When they’d entered the inn Fergus hadn’t paid any attention to its name, not thinking that it mattered as he knew which one it was on the street of similar businesses and how to get back to the keep. It certainly wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, a smoke filled room with dirty rushes on the floor and numerous patrons in varying states of drunkenness. The drink wasn’t anything out of the ordinary either, which Fergus was grateful for even if it did mean that it was heavily watered down ale with a bad aftertaste. He’d had enough of fine wines and very potent brews for now.

It was almost painfully obvious that Fergus didn’t know the small group of nobles he’d entered with that well. They seemed to be regulars while he didn’t know anyone here, completely comfortable in the dark room and occasionally exchanging banter with the prettier girls or other men as he stayed awkwardly silent. While sitting at the same table as them Fergus had managed to position himself at the end of it so that there was a small gap between him and the nearest man, with his body angled slightly away from them. Even though he was looking at them and paying attention to their conversation, only occasionally asking a question or responding to one, the casual observer could probably tell that he wasn’t that attached to them. In fact he’d invited himself along as they were leaving the court buildings for the town, not feeling up to spending another evening with the majority of the courtiers in the hall and finding the prospect of spending the evening on his own undesirable. Even if the lords had initially been taken aback by his company and wary of his presence they could hardly tell him to go away.

They were still a little tense when they remembered that he was there and tried talking to him, although it didn’t happen often. Caught up in enjoying the evening it was apparently easy to forget the silent addition, especially when he hardly communicated with them and seemed to be happy just observing their surroundings and listening to them and the other drinkers.

From the conversation going on between the men Fergus was beginning to get the impression that most of them had been fostered together somewhere, or if not together then at neighbouring households that had been close enough for them to have spent time together quite frequently. They were having an animated discussion about some arms master with a distinctive moustache Fergus had never heard of, and his attention soon began to stray away from the table and around the room.

The was something wrong with Jessie. She just hadn't been feeling like herself lately. She had been this way ever since the stranger approached her brother John in Lawley that night. It wasn't unusual but something didn't sit quite right with her about it. It could just be that she was jealous. John was hers. They were partners and this new guy wanted to mess things up. She had left Lawley and traveled to Thiasa Keep all by herself in order to spite him. She knew he would be worried. She would let him worry for a few days before coming back. he deserved that much.

She had spent the last two nights in this decrepit inn. This was the third night in a row here. So far, she hadn't gotten a single man or woman in her bed. It wasn't because no one thought her pretty or that no one approached her. It was because she just hadn't been in the mood for some reason. The same people had entered the bar each night. They all knew that she wasn't up to doing anything with them by now. But she had to do something to get out of her rut. She sighed and drummed her fingers on the wood of her chair.

There was a group of guys that had entered the past two nights in a row now. They weren't the usual drink commoners she usually saw in inns like this and they never stayed the night. They were nobles. Jessie knew that she could have gotten a good amount of money from them but something made her hold off. Of course now they thought she wasn't what she was and had turned to other women. But tonight was different. Tonight the men entered with another man in tow.

The man looked different. She could tell that he wasn't quite comfortable here. He was definitely better looking than the rest of them. She could also tell that he didn't really know the men around him. He didn't laugh at their jokes or jump into their conversations. She wondered if she could take advantage of this. He didn't know who she was or what she'd been doing for the past two days. She decided to try her luck. The young woman walked up behind him and crouched so her head was next to his.

"You don't look like you're having much fun here." she noted.

A sudden hoot of laughter beside him pulled Fergus away from his musing on whether the royal we had its origins in a ‘me and this army’ context, as in ‘if you do not agree to surrender quietly we, myself and my army, will be forced to invade’, and he turned his face back towards his companions, only to find that the conversation had already moved on. It had probably been a private joke that he wouldn’t have understood if he’d heard it anyway, he decided, considering the topic when he’d last been paying attention.

As the talk moved on he looked away, down into the ale mug with the expression of someone who had other things on their mind besides looking for dead creatures in the brew. But before he became lost in thought again, a body came up behind his and spoke near his ear. Starting in surprise he made a ‘huh’ noise, twisting his neck and back to get a look at the person. Girl. Woman? She was bent over so it was hard to tell how tall she’d be, but she didn’t look that old in the dim light. Quite pretty with a fresh face and good skin. Despite her age her presence over his shoulder – in fact in the inn at all – suggested that she was here in a professional capacity and likely had some experience.

Fergus had never been the most sociable of people. Even in a crowded room like this one he somehow managed to avoid talking to people. So suddenly having a young whore paying attention to him when for the best part of the past hour he’d been sitting in silence without talking caused a momentary brain freeze. The outwards expression of this was a completely blank look aimed just to the right of Jessie’s face. As his thought process began to slowly resurrect itself his expression became embarrassed, blood tingeing his cheeks a slightly darker shade as he glanced at the party he’d entered with. Preoccupied with some sort of drinking game they hadn’t actually noticed Jessie’s presence yet.

Clearing his throat he looked back to the girl, the barest hint of a shy smile hanging around his mouth. “My apologies, miss, it’s been a long day.” It was currently looking to be a long night as well, which wasn’t very promising for tomorrow morning. Another roar of laughter from the other men at the table had him looking back at them in time to see someone drop what looked like half a mug of ale down their clothes. “Some of us aren’t meant to lead entertaining lives, I fear.” His arched eyebrow indicated that these men he was with didn’t fall into the category, while he felt that he did.

