My problems with language
I am certainly not talking about spelling mistakes! :-)
The hardest part of my pre-university was to either remember or get cleverer in temporarily knowing concepts of science and maths. It was exhausting for me since i always felt i couldn't relate to the million words or concepts in the text books. I could feel a little bit of forces, weights and tensions and i believed the physics. I could count few numbers and i believed the Math as a counting subject.
After an overwhelming year, i joined the Architecture school. I was more comfortable in learning by watching buildings seeing its limitations and touching and having my own view of materials and joints. I was happier since i had lesser names to remember and more things to feel towards.
This continued with my course in Industrial design where i was judging the shape of the object by the feel of my hands and eyes. Eyes was always tricky!. To justify my shape, we did use a lot of language, words describing the emotions and parts of the objects and materials and so forth.
My problems with the language started then when i could not describe sufficiently or accurately or even truthfully to the shapes i made. We were learning semantics then. As soon as I assigned a name to an object or even a concept, metaphors would magically organize or give newer meaning to what i had felt to the objects or ideas. I was loosing to language especially English. I take great pride and love toward my mother tongue Kannada. The reason being, Kannada establishes multiple meanings on a word simultaneously. A word like "Madilu" or " Jeeva" means many things in many contexts all together giving one feeling together. This insight was during when I read "Manku Timmana Kagga" in both English and Kannada.
This constraint cracked my basic belief in the language and i incidentally happened to read a lot ideas around this problem by many authors.
Sussanne langer gave me insights into the role of language as primary units of conceptions, philosophy of U G Krishnamurthy says the inadequacy of language in solving worldly problems and its associations with thought. Micheal Polyanis coining of the word "Tacit" - a knowledge outside the domain of verbal/lingual tradition of language. I was infering the same insights with symbols too...they are very similar to language. In the mean time I was creating a lot of symbols in Kannada, English and other open graphics. I was getting more and more convinced about how language shape our thoughts and perceptions.
My job in Yahoo! is to observe people how they interact with Web based systems and I keep seeing over and over again how people adjust themselves to web language. Just after a quick seeing and recognizing of a word or object in less than a second, parsing for a second and allowing the mind to establish a quick conception of the situation overall resulted in a million problems of usability of the systems. Designing terminologies is quite challenging on the web!
At this point i am completely convinced on the nature of amazing abstraction called language and its impossible problems. Works of Boroditsky shows works in this direction. I am in a big state of doubt with language. It opens my interest in the state of creativity and how language can kill it or enhance it while creating an object or anything for that matter. It also blocks us from many other internalization's your silent talks with your soul! It is just inadequate as communication and can build dangerous world views. I feel caught in the web of word and conceptions a very thick and deep web. The only way is to use it, than running away from it. Language and thought cannot be separated.
The hardest part of my pre-university was to either remember or get cleverer in temporarily knowing concepts of science and maths. It was exhausting for me since i always felt i couldn't relate to the million words or concepts in the text books. I could feel a little bit of forces, weights and tensions and i believed the physics. I could count few numbers and i believed the Math as a counting subject.
After an overwhelming year, i joined the Architecture school. I was more comfortable in learning by watching buildings seeing its limitations and touching and having my own view of materials and joints. I was happier since i had lesser names to remember and more things to feel towards.
This continued with my course in Industrial design where i was judging the shape of the object by the feel of my hands and eyes. Eyes was always tricky!. To justify my shape, we did use a lot of language, words describing the emotions and parts of the objects and materials and so forth.
My problems with the language started then when i could not describe sufficiently or accurately or even truthfully to the shapes i made. We were learning semantics then. As soon as I assigned a name to an object or even a concept, metaphors would magically organize or give newer meaning to what i had felt to the objects or ideas. I was loosing to language especially English. I take great pride and love toward my mother tongue Kannada. The reason being, Kannada establishes multiple meanings on a word simultaneously. A word like "Madilu" or " Jeeva" means many things in many contexts all together giving one feeling together. This insight was during when I read "Manku Timmana Kagga" in both English and Kannada.
This constraint cracked my basic belief in the language and i incidentally happened to read a lot ideas around this problem by many authors.
Sussanne langer gave me insights into the role of language as primary units of conceptions, philosophy of U G Krishnamurthy says the inadequacy of language in solving worldly problems and its associations with thought. Micheal Polyanis coining of the word "Tacit" - a knowledge outside the domain of verbal/lingual tradition of language. I was infering the same insights with symbols too...they are very similar to language. In the mean time I was creating a lot of symbols in Kannada, English and other open graphics. I was getting more and more convinced about how language shape our thoughts and perceptions.
My job in Yahoo! is to observe people how they interact with Web based systems and I keep seeing over and over again how people adjust themselves to web language. Just after a quick seeing and recognizing of a word or object in less than a second, parsing for a second and allowing the mind to establish a quick conception of the situation overall resulted in a million problems of usability of the systems. Designing terminologies is quite challenging on the web!
At this point i am completely convinced on the nature of amazing abstraction called language and its impossible problems. Works of Boroditsky shows works in this direction. I am in a big state of doubt with language. It opens my interest in the state of creativity and how language can kill it or enhance it while creating an object or anything for that matter. It also blocks us from many other internalization's your silent talks with your soul! It is just inadequate as communication and can build dangerous world views. I feel caught in the web of word and conceptions a very thick and deep web. The only way is to use it, than running away from it. Language and thought cannot be separated.
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