I'm taking a Word Nerd class this semester, taught by a professor (Stephanie Haas) who's a closet linguist like me. The official title is "Information Systems and Services," but the actual title should be "Linguistics and Cognitive Science Theory for Information Scientists 101". For the last few days, the discussion has centered around words and concepts -- more specifically, the intersection between the two.
A fellow classmate provided an interesting explanation of Turkish kinship terms, where there are 4 words for 2 in English: they say "mother's sister, mother's brother, father's sister, father's brother," and we say "aunt and uncle". I could intellectually grasp what he was talking about, but that it wasn't a conceptual set that I intuitively undersood or internalized.
So which one is what we're actually talking about when we say that one "has a concept" of something? I think it's the latter. I mentioned the "They Have a Word For It" list, and how I sometimes wished I lived the kind of life where the concepts on the list were central to my view of the world. I think being able to describe or understand something in a language is not the same as having a concept of it. "Concept", to me, implies basicness. Table. Husband. Justice. Plausible Deniability.
Another classmate pointed out that this is what makes poets great: the ability to sense an underlying, collectively known concept and name it in a way that everyone understands but might never have thought of.
And Stephanie asked whether speakers of a language can have concepts for which there are no words, like the feeling you get when you walk home through a 40-degree rain, and enter the house, and notice that you remembered to put the lasagna in the oven before you left. The smell of rich spices, the warmth after being wet, that sense of comfort. You know, that ______. Is that a concept?
Posted on February 22, 2002 at 01:05 PM
I think I would like to take a Word Nerd class...especially if that was the title.
Says Brad Lauster
22 Feb 2002 at 01:59 PM
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