BlueRaven’s blog

Antaeus.

Monday 11/2 I returned from Budapest.  My Hungarian is improving.  When we are immersed in a group that speaks a particular language that is different from the one we normally use, we have a remarkable ability to pick up the accents and usages of the group's language (assuming we have some base to build on.)  I suspect this has something to do with mirror neurons.  We also pick up figures of speech. 

Along with the speech patterns, we also assimilate thought patterns.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is still controversial:  Back in 1985, when I asked the  professor  in my USC NLP class,  he responded that the hypothesis has has been discredited:  No-one found an example in real life.  Someone once thought they found an example in some south seas island where a color between green and blue, (he jokingly referred to it as "grue") but it was not found to be a real category of color:  The speakers of the language still categorized colors the same way as everyone else in the world.  Classroom situations being the way they are, I could not ask a follow up question:  Is it possible that Sapir-Whorf does not apply to raw percepts, but to conceptual constructs, such as Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung?

I see these culturally sensitive filters as occurring all the way from perception, conception, reasoning, and presentation.  Even our level of sensitivity to a percept may be culturally determined.  While I cannot put a finger on it, I think you are allowed to be more vague in Hungarian than you are in American English.  American culture's treatment of the concrete (see Hemingway) vs. Hungarian culture's treatment of the vague and abstract (See Antal Szerb)

Not that I claim to be a literary maven, but I do have a fairly strong sense to Americans I am expected to be much more specific in what I say to Germans or Hungarians.  This can normally be seen as a virtue:  I should be as specific as possible when I say something.  But what do I do when I sense something and I am not sure what it is?  The whole point of the discussion is to figure out if there is something to a vague foreboding, intuition, or what not?  I rarely get ideas in a clean form.  They start as vague intuitions, crystallizing over time.

Years ago I was studying Greek and Roman forensic oratory (in order to better defend some engineering ideas at work.)  Shortly afterwards I received a jury summons, and I told a friend of mine (Steve) that I thought the Greco Roman forensic oratory may effect how I will discuss things in the jury room.  His replied that American law has nothing to do with Greek and Roman law.  He had a point, but I felt he missed something. 

Last week I met a lawyer who described a lawsuit where the plaintiff was an ex member of the JAD (Judge Advocate General's office) and described the plaintiff's legal experience as invaluable in the case.  I repeated Steve's refrain, asking how useful is a military law background in a civil suit.  He replied that proof strategies are the same regardless of legal system.   This was the proper reply to Steve.  The intuition was correct, but the reply could not be formed in the flow of the conversation.  If you cannot resolve a problem in a second or two, the conversation will treat it as a conclusive failure.

So how did my trip to Berlin and Budapest effect me?  I felt the freedom to proceed with half-formed ideas, and request the help of those I was talking to to help see if the intuitions had any validity.  In the US it did not occur to me to do that.  Unconsciously, I did not feel this was an option, and I filtered it out.  Maybe this was just me, or just the people I was with.  Still, when I listen to Hungarians discuss politics, the language sounds much more allusive than when Americans do so, and my mother insists that this is a Hungarian vice:  People whose words never effected anything for countless generations other than a sense of aesthetics will develop the sense of aesthetics more than they will develop the clarity of the language.  Additionally, totalitarian and authoritarian government will influence the language to become more vague simply to preserve plausible deniability.  But this this twilight zone of language has a secret power:  It can be used to explore ideas as they emerge from vague intuitions.  The trick is not to stop here, but to carry them to greater clarity when we have the ability to do so.  (Doing so too soon creates a sort of intelectual procrustean bed) that is worse than honest vagueness.  I am multicultural.  I hope to be able to do this.

But strangely, I do not feel I learned anything new on my trip:  This change of attitude struck me as familiar but long unused.  I was born in Budapest, to an educated liberal arts family.  It is as if my early development was in this atmosphere.  The trip to Berlin and Budapest was like returning to something old and familiar, which however was never developed.  In a drunken, expansive mood, I may even call this an "Antaeus" like experience.