Writing, Language
& Thought
Jason Godesky
Mensa Annual Gathering
Pittsburgh, PA
4 July 2009

A Book has
chapters, made up of
paragraphs, each with a number of
sentences that contain a number of
words, each formed from a series of letters.

...all observers are not led by the same
physical evidence to the same picture of
the universe, unless their linguistic
backgrounds are similar, or can in some
way be calibrated.
Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1940

coyote
n. A member of the species Canis latrans.

talêpês
v. A pattern of movement or behavior.

tree

Oak Tree, Bon Tempe lake
Franco Folini

Kpelle girl, Kpaiyea, Liberia, 1968
John Atherton

Hasan Ahmad

Ed Fella, A Commercial Art Alphabet
Karen Horton

I Like Music
Rossina Bossio Bossa

Star Trek:The Next Generation
Episode #102, “Darmok”
September 30, 1991
Property of Paramount Studios.

For all music, viewed in this light, is on its
way to becoming speech, and there is no
Rubicon beyond which we can say that it
is unequivocally one thing rather than the
other.
Tim Ingold, 2000

Of course, other beings manifest that
consciousness in their literature of
tracks, chirrups, and loon calls.
Sheridan & Longboat, 2006

To shut ourselves off from these other
voices ... is to rob our own senses of
their integrity, and to rob our minds of
their coherence. We are human only in
contact and conviviality with what is not
human.
David Abram, 1997

Questions?

Thank you!

Bibliography
Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world.Vintage.
Gladwell, M. (2007). None of the above. The New Yorker. December 17, 2007.
Goody, J. & Watt, I. (1968). The consequences of literacy. In Goody, J. Literacy in traditional societies (pp. 27-68). Cambridge University Press.
Hall, E. (1992). Beyond culture. Peter Smith Publisher.
Hoffer, P. (2005). Sensory worlds in early America. The John Hopkins University Press.
Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
Mann, C. (2005). Founding sachems. New York Times, July 4, 2005.
Ong, W. (1988). Orality and literacy:Technologizing the word. Routledge.
Sheridan, J. & Longboat, D. (2006). The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. Space and Culture, 9:4 pp. 365-381.
Scheub, H. (1998). Story. University of Wisconsin Press.
Weatherford, J. (1994). Savages and civilization:Who will survive? Crown.

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