Jackie-- Re: I've mentioned before, I think, the strong tendency of us humans to put things into patterns that we recognize.
Ha! another one of my favorite "quotes" is "Truly gifted thinkers find order, where others only see disorder" (and of course, is myself as the former, not the latter!)
but there is some validity to language effecting thought-
two areas come to mind. One is Time( which we have discussed here at AWAD)and Maps.
Norther europeans, and related groups see time as rigid, and specific. 2:00 PM means exactly that. some native americans, and many other cultures have very different views. 2:00 means "the afternoon" .
Japan, curiously is one of those places that actively adopted the european sense of time (to a point, that while they still follow the chinese zodiac, and think this is the year of the Ram, New Year's was January 1st, not the Chinese lunar New Year. and there trains run to very strict schedules, and being late (even by a minute or two)can be an extremely rude act. This was not always so in Japan. It was something they desided upon, and incorporated into their culture, (in the 1850's.) (still haven't unpacked dictionaries, or reference books... maijing dynesty-- spelled wrong...)
Hispanic, and hispanic influenced cultures (for one) don't treat time the same way. they use the same clocks, (both digital and analog)but culturally, and linguistically, time is more fluid.
when English speakers say tomorrow,they mean one day from now...but manana is not the same...it could be one day from now, or it could be some unspecified time in the future.
Maps too,(written expression of geographic space)also effect thinking....
at some point in the late 1700,new surveying tools,and more accurate ways of measuring, resulted in a new map of france being created. and the more accurate map shrunk the country. The king at the time(one of the Louis's)is said to have commented to the head of the surrey taskforce, "Your map has lost me more territory than any battle ever fought in the history of France" --(and map making in france was a very politically unpopular occupation for a long time afterwards)
American indians, knew their way about the land scape, and had reference points (some still exist in NYC, the 'Rocking Stone', a glacial erratic, that weights over 3 tons, but that can be set to rocking by a child, if you know where to push, now part of the Bronx Zoo) , but they never made maps.
maps are a way of defining land and once defined as a concrete thing,crossing threads, it can then be 'owned' in a way that is total foriegn to most of the american indians tribes ways of thinking....
the aboriginal people of austalia, too, navigated with out maps, and the polinasian navigated the south pacific, travelling thousands of miles, on what westerner's called "uncharted" waters. but obviously, if they where consistantly able to find small island, in a vast ocean, they had "charted" them in some way... they just didn't make maps, charts, visual displays that NEuropians used.
