思绪

Just keep down what is showing on in my mind.

And once again, it's awful that my English has become this bad!

1. Language and logics

Some linguists believe that people in the world, no matter what languages they speak, have the same logic. In another word, based on the terms by the famous Chomsky, the deep structure is the same or at least similar, while only the surface structures differ. However, I always wonder whether it is true or not. If the logic is the same, why are there still so many misunderstandings produced? On the other hand, if it's not the same, why could two people that speak simply no common words can still understand each other with gestures, facial expressions, and so on so force?

The idea in my mind, again, goes on with how people communicate and what's going on in the process of communicating. I assume that there are six elements concerned in the procedure, which are detailed in the following diagram:

1. Two parties: The speaker and the hearer. 

This is not hard to understand, in any form of communication, there are these two parties, only that they are given with different names, such as the receiver and the sender or whatever else.

2. Knowledges of the speaker

According to my understanding, there should be two parts: Knowledges about the speaker himself and knowledges about the hearer. So here, I have to mention at first that I ignore here the saying of objective views and subjective views and design the model based on cognitive learning process, which is that people learn to know by categorizing. So everything here is human activity. 

Back to the topic. I believe in this world, if we neglect the so-called objective facts, people usually has two sorts of knowledges about the beings: (1) What he knows about himself, i.e. who he thinks he is; (2) what he knows about others, i.e. who he thinks others are. In the case of communication, to be more specific, these knowledges are sorted out as: (1) knowledges about himself, and (2) knowledges about the hearer. 

2.1. Knowledges about himself

As far as the speakers are concerned here, and due to the fact that people do everything "intentionally" (人类活动是有意识、有目的的行为。) and it is the same with communication, these knowledges usually deal with what the speaker already learns (general background--which can be really broad, from the experiences of being school to every single daily activity, that can all be included) and what the speaker wants to say or express (in another word, what he wants the hearer to know, the information he wants to deliver to the hearer.)

2.2. Knowledges about the hearer

For this part of knowledges of the speaker, it is based on the cooperative principle of Grice that each party would like the communication goes on smoothly not full of conflicts. Therefore, before the speaker speaks, I assume that he will usually make some judgement about the hearer, e.g. who the hearer is (the knowledge can be based on either physical appearance especially when two parties meet for the first time, or formal experiences with the person), why he is here, etc. In terms of these judgments or "knowledges about the hearer", the speaker might come into conclusion or at least has some rough idea about what the hearer wants to hear from him or what kind of information the hearer wants to acquire. And then, after a quick thought, the speaker speaks the words out.

3. Knowledges of the hearer

Similar to the knowledges of the speaker, I also divided the knowledges of the hearer into two parts: (1) knowledges about himself,  and (2) knowledges about the speaker.

3.1. Knowledges about himself

It is just the same as the speaker has some knowledge about himself, the hearer also has some knowledge about himself. Thus, we can save lots of our words here. In the specific case of communication, when two parties meet, based on his general background, the hearer would also have some idea about he wants to know before the speaker really talks.

3.2. Knowledges about the speaker

Similar but also a little different here is about knowledges about the speaker. Well, the judgmental process is rather the same. However, the procedures are more here, that based on the knowledges about the speaker, the hearer might at first have already got some thoughts about what the speaker is going to tell him--"what the speaker might tell me"; or after the speaker really talks, the hearer would try to understand the words by the speaker according to his knowledges about the speaker--"why the speaker is telling me this, what he wants me to know." 

Based on this model, it is not hard to figure out why sometimes even people are speaking the same language, they can still not understand each other. The point is whether what the speaker wants to tell the hearer equals what the hearer wants to know. To be more concrete, it depends on how much the knowledges about each other equals, as the lines in the diagram show. If the red line and the blue one can both be replaced with "=", then there would not be any misunderstanding expected. But the problem is always there, that people are flexible and change quickly, we don't have fixed mind all the time. So this "=" seems impossible to realize. Therefore, misunderstanding always exists, no matter whether two are speaking the same language or not.

当然了，这只是一个简单的图表，深入的话，远要更加复杂，比如context在这中间的影响，听者与言者必然也会有不完全相同的诠释，另外，每个人对语言的理解也完全不同，这就涉及Semantics和pragmatics，总体上对于一些事物、一些词语，人们有大体上相同的认知，譬如中国人大多数认为“红色代表喜庆”，但是一旦触及细节，由于各自的知识背景(教育背景、社会出身、经济地位等等)，就可能存在很大的分歧，有人会认为一个词是褒义，另一些人则可能认为是贬义，与此同时，性别在其中也可能起非常大的作用。

另外，我终于想明白我的两篇论文之间最大的区别，中英文问候语的比较研究，是一个平行研究，两个语言的使用者没有交集，而中式英语与英语问候语的比较研究是一个交叉研究，是建立在语言使用者交流的基础上。

2. 关于世界和世界们
在巴哈伊的儒禧课程学习里，我们涉及过这个问题，无论是词形上没有单复数区别的中文，还是有区别的英语、德语，人们的普遍理解是世界是一个不可数名词，因为世界就一个。可是在巴哈伊的许多著作中，世界都被赋予了复数形式，为什么？在宗教教义里，我们认为，人类有一个physical world, 还有一个spiritual world，所以，至少有两个世界。
而在关于人类的交流现状的困惑中，我想，还有另外一种理解，每个人(个体A)对自己有一种认识、理解、期待，这个一个世界，我们姑且称之为“自我世界”，而A周围所有的人，认识的、不认识的，喜欢他的、不喜欢他的，都对A有另外一些认识、理解和期待，这就构成了另一个世界，暂称为“他我世界”。这两个世界可以重合也可能在完全相反的两个方向上，窃以为，世界上芸芸众生，每个个体对A的认识、理解和期待都有不同之处，于是，就形成了世界们。这些不同的世界有时对任何世界都不产生任何影响，有时却对某些世界意义非凡，但无论如何，都不会有一个世界对所有的世界产生巨大的影响。

3. 关于专业人士
前一段时间因为签证的事情忙活了好一阵子，毫无结果，路遇一同事，说起她办工签的经历，很潇洒地甩了300欧给一律师，一星期就办好了。不禁感叹，人家这些收高费用的怕也有人家的道理。
在现在这样一个细分工的社会，我发现有两个极端，一种就像是《生活大爆炸》里的Sheldon一样，除了他那摊瓷器活儿，别人的金刚钻他是碰都不会碰的，精益求精，总也可以在自己的领域成为人才、顶尖；还有一种就像是我们这样的穷苦百姓，尤其是经济拮据的移民，总是舍不得花一分钱，于是大到法律法则，小到下水管道，全都自己代劳了～
孰好孰坏，我也说不清，不过就像是之前在卡巴论坛上讨论过的一样，现在的软件如此便宜，三年才199RMB，何必隔一两个星期就得花十几、二十分钟甚至更长时间来找一个盗版的KEY呢？和老公讨论起这个问题的时候，我很坚定地说，如果我在国内铁定也买软件了；老公则不然～还是观念不同吧，世人皆知，“时间就是金钱”，如何做这个投资，恐怕更需要些实力，运气？我就不知道了～