topic for your discussion
i was thinking as i drove home tonight about language and how people come to have a particular repertoire of words and phrases and it's as identifiable to them as say... the clothes they wear or more perhaps.. maybe like your voice itself. so anyway, the point: does your language inform your personality or does your personality inform your language? if you think about the words used when you were small and acquiring your first language, your parents' influence could be very potent in the development of your vocabulary and how you use it. unless you believe that the personality came first, and that defines how you acquire and add your style to the way you speak. i'm sure you will have many interesting thoughts, and i'd like to read them. so post.
3 Comments:
whoa, this is freaky how much I was thinking about this very subject and that you were as well...freaky...
I suspect that language informs your personality AND your personality informs language. Going both ways.
I think this is the case because I know there's a lot of ways I communicate that come straight from my family, which would be from direct exposure to language, but then there's the ways in which we choose to defy that in a sense and create our own voice.
I mean, sometime around 11 to 13, we start intentionally talking in an entirely different way, albeit influenced by peers etc, but then eventually we go through a process of weeding through the collection of old ways of communicating and the collection of new ways of communicating to come up with our own voice.
Then again, the more I listen to Radio Lab, the more I'm convinced we really have no choice in this at all and our wacky brain just pushes us one way or the other... but that just makes me cynical, and a little confused.
I just had an interesting actorly thought about this...
All we get as actors is based in language. So all the choices we make come from the constructive choices of words the playwright put down. But we often use them as clues in. Like working a maze backwards. "The character says this, which means he feels this way about X" kind of thoughts.
That's all I think.
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