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Originally Posted by Hamster
That's a really interesting question Guy. Kudos for bringing it up.
I tend to think that words help us to define, qualify, categorize, organize, and otherwise make sense of the enourmous range of sensory inputs we are bombarded with.
I further think that when we have no words to describe an experience, though the experience may well be profound, it unfortunately is also difficult to make sense of, and thus the experience loses some of it's meaning.
In this way, I think that the greater the complexity of an individual's language the greater the complexity of meaning can be found in his or her experiences.
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Very interesting point, Hamster. This perhaps is the key to understanding Thai culture? Analysis, subconscious or otherwise, of personal experience is not as "thorough" as it is in the Western (bad term, but I mean to refer to native speakers of Indo-European languages) mind, due to a lack of linguistic "infrastructure" to cope with such analysis. If certain concepts do not exist linguistically, then they probably do not exist culturally.
I hasten to add, I am merely concluding this based on my own use of logic, rather than on any concrete research into the matter!