Conversations are wonderful things. They are one of a few things in the universe that teach us as much or as little as we are willing to learn from them.
I had a nice chat with someone a few days ago and below were our topics of discussion and my opinion on them.
1. If a person were born deaf, what language would they think in?
This is a really cool question because it forces us to consider what thinking really is? Is it possible to think without words? Try...let me know, I can't. You can trace the way people act back to the way they think and you can trace the way they think back to the words they know. In the English language their are over 500,000 not counting scientific/medical terminology used only in those fields. The average English speaker knows only about 3000 words. We use only a fraction of the words we could which results in us only being able to think about a fraction of the things that actually exist. A simple way of thinking about it is as follows. Words are invented so that we can talk about things. A person will only be able to talk or think about the things he has words to understand. If you understand (understand is an important word here. Understanding is different than simply reciting a definition) 5000 words you will be able to think about twice as many things as a person who understands only 2500 words.
The words that we know give us potential to go deeper and look further and acquire greater understanding. Here's an example of what I'm trying to say. Pretend that you are required to write an essay in school about being a parent. You know that parent means the producer of the child. However you don't know the vocabulary words like, father, mother, mom, dad, son, daughter, pa, ma, patriarch, matriarch, loving, caring, kind. ect... Without these accompanying words your essay will be short and bland and boring. Why? Because words are the building blocks that create ideas in our minds. Ideas are the building blocks of beliefs, And beliefs are the building blocks of our worldview.
So I've talked about how words are so important. What does that mean for our deaf friend who has never heard a word in his life? There's a story recorded in Herodotus' history. (2.2) about an Egyptian Pharaoh named Psamtik I. He reigned over Egypt for 54 years in the seventh century BC. He conducted an experiment to figure out which language was the oldest in the world. He took two children who were orphaned at birth and raised them in seclusion. Their nurses were women who had had their tongues cut out. The nurses cared for the children but were responsible for ensuring that the children never heard a spoken word. Around their second birthday the children began saying the word "Bekos" a Phrygian word meaning bread. The Pharaoh concluded that Phrygian was the worlds first language or at least Bekos was a word in the world's first language and that Phrygian was related to that language.
Beyond being an interesting story, I think it tells us something about the nature of humans. Human beings in contrast to animals were created as thinking beings. We will think and if we don't have the words for what we want to think about we will make them up. Shakespeare is a recognized genius because he wrote plays about human experience and he made up words to describe experiences that we all have had. In situations that leave alot of people speechless, Shakespeare invented words so that he could tell others about those experiences.
The deaf person will think either in Phrygian or in a language of his own invention or perhaps words will be different for him. For most people a word would be defined as a unit of sound. Perhaps for him a word be defined as a particular sight. He could see "tree" written out and have someone point at a picture of a tree and realize that the letters t r e e on a piece of paper represent the idea of a tree as seen in nature.
The other things we talked about I'll save for later. The ideas are below but this post is already long enough and I'll save my comments for another time.
2. If a vampire bites a zombie will the zombie become a vampire or remain a zombie? or will it become some form of hybrid.
3. What would I do if I could not fail?
This isn't a hypothetical question. Do you know any congenitally deaf people? I do. Deaf people don't have any handicaps in thinking, and the only handicaps they might have in acquiring language is if their parents don't only use spoken language, but thankfully this is uncommon. Deaf people typically acquire the sign language that the Deaf community in their area uses, or if there is none a "home sign" system is developed from communication at home. In any case, they certainly don't speak (or think in) Phyrgian.
ReplyDeleteThe original question was, "If a person were born deaf what language would they think in?" The presupposition here is that deaf people are equally capable of thinking as not deaf people. The issue at hand is how they go about thinking and whether they think differently than the non-deaf person?
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not sure what you're getting at. I hope you don't think that I believe that deaf people are handicapped in their ability to think. Because, I didn't say that anywhere.
I also don't know why you bring up sign language. It seems like sign language is not a medium of thinking as much as it is a medium of communication. I guess I'm confused by your comment. Let me know if I can clarify anything from my post. And to answer your question, no, I don't know anybody who is deaf.
Would you consider English, or any other spoken language a medium of thinking? If so, then what makes you think signed languages aren't?
ReplyDeleteIf you don't consider English as a medium of thinking, then what are you getting at?
It seems signed language is just what the name says, the signs for the language not the language itself. So I would consider many spoken languages mediums of thinking while I wouldn't consider signed language a medium of thinking. Languages are systems of symbols used to express ideas. Signed language is a system of signs used to express language. So you could use sign language to express ideas but the person will have to understand the language he's signing or else his symbols will be meaningless.
ReplyDeleteI don't like internet discussions that rabbit trail and continue endlessly on. If you would like to discuss a specific point from my original post I"m happy to continue this conversation but just asking me difficult questions won't help us reach truth. I'm sorry if I'm not as smart as you would like.
Hope that makes sense.
Sorry if I'm bugging you, but this is just an issue that's important to me and I have trouble resisting the urge to chime in when I see misconceptions about sign language and the deaf.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you are saying, that signed language seems more like a fancy alphabet, or way of encoding a language, so to speak, than a language itself.
This is a common, but completely incorrect, idea. Many people have the idea that American Sign Language (ASL for short) is essentially English, except you sign the English words instead of speaking them or writing them (btw, such a system does exist, called Signed English). In reality, ASL is a completely separate language. If you knew sign language, this would be obvious, but instead of just trusting me on that, consider this: ASL is much more closely related to Mexican Sign Language and French Sign Language than it is to British Sign Language. This would be impossible if signed languages were encodings of spoken language, since I think you'll agree that American English is more closely related to British English than it is to Mexican Spanish or Parisian French. Also, there are a number of incidences of communities of deaf people, who grew up speaking a home sign language, illiterate in the local spoken language, developing a new sign language (e.g. Nicaraguan Sign Language). These are exciting events for linguists because it is one of the few situations where a birth of a new (natural, nonfictional) language can be observed.
People who are born deaf (in good circumstances where they have acommodating parents that care for their linguistic needs) learn a signed language as their native language, and grow up thinking in their native language. Often they learn the local spoken language in written form as their second language as part of their education, i.e. many deaf people are bilingual. Monolingual deaf people only know sign language.
I'm not telling you all of this because I think you aren't smart, but because I want you to know the actual answer to the question: people who are born deaf think in a sign language. This seems so obvious to people acquainted with Deaf culture, but I suppose it might be surprising for you to imagine that people think in a modality other than spoken/written language.
As for whether or not babies, hearing or deaf, have thoughts before they acquire language--that's an entirely different (and IMO more interesting) question.