters your language lays out.