Do I know you mean what you mean? If people think in one language, they think a given way; and in another language then another way. Or at least so thought Benjamin Lee Whorf, who asserted that our thought is a prisoner of our tongue. …
Language is a wonderful instrument that lifts the individual above all other living things. Language makes us unique, but it is also quite evident that language serves as a barrier betwen groups of people. And this problem goes much more profoundly than mere difficulties in translation, for it questions the very way we perceive and experience the world around us. Linguistically speaking, people are not born free. Our linguistic minds were made up for us from the day we were born. Simply, we have inherited our culture’s particular habits that differ markedly from those inherited by people in different cultures.
—image:/2011/06/nixon-local-cops-on-the-beat/
Nature bombards us with sounds, smells, sights, and other sensations. All human beings are born with the sensory and motor potential to detect them, and so all humans should be able to report exactly what their senses tell them. But do they? In fact, the approach to any issue, any perception of problem and resolution will follow the channels of perception demanded by their language; more than merely blinding its speaker to certain perceptions, instead conducting a channel of direction opposite towards certain habitual patterns of thought. Observations are tracked differently as well as different categories in which to place them.
It would seem that vocabulary alone is te least important distinction made by different languages. What matters is the totality of the patterns and internal structures of the language. No one appeared to think scientifically about the matter until the German Wilhelm von Humboldt became the first to clearly state that the structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers. The study of the interrelationship of language and culture basically waned until an amateur linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf of Hartford, started publishing the results of his intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona.
—“The white man said that all those who wished to shake hands with Sitting Bull would please line up if they cared to meet the man who had killed Custer. It made me wonder what sort of people the whites were, anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed, and were really pleased to shake the hand with the man who had killed him!” Luther Standing Bear—WIKI
Whorf’s analysis of the Hopi placed the old folk beliefs about language and culture into a more scientific context, and also arrived at the idea that the individual is a prisoner of their language.” It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for people’s mental activity, for their analysis of impressions, for their synthesis of their mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly, among different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.”
Whorf forced us to re-evaluate the traditional thinking about language, breaking it off from rational and linear studies of equivalence to a broadening of the parameters to include cognition and cultural behavior. Whorf first became interested in language because of his fundamentalist religious beliefs. He perceived a discrepancy between the Bible and modern scientific evidence, but held the idea that it might be more apparent than real based on faulty translations of the Bible. This led him to study Hebrew. ( to be continued)…
—Kurt Meyer (centre) on trial, December 1945.
PHOTO: BARNEY J. GLOSTER, LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA—PA141890
The violence of this June 7th encounter did not end when the fighting stopped. In Authie, “wildly excited” Hitler Youth began murdering Canadian prisoners while the battle still raged, and continued killing prisoners after the fighting ceased. Today’s visitor to Authie is shown the Rue des Canadians, where the bodies of two murdered soldiers were placed in the street so that a tank could repeatedly run over them.
Other murders were committed in Buron and during the German withdrawal from the village, bringing the total to at least 37 men. After the war, SS Lieutenant-Colonel Karl-Heinz Milius, the battalion commanding officer, was indicted for war crimes, but never brought to justice.
Reports of the killing of soldiers taken prisoner during or immediately after episodes of intense close combat are common, but some of the deaths in the streets of Authie and Buron crossed the line into premeditated murder. When the killing stopped there were still 91 Canadians in German hands.—click image for more…
From Maimonides Guide to the Perplexed: …The intellect then acquired true knowledge, which presented itself to the prophet’s imagination in forms peculiar to that faculty. Pure ideals are almost incomprehensible; man must translate them into language which he is accustomed to use, and he must adapt them to his own mode of thinking. In receiving prophecies and communicating them to others the exercise of the prophet’s imagination was therefore as essential as that of his intellect, and Maimonides seems to apply to this imagination the term “angel,” which is so frequently mentioned in the Bible as the medium of communication between the Supreme Being and the prophet.
…That the Psalmist really means to describe the heavens’ own doing, in other words, what the spheres actually do, and not what man thinks of them, may be best inferred from the words,” There is no speech, nor language, their voice is not heard” (ver. 4). Here he dearly shows that he describes the heavens themselves as in reality praising God, and declaring His wonders without words of lip and tongue. When man praises God in words actually uttered, he only relates the ideas which he has conceived, but these ideas form the real praise. The reason why he gives expression to these ideas is to be found in his desire to communicate them to others, or to make himself sure that he has truly conceived them. Therefore it is said,” Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still” (Ps. iv. 5). Only ignorant or obstinate persons would refuse to admit this proof taken from
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