{"id":1135,"date":"2009-02-21T12:37:45","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T12:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/2009\/02\/21\/1135\/"},"modified":"2009-02-21T12:37:45","modified_gmt":"2009-02-21T12:37:45","slug":"thinking-in-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/thinking-in-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking in languages"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nI’m thinking of…<\/a>
\nOriginally uploaded by gutter<\/a>
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Phyllis says people have often asked her whether her kids are thinking in English or French when they are speaking the latter, and I remember being asked similar questions when I was a kid.<\/p>\n

I must admit I find it a puzzling question because I don’t think of thinking as being in a language most of the time. I’d say something like 4\/5 of thought happens in swift, intuitive, pictorial ways, and it’s only put into words in a final output stage.<\/p>\n

So when I’m speaking Spanish (just to take a language I’m fairly fluent in but where I have severe gaps in my vocabulary), most of my thinking is the same as the same as if I had been speaking Danish, but when I have to output it, I have to express myself using fewer words, and I will occasionally be unable to express exactly what I wanted to say. That doesn’t mean I have a word or a sentence ready in Danish, just that I’m thinking of a concept that doesn’t have an output mapping.<\/p>\n

So I must say I disagree with Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind nicht<\/i> die Grenzen meiner Welt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m thinking of… Originally uploaded by gutter Phyllis says people have often asked her whether her kids are thinking in English or French when they are speaking the latter, and I remember being asked similar questions when I was a kid. I must admit I find it a puzzling question because I don’t think of thinking as being in a language most of the time. I’d say something like 4\/5 of thought happens in swift, intuitive, pictorial ways, and it’s only put into words in a final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}