metalangel wrote:
We discussed earlier in the thread that you think in concepts, not sentences, unless you're making a point of "talking" to yourself in you head. I don't think, then, thinking in Sign is any different to thinking in any other language, spoken or otherwise.
I don't think it's possible to think in concepts. Even if it's thinking in concepts, these concepts have to follow a code, and I'm referring to this very code. It is not different in essence, but from what I've read it is different in form. You can't live in the abstract, you are not Rin
"Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. "Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane," Sacks writes. "She was dreaming in Sign."
And even then, I think that deaf people also make a point of talking to themselves in their heads every now and then, so how do the prelingually deaf do that? Imagine someone signing in their heads?
"Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one’s own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads."
I can't say I myself think in concepts, I'm 100% of the time using sounds to remember these concepts, all the time I can't help but remember the group of phonemes I attached to these concepts (and I always have an inner voice saying them). Concepts only are not enough, some born-deaf people are left mentally handicapped because they weren't taught sign early in their lives and therefore the language never came to them, the code was never infused in their heads. How it feels to exist like that, it's hard to say, but here's a quote from a late learner:
"“Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. (…) Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”
Furthermore, in more unfortunate times when deaf culture was not very developed, deaf people were forced to try and communicate in spoken language (the nearly-deaf or progressively-deaf ones), those people also experienced learning difficulties and were sometimes labeled as mentally challenged (a common thing done to deaf people in the past), that was because of their difficulty in attaching the sounds/phonemes they were not familiar with to the concepts so that they could grasp the meaning.
So, all of this leads me to think that the code is very important and it must have an influence on how you think, how you organize things in your head. I think they do think in a sort of different way, at least the symbols inside their mind that correspond to the concepts are different and it must be sorta different how they go from the initial gathering to the conclusion.
metalangel wrote:
I would say it's more down to a lack of social contact as a child which, while due to her deafness, could just as easily happen to a hearing person who was similarly isolated. Basically, anyone could have a personality like Shizune.
Yeah, I think you're right there, one's language doesn't determine their personality, I was just extrapolating
) and her socially isolated situation extrapolated it.
I prefer the English originals).
