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[xmca] Language, meaning and culture.



Is our intellectual activity driven by a quest for answers to specific questions, or is it more like a game or sport we engage in for the sake of participating in society? What questions do we ask? I wanted to know why people behave destructively, as they do. I allowed that question to exist for many years until the answer became clear. It related to culture. When we use words, we are making a statement about whatever things we name. By referring to things vocally, we are, virtually, informing ourselves of the affect/meaning of those things. The sounds we utter correlate to emotive states, which we experience subliminally. Consequently, we associate those emotive-feeling states with the things to which the sounds refer. Linguists have been looking for relationships between the sounds of words and the things to which they refer, and have been, for the most part, frustrated by that search. Vocal sounds relate primarily to emotive-feeling states, and only secondarily to the things to which our words refer. Are we able to discover to what emotive states each of our vocal sounds refer? If we would change our human behavior, which is often misidentified as "human nature", we must address the cultural values, the unquestioned givens by which we perceive our world. These givens, these values, our culture, is a result of our language. I would like to share more of this with youall if you want to know more.
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