Re: goan hoam to Noam

Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Tue, 21 Apr 1998 08:04:00 -0700 (PDT) 

>
>	But *were* the Greeks aware of brownness ?  
>
>	If they didn't have the word for it, is there any way 
>	of knowing ?  They may have thought of some things 	
>	as being a kind of red, others a kind of yellow.  They would 
>	not, presumably, be then able to categorise brown foxes, 
>	brown beer & brown noses as sharing 	one particular quality.
>
>	Scottie B.


I've completely forgotten the idea behind this discussion, but I'll 
perpetuate it anyway.

I think we're talking about two different things, Scottie.  You're 
talking about communication and symbols, which is entirely different 
than perception and cognition.  My point is that, simply because they 
had no word for brown, they weren't not able to perceive and process the 
abstract...um, "thing" of brown itself.  If we weren't able to process 
abstract or even concrete things without first being able to label them 
with language, then all children before the age of two, and all isolated 
deaf people, are completely vacuous, their brains void of any 
information.  Yet children and deaf people are not so, and that alone is 
enough proof that language is secondary to cognition.

Anyway, following Noam along a bit further, we see (through his sort of 
Jungian theory of language being written unerasably upon the human 
subconscious) that, even if they didn't have a word for brown, they 
would have found a way to communicate it if they needed to--because 
that's what humans do: communicate.  In fact, it's what we can't *not* 
do.  If they needed to talk about brown, they'd just slap a few 
morphemes together, or, if needed, pen up a new phoneme or two.

Please don't take my example too seriously.  I was paraphrasing a text 
that is physically and mnemonically very far from me at the time.  It's 
only to illustrate the wider point that language does not precede 
thought or even idea.

Brendan

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