Language and how it shapes our thoughts.

One thing that I have stumbled upon recently has been the issue of language and words we use and how it affects our thoughts. It has primarily come about by listening to and reading Bohm who also was a linguist and had an obsession about finding out the origins of a word and going to the root of it and then more importantly comparing it with what that word is trying to describe and see if it fits. Well he didn’t try to see if it fits. He raised the questions and leaves it to the reader to make up his or her mind. A true philosopher who was not strait jacketed by any belief system and bogged by concepts and steadfastly believed in dialogue and arguments to talk things through and see if things can be made clearer.

Apart from using the correct word at the appropriate time, Bohm also shed light on problems the Subject-Verb arrangement of words does in our thought process. In English we have to have a subject who needs to be doing something or something needs to be happening to it for there to be a complete grammatically correct sentence. This happening or doing is denoted by the verb.

So for e.g. we can have a sentence like:

  Ram   Laughed

Subject+ Verb.

So a two word sentence( subject  and verb) would be the shortest possible sentence in English. IN such a format the subject takes exaggerated importance. There has to be a doer of action for there to be action. This is in contradiction to lot of eastern philosophy( hindu,buddhist) where we  say there is action. The Verb is all important in that set up.

Bohm then  gives the example of a common  English  expression " it is raining".

What is this "it" that is raining. Logically we should say  "Rain is falling of "There is rain"

Bohm says this is due to our contrived way of thinking and giving so much importance to the subject and not being able to think wholly and just seeing things in parts.

While it may seem as an extreme example, you can see the point he is trying to make from a larger philosophical point of view. If we accept that language shapes our thoughts then surely when we learn to make sentences where the doer of the action is going to be paramount that shapes in our mind an image of the importance of the individual. The "I". The "ego' .That becomes our default setting if you will.the way we look and interpret things and event.

if some ill luck befalls us and we are in rut we think of people to blame it on or blame ourselves for it. We find difficulty in accepting that things just happen and there maybe no one to blame for it. There was no grand cosmic plan to fail us on that day .Things happen. You handle the present moment and then you move on to the next moment. Or maybe you don’t move on anywhere, the next moment happens and  you react in it

So stuff to munch on,,this subject verb thing and on a wider scale how language shapes our thoughts.