Dear Organlearners,
Greetings to all of you.
We often take the obvious for granted. One such a thing is language in our
organisations. But take the obvious away and see what is left over!
Learning depends on all five sense organs of the learner. Seeing and
hearing play the major role. Think how difficult is for a deaf or blind
person to learn. These sense organs are activated by organised signals
coming from sources. These sources can be distinguished in two categories
-- those sources in which humans played no role in the generation of the
signals and those in which humans did play some or other role.
Giving name to these two sources is not straight forward. We usually refer
to those in which humans did play some or other role as information
sources. (The organised signals by their very organisation is called
information.) This word means that organised signals from these sources
ought to have a "form"ing effect "in"side us. But the same applies to
sources in which humans played no role. Consequently we might distinguish
between these two sources as cultural and natural information sources.
The oldest and still most general kind of cultural information is the
spoken language which is transmitted by sound signals and detected by the
sense of hearing. We have no direct evidence to claim that it is the
oldest kind of cultural information. This claim is based on the tudy of
the evolution of languages in philology. The thousands of present day
languages can be classified in about a dozen families. For some of these
families (in their older form) we have written fragments which go as far
back as five millennia ago. These fragments show a much reduced family of
languages in those days, almost as if dialects of a single proto-language.
The "proto" means that many features of the language is known only by
guess work based on rules of thumb. With a few exceptions even these
proto-languages seems to have been derived from one even earlier
archeo-language.
Perhaps musical expressions (which also relies on the sense of hearing)
made by singing and vibrating instruments like drums, strings and flutes
followed soon afterwards. But written language relying on seeing followed
much later. Actually, there is sufficient archeological evidence that
painting preceded writing. Furthermore, the most ancient letters of
writing suggest a simplified painting stressing only its essential feature
-- the first attempts at abstraction. Mathematical expressions also
relying on seeing is another kind of cultural information depending on
seeing. In terms of the previous kinds it is a relatively recent
development.
The point which I want to make is that the spoken language, being used the
most general of all kinds of cultural information as well as also being
the oldest among them, gives it a unique importance. The following is how
it is for me. When I think, it is almost always in terms of a language,
usually spoken (natural), but sometimes also mathematical or chemical, but
then visual. When I try to think without a language, I end up thinking
subconsciously. But when I dream, it is seldom in terms of language. It is
usually in terms of images as those derived from my five sense organs when
awake. I would like to hear how it is for you fellow learners.
Exploring a desert alone, after several days my thinking in language
becomes like dreaming in images. Sometimes I took others along with me to
explore a desert. After several days they become silent too. This usually
upsets them because they do not observe what is happening to them. I have
only three desert friends who can live up to this transformation in
thinking.
I must have been thinking in terms of my mother tongue Afrikaans since
early childhood because I knew no other language. At primary school I also
began to learn English. Here I suffered because in my speaking and
writing, although using English words, I arranged and spelled them in my
Afrikaans way of thinking. At secondary school I began to learn, apart
from Afrikaans and English, also German, Latin and Sotho, a Bantu
language. Again my thinking in Afrikaans prevented me to use these
languages fluently. Only when I met a girl friend who spoke German at
home, I began to think somewhat in German.
At university my first year was almost a disaster and the second year
would have been a disaster. Out text books were written in English whereas
our notes were in Afrikaans because the lectures were given in Afrikaans.
I had to force myself to think in English to understand the text books as
well as my notes. I began with this in my second year and it saved me. It
is also from this year that I have learned to use an Afrikaans-English
dictionary to find the meaning of every new English word which I
encountered in my studies.
During my five years at university and eight years afterwards in the town
where it is situated and I worked, I spoke almost always Afrikaans.
Thinking in English did not come natural to me because I seldom heard
English (except in movies) and even less had to speak it. When I moved to
Pretoria, I heard much more English. But I still spoke and wrote almost
always in Afrikaans and thus thought in terms of Afrikaans.
Since the middle eighties I began to write mostly in English. This was
very difficult because my thinking in Afrikaans prevented me formulating
fluently sentences in English. I then began to force myself deliberately
to think in English. The first few years I often found that my thinking
became slower and sometimes even stopped when I did it in English. I was
already aware of Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowing and had some
vivid experiences of it when thinking in Afrikaans. But somehow this
slowing down and faltering of my thinking in English cautioned me that it
was not merely a case of articulating tacit knowing. I could articulate
these very faltering thoughts fluently in Afrikaans so that they were not
really tacit thoughts.
