End of summer musings

Hey, guys!  As we're transitioning from summer to fall and high school to college, thought I might take this opportunity to look back and forward—that is, to recap some things I've been thinking about in August and the direction those thoughts are leading me in for school, maybe.  So as I've mentioned, I took Spanish conversation classes at Berlitz this summer.  They kind of shuffled me through instructors, but I guess I didn't mind too much because it meant I got to see four or five different perspectives on the Spanish language.  

I noticed there were more or less two types of instructors—those who were concerned with the purity of the Spanish they spoke, taught, and demanded of students, and those who were content to speak somewhat Anglicized Spanish after having lived in the States for a while (“tenemos un picnic” and “es muy nice”).  To me, this Anglicized Spanish was a wonderful example of language change, and it was easy and interesting to see how and wear English had left its mark.  Yet other instructors saw this as wholly negative—a contamination of language rather than a natural change.  I almost got into a terrible argument with one instructor who was hell-bent on teaching me “lo mas puro” when she told me that despite variations from country to country, "solo hay un espanol"—there’s only one "Spanish."  Well, I would have fought her had I been able to express myself properly in not-English.

But above all, each instructor said to me that I'd know that I'd have achieved some kind of fluency if I dreamed "in Spanish."  I've heard that before about learning a language, as I'm sure you guys have.  I'm wondering to what extent there's any scientific backing to that claim, especially because there's reason to doubt that we think (or dream, in this case) in any particular language at all!  We've talked about Chapter 3 of Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which Pinker tells us that we do not think in words, or even in images.  The "language" of our minds, he says, is "mentalese"--an idea pioneered by American cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor.  (If you Google "mentalese," there are a few good links... look into it!)

Tangentially, this also came up when my dad and I were talking about translated texts, and lamenting their inadequacy in precisely expressing the idea communicated in the original language.  We were reading something that had been written in Spanish but translated into English by the author himself.  I said I thought this might be better than having a third party translator do the job, because the author knew best what he wanted to express with each particular word/phrase in Spanish, and could therefore carry it over into English.  But does this actually fix our “lost in translation” problem?  Or, does it still matter that the idea was originally expressed in Spanish?  How does this affect the outcome of the translation?  Is the translation true to the way the idea was conceived? What if there is no real way of translating a particular idea or concept wholly and precisely?  What if, in the language of translation, there were no good words?  One language could be better to express a particular idea than another.  This got me wondering about whether we conceive of thoughts in a particular language, and how and why some languages communicate certain concepts better than others.

Anyway, these questions are part of a larger one: Can thoughts exist outside language?  Or, what is the relationship between language and cognition?

A second fundamental question for me is the extent to which culture affects language (and perhaps vice versa?), especially if language is a pre-programmed human capacity.  In other words, do grammar and culture in fact mesh?  I understand how culture could affect language on a lexical level; however apocryphal the story that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow may be, it certainly proves the point.  Yet I wonder whether culture impacts language on other levels?  For example, what about syntax?  Is the fact that verbs come at the very end of a sentence in an SVO language like Latin just pure coincidence?  Random?  Chance?  Or is it affected by an external factor, like the culture, biology, or even geography (Jared Diamond style) of the people and place that develop a language?   These are the kinds of questions that I want to be able to answer in college—through the study of linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, etc., and through spending time abroad observing the relationship between the culture and language of a particular place.  I’m ready.

--Amy