Counting Sheep

Last night Dan and I were counting sheep in groups of twelve because we had just tried to create a list of '90s alternative rock and grunge bands for about twenty minutes, and our heads just kept on their search for band names. So we counted sheep in groups of twelve to get our minds on something else.

Midway through counting, Dan asks: "What kind of sheep do you picture when you count them? Do you see an actual sheep or one of those big fluffy cartoon ones?"

Laughter ensued, but he was serious. It is a really good question.

"I see those fluffy cartoon ones. What about you?"

"I see fluffy cartoon ones too, and they are jumping over a fence as I count them. What do your sheep do?"

"Nothing. They just float."

"Just float across your thoughts from left to right?"

"Yup."

"I see a big green field, and a white fence, and the sheep jump over it!"

"Mine are see-through, almost iridescent, and float."

"I probably got stuck on something I saw in a cartoon."

"You never know."

It may seem trivial, but I guess this is a pretty significant disclosure, on both of our parts, just to illuminate the fact that we may not envision the same thing, but have enough understanding to bridge this with communication. However, Google images shows tons of sheep jumping over fences - and it seems that the majority of the population envisions sheep jumping over a fence because of references in popular culture. The fact that Dan asked me what my sheep look like is especially considerate! Why I don't I envision a field with sheep in technicolor but a transparent outline of a sheep floating without context is something I may never know. There are also studies that show that some people don't envision sheep at all!

Time to sleep.

No, it is unnecessary to trip on massive amounts of LSD and Mushrooms to expand your consciousness.

I would urge you not to freak out about how language is meaningless because it's an abstract construction created by man. I would urge you not to let your mind go reeling on the fact that the act of speaking itself is unimportant because it is "just sound"; that we can live without the act of speech. But thanks, because I looked into it, and what I found wasn't disappointing. 

I found this insightful article the other day that helped me understand another profound facet of language - language not just for communication - but for it's ability to change our worldview. There have been some studies that show how language shapes the way people literally see and understand the world. For example, in English, nouns are mostly gender neutral. But what about German and Spanish? For example, the word "key" is denoted as masculine in German. However, in Spanish, "key" is denoted as feminine. In one of the studies, scientists asked a group of German speaking people to describe the word "key" using adjectives. They said: hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful. The group of Spanish speakers described the word "key" as: golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. As an English speaker, I can see how this would change my view of a key, something I would normally understand as gender neutral. I can't imagine thinking of a key and immediately connecting it to masculinity or femininity. Actually, I would probably think of something that had to do with my own personal experience with keys. This takes the whole argument even further. While the article describes language through a priori knowledge, I might say that language can also be understood through posteriori knowledge. But I'll focus on the former for now. There is an even more interesting excerpt in the article about a group of aboriginal people from Australia who use the words North, South, East, and West, but never right, left, forward, or back. This completely changes how they feel and think about space, it gives them even more depth... both physically and temporally.

Fascinating. Here's a link to the article:

How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? by Lera Boroditsky

- F