David or Vera or Ana or .....????
I have been reading the exchanges with great interest and have, as part of
the task of writing an article on development, been going back and
reading the parts of Thinking and Speech that you have been bring back to
our attention. I was certain that somone referred to Norris Minnick
with respect to the translation of soznanie and osoznanie. But I cannot find
it. I googled soznanie osoznanie and the first entry brought up something
I thought interesting, although I would point to some other aspects of the
russian terms and their translation. Can anyone point me to the note where
this was brought up (which doesn't google search on lchc find it??) or
assure me it is a figment of my imagination (which is a whole different trip
when
we get into Russian!)
mike
---------------
I would like to attract attention to a similar problem. In Russian the
words <consciousness>, <awareness>, <knowledge>, <familiar>,
<symbol/sign> have a common root. For example, the word
<consciousness> sounds in Russian as <soznanie>; the word <awareness>
- as
<osoznanie>;
the word <knowledge> - as <znanie>; the word <familiar> - as
<znakomiy>; the word <symbol/sign> - as <znak>. The Russian word
<soznanie> (consciousness)
literally means <the incorporated, integrated, generalized personal
knowledge>, likewise the other words with the prefix <so->, e.g.: the
word <sovokupnost>
(totality); the word <soberat> (to assemble); the word <sozdavat> (to
construct).
Question for Russian experts: doesn't the prefix, so, indicate
something like co as in cooperate? Doesn't Vygotsky, (where exactly)
say that consciousness requires
at least two people?
The similar situation is in Ukrainian (which has a common predecessor
with Sanskrit):
the word <consciousness> sounds as <svidomist>; the word <awareness> -
as <usvidomlennia>; the word <experience> - as <dosvid>; the word <to
know> - as <vidaty>
(confer <vedanta> in Sanskrit) or <znati>; the word
<information/news> - as <vidomosti>. Here we have a common root <vid>
which may be regarded as some absolute
feature of cognitive activity. The <vid> dissociates into the
elements like <svidomist>, <usvidomlennia>, <dosvid>, etc. The reverse
cognitive action to
<dissociation> is <integration/association>. The integration over the
dissociated elements can be fulfilled easily and naturally.
So, I may conclude that the integrative tendencies of thinking are
rooted in the very Eastern languages, and that those tendencies are a
distinctive feature of Eastern mentality
. But Western mentality presumes the separation/decomposition of the
object investigated into small parts, and the smaller, the more
separated - the better (the decomposed elements,
unlike dissociated ones, cannot be easily integrated). So, in English
we have words <consciousness>, <awareness>, <experience>, <knowledge>,
<information> as having no common roots.
They are decomposed elements that cannot be easily integrated. That
is why I state that English language is not good for consciousness
studies.
Therefore I would much like to know what are the Chinese equivalences
of the words mentioned above and whether they have a common root too.
Kindly,
Serge Patlavskiy
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