I was forwarded an article from the NY Times on language and perception, and how language shapes the way we think about things. Although this debate is all but dead in modern thinking, this article does a good job explaining how language, naming, and the classifying of objects into name-labeled categories (as opposed to attribute-driven categories) creates inherent biases and preferences in the way we perceive things.
Seems sort of obvious now, but really, this is a big deal. What this article does not talk about (much) is the actual physical nature of speech and internal language and how it connects to thought. The way we can connect words in our head and send them to our mouths, memory, or fingertips is a very fine trick made possible by the storage of letters and phonemes (mouth-shape sounds) as shaped-based neural arrays. Say "pull" in you head and you can actually feel the roundness of the "p" and the slow hanging ledge of the "l" at the end. These are physical neural events, events which stall or misfire in the case of stuttering or that inability to recall a certain word.
Millions of years of evolution, the magic of flight and feathers, and building nests - nevermind all that cause it condenses into 'a bird'. Kill the magic, give it a name. There's birds everywhere, nothing special, get on with your life and move along now. Indeed, the lingo is sorely lacking in that it doth not attempt to ascribe any meaning to the labels it creates.
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