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Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>
haywire.csuhayward.edu>Third International Albuquerque Science Dialogue: July 6-8. 2001 on the Language of Spirituality and the Spirits of Languages Join us in early July as intellectual and spiritual leaders from Turtle Island and Down Under traditions, quantum physics, linguistics, cosmology, and other disciplines gather in Albuquerque, NM, to dialogue over three days in the tradition of David Bohm. This year, in a continuation of the historic Bohmian Science Dialogues, we will dialogue about our continuing Southern Circle focus, The Language of Spirituality, with a sub-focus on The Spirits of Languages: Can different languages, which we may now see as complex fields that speakers are inside of and are also inside of speakers, be said to have different "personalities" in the way they create a "world" and even "cosmos" for their speakers -- creating, in Sakej Henderson's term, different langscapes of reality? This idea is 3-400 years old in Western thought (a favorite topic of linguistics founder W. von Humboldt) and is even applicable today to mathematical and programming languages, each presenting a different proscribed reality to its users, within which they think. Should this be so, as we will discuss, then does each language to some non-trivial degree shape the way you think while using that language? When we think in English about something, are we constrained in how we CAN think? Are other avenues (such as talking all day without using noun-phrases, or pictures in the head) thus closed off to us that can be overcome only by shifting to thinking in another language? Are all languages the same, just different labels for the same things, or does each carve up or even construct a reality for its users in some deeper, less obvious and more profound way? Current indigenous evidence points to whole Native American language families, such as Algonkian, comprised of not pictures-in-the-head languages like we're used to but instead dynamic primes of process and relationship which evoke somatic meanings the way Sign does, and which fit anciently into an integrated system of sound, sign, and (written) symbol. The Slobinian "thinking for speaking" for Algonkian languages must thus be drastically different than for WIE languages such as English (though this claims nothing about other kinds of thinking). Agreeing to attend this Dialogue as Inner Circle participants are: Leroy Little Bear (Moderator: Blackfoot, educator/lawyer) and Amethyst First Rider (Blackfoot, educator), Sakej Youngblood Henderson (Cheyenne/Chickasaw, educator/lawyer) and Marie Battiste (Mi'kmaw, educator), David Begay (Dine', educator) and Nancy Maryboy (Cherokee/Dine', educator), Lloyd and Joyce Pinkham (WA River People, educators), Greg Cajete (Tewa, author), Joseph Rael (Tiwa, author), Stan Knowlton (Blackfoot, educator), Roberto Gonzales-Plaza (Brazil, educator) Polly Walker (Cherokee, educator), Norm Sheehan (Waradjuri, Tasmania, educator), Mary Graham (Australian aboriginal elder), Brian Josephson (Nobel Laureate physicist), John Erskine (former D.O.E. physicist/administrator), Fred Alan Wolf (physicist/author), Peter Gold (author), Berney Williams (educator), Melanie Daily (Confucius expert), Matthew Bronson (linguist/educator), and Dan Moonhawk Alford (Cherokee/Osage linguist/educator). See < http://www.seedopenu.org > for details and registration. You may email me with questions: moonhawkMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue