Language and world-view

Language is intimately connected to the world-view of those who use it. So intimately that some writers have claimed, that if you don't have a word for something, you can't think about it.

The fact that my thumb is a part of my hand says that I have sentiments toward it that a corkscrew doesn't share and renders absurd most of the possible phrases that involve my thumb -- to the point that I have no possibility even to think them -- they never reach my conscious awareness not because they get filtered out somewhere in the process of language generation but because they clash directly with my world view.

Example

 The humidifier exits my thumb.

While it is grammatical, the meaning is an absurdity because my thumb is unable to contain a humidifier -- it wouldn't even occur to me that it could.

However I wrote the above sentence so how did it occur?

Only through arbitrary connection of three separate things "thumb", "humidifier", and "exit" which were all within sight at the time I set out to write this -- coming through the language generator backwards -- ie: from the syntax first:

      [subject]      [verb]   [object]

     the humidifier  exits    my thumb

All this instead of using the syntax to render the action that fitted my world-view. Syntax generation comes in during the final rendering process rather than being involved in the internal representation of a thought form.


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