Random thought on language

Since my reading on the language structure of Hopi and meeting with Prof. Cheung, I started to think about the PI again, with the focus on “pain”. Wittgenstein asked us to question the deep grammar between “I have a pain” with “I have a pen”. As I pointed out in my term paper, they are not identical.

Now I want try to contrast it with the “Time” concept between Indo-European language with Hopi. We talk about today, yesterday in our language. To our perception, today and yesterday are two entities so we can talk about identity, that “tomorrow is another day”. In Hopi, there is no such “Time”, all they have is a duration, to my understanding, it is like the concept of spacetime interval. All you can speak of in Hopi is the causation between A and B, as well as the duration of this event AB. There is simply no such “container of, a fictional entity, time”.

Author asked us to imagine the case of collective nouns, like milk. We use “container” to grasp a portion of this collective noun. Similarly, our language try to capture a portion of our life, like the life between each sunrise. Therefore we have a container, but of what? This leads us to invent a fictional entity called “Time”. This is an analogy.

Back to the topic, pain. Could it be a similar case like “Time” in our language? We would like to describe the current suffering, we therefore have a “container”, but again, of what? We have to invent a fictional entity, that we can possess and distinguish from universal, in this case, it is pain.