Language and Thought

by Dan Slobin of the University of California, Berkeley No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways. There is great disagreement, however, about the proposition that each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers. On the one hand, anyone who has learned more than one language is struck by the many ways in which languages differ from one another. But on the other hand, we expect human beings everywhere to have similar ways of experiencing the world. (world of warcraft power leveling)

Comparisons of different languages can lead one to pay attention to 'universals'--the ways in which all languages are similar, and to 'particulars' --the ways in which each individual language, or type of language, is special, even unique. Linguists and other social scientists interested in universals have formulated theories to describe and explain human language and human language behavior in general terms as species-specific capacities of human beings. However, the idea that different languages may influence thinking in different ways has been present in many cultures and has given rise to many philosophical treatises. Because it is so difficult to pin down effects of a particular language on a particular thought pattern, this issue remains unresolved. It comes in and out of fashion and often evokes considerable energy in efforts to support or refute it. aion gold

Relativity and Determinism

There are two problems to confront in this arena: linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism. Relativity is easy to demonstrate. In order to speak any language, you have to pay attention to the meanings that are grammatically marked in that language. For example, in English it is necessary to mark the verb to indicate the time of occurrence of an event you are speaking about: It's raining; It rained; and so forth. In Turkish, however, it is impossible to simply say, 'It rained last night'. This language, like many American Indian languages, has more than one past tense, depending on one's source of knowledge of the event. In Turkish, there are two past tenses--one to report direct experience and the other to report events that you know about only by inference or hearsay. Thus, if you were out in the rain last night, you will say, 'It rained last night' using the past-tense form that indicates that you were a witness to the rain; but if you wake up in the morning and see the wet street and garden, you are obliged to use the other past-tense form--the one that indicates that you were not a witness to the rain itself. maple story mesos

Differences of this sort have fascinated linguists and anthropologists for centuries. They have reported hundreds of facts about 'exotic' languages, such as verbs that are marked or chosen according to the shape of an object that is being handled (Navajo) or for the relative ages of speaker and hearer (Korean). Such facts are grist for the mill of linguistic relativity. And, indeed, they can be found quite readily in 'nonexotic' languages as well. To cite a fact about English that is well known to linguists: It is not appropriate to say Richard Nixon has worked in Washington, but it is perfectly OK to say Gerald Ford has worked in Washington. Why? English restricts the present perfect tense ('has worked') to assertions about people who are alive. Exotic!

Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that such differences between languages influence the ways people think--perhaps the ways in which whole cultures are organized. Among the strongest statements of this position are those by Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half of this century--hence the label, 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', for the theory of linguistic relativity and determinism. Whorf proposed: 'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way--an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language' (Whorf, 1940; in Carroll, 1956, pp. 213-4). And, in the words of Sapir: 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' (Sapir, 1929; in Manlbaum, 1958, p. 162). wow gold

Investigating Language and Thought

How can such bold claims be substantiated beyond examination of individual languages themselves? If one takes the hypothesis seriously, it should be possible to show that Turks are more sensitive to evidence than are Americans, but that Americans are more aware of death than Turks. Clearly, the hypothesis cannot be supported on so grand a level. Rather, experimental psychologists and cognitive anthropologists have sought to find small differences, on controlled tasks, between speakers of various languages. Maybe Navajos are somewhat more sensitive to shapes of objects, for example.

The results have been mixed. In most cases, human thought and action are overdetermined by an array of causes, so the structure of language may not play a central causal role. Linguistic determinism can best be demonstrated in situations in which language is the principal means of drawing people's attention to a particular aspect of experience. For example, if you regularly speak a language in which you must pick a form of second-person address (you) that marks your social relationship to your interlocutor--such as Spanish tu ('you' for friends and family and for those socially subordinate) vs. usted ('you' for those socially above in status or for those with whom you have no close connection) or French tu versus vous--you must categorize every person you talk to in terms of the relevant social dimensions. (As a thought experiment of linguistic determinism, think of the categorizations of social relationships that would have to be made if Spanish became the common language of the United States.)

world of warcraft power leveling,Going beyond thought experiments, some of the most convincing research demonstrating some degree of linguistic determinism is being conducted under the direction of Stephen C. Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Levinson and his collaborators distinguish between languages that describe spatial relations in terms of the body (like English 'right/left', 'front/back') and those that orient to fixed points in the environment (like 'north/south/east/west' in some aboriginal Australian languages). In a language of the second type one would refer, for example, to 'your north shoulder' or 'the bottle at the west end of the table'; in narrating a past event, one would have to remember how the actions related to the compass points. Thus, in order to speak this type of language, you always have to know where you are with respect to the compass points, whether you are speaking or not. And Levinson's group have shown, in extensive cross-linguistic and cross-cultur studies, that this is, in fact, the case.

Much more research needs to be done, but it is not likely that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis will be supported in the strong form quoted above. For one, language is only one factor that influences cognition and behavior. For another, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were really true, second language learning and translation would be far harder than they are. However, because language is so pervasive--and because we must always make cognitive decisions while speaking--weaker versions of the hypothesis will continue to attract scientific attention. (For a lively debate on many of these issues, with much new evidence from several fields, read Gumperz and Levinson 1996.)

Suggested Readings

Gumperz, J. J., and Levinson, S. C. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lucy, John A. 1992. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. ambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. world of warcraft gold
Sapir, E. 1929. "The status of linguistics as a science". Language 5. 207-14. Reprinted in The selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality, ed. by D. G. Mandelbaum, 160-6. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whorf, B. L. 1940. "Science and linguistics". Technology Review 42: 227-31, 247-8. Reprinted in Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. by J. B. Carroll, 207-19. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of MIT/New York: Wiley. 1956.