From owner-freebsd-chat Wed May 29 0:54:10 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C67C37B400 for ; Wed, 29 May 2002 00:54:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 5935781461; Wed, 29 May 2002 17:24:04 +0930 (CST) Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 17:24:04 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Brad Knowles Cc: Terry Lambert , pgreen , Rahul Siddharthan , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Language in danger: Language loss Message-ID: <20020529172404.X82424@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <3CF17486.F06F3E6A@mindspring.com> <20020527104558.B43610@wantadilla.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Monday, 27 May 2002 at 13:14:14 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote: > At 10:45 AM +0930 2002/05/27, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> Imagine you're driving down a crowded freeway and a car in front of >> you suddenly stops. You have to avoid it. How do you do it? "Well, >> if I veer to the left, I may hit the gravel on the side of the road, >> if I veer to the right, I may hit the central reservation, but there's >> not enough space between the lanes for me to get through, so maybe the >> gravel's the least risk"? Of course not. Putting thoughts into >> language is too slow for your own thoughts. > > I would argue that this issue is handled largely by reflex, with > relatively little conscious thought. What conscious thought has gone > into this process happened before the situation began, so your reflex > is going to be guided by your memory of the overall situation > immediately before the unexpected occurrence. Maybe we have a difference of terminology here. There's a difference between this kind of "reflex" and the kind of reflex which makes your leg kick when you're hit on the knee. I suspect what I call thinking is what you call reflex, and what you call "conscious thought" is really formulating your thoughts in language. A corollary to this is: if the languages you speak don't have any words to express a thought, can you think it? Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message