I began to ponder on the indivisible relationship between thinking and
speaking, i.e., between knowledge and language. Sometimes I even explored
the wild idea that knowledge and language are one and the same thing. But
every time I ended up at the impenetrable contradiction that I can
formulate my knowledge in English or Afrikaans. Should I do it in
Afrikaans, it would be meaningless to someone not knowing Afrikaans. Thus,
being able to speak, read and write a language is part of knowledge. But
to think in that language is something clearly different since thinking is
not part of language. What is this difference?
I must identify my thinking in Afrikaans or English more categorically.
When I think, I always "hear" my thoughts in my own voice as if I am
speaking aloud. At first it happened only in Afrikaans, but now it can
happen also in English. Twenty five years ago I needed to learn Spanish.
People who speak Spanish are as rare as chicken teeth in South Africa. I
had to translate a letter addressed in Spanish to me. I bought myself a
Spanish-English dictionary and a Spanish grammar book. Like a
mathematician, hearing no sounds but seeing clusters of symbols undergoing
rules I translated the letter into English. It took me three months.
I began to develop a desire to learn Spanish. I knew I had to pronounce
the words aloud in order to hear them. So I used the dictionary with its
phonetic symbols to pronounce the words aloud. After a while I could hear
them in my head without speaking them aloud. I also became fairly
competent in translating Spanish text into English. Suddenly I had the
opportunity to visit South America. I was confident that I would be able
to converse in Spanish. When I arrived there, all my theoretical knowledge
of Spanish flew out of my head. What they spoke and what I heard in my
head were vastly different. I recognised only a few words and I could
think of even less when trying to express myself. Only after four weeks
listening to spoken Spanish I found my bearings again, hearing my own
thinking in Spanish.
Some say that my thinking in Afrikaans is the mother tongue effect. A few
others who know NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) say that it is clear
evidence that my thoughts are programmed by language. I think that it has
not much to do with the traditional mother tongue effect or NLP. Although
the effect is first manifested in the mother tongue, it goes beyond the
mother tongue when becoming bilingual. Furthermore, when I think in
English, I have to think differently than when I think in Afrikaans.
Should I have thought in English the same way as in Afrikaans and then
expressed myself, English people would not have understood me. Thus I have
to think in English to harmonise any organisational learning with my
individual learning.
I am today in a position to think in Afrikaans while reading, writing or
speaking, for example, German or Greek. But I am also able to do the same
for German or Greek while thinking in English rather than Afrikaans. Again
I experience the typical difficulties in formulating fluently German or
Greek because I cannot think fluently in them. So what is going on here?
The only explanation which I can give, sound enough for me, is in terms of
chemistry. It involves the concept of a catalyst. A catalyst is a compound
participating in a reaction. Without it the reaction will not happen. But
unlike the reagents which are converted into products and thus get used
up, the catalyst is not consumed itself. A catalyst adheres to only one
rule -- to lower the free energy ridge between two other compounds which
prevented them to react -- to bridge the rift in their entropy landscape.
It provides for fruitfulness through the associativity pattern of
wholeness. It is usually far more complex than the compounds which it has
to catalyse. Catalysts play a vital role in life. For example, much of the
biochemistry in our bodies would have been impossible were it not for
catalysts (hormones and enzymes).
Allow me to explain the thinking in language as follows with the concept
of "onlighting".
There is a light shining within me. It lightens up the "world-inside-me".
It is the light of knowing in language -- formal knowledge. I use this
light to act mentally in the "world-inside-me" and act materially in the
"world-outside-me". The outcomes of such acts are invariably the change in
organisation of a system.
This first flicker of this light was switch on originally by my mother and
father who had organised themselves into a family. When I took something,
they told me the Afrikaans word associated with the thing. When I did
something, they told me the Afrikaans word which matched with the doing. I
was not aware they did it, by I was extremely aware of doing the same for
our children. My parents were the first to teach me thinking in language.
They learnt it from their parents in a similar manner. This seems to have
gone back as far as the first family of talking humans.
By interacting through my five senses with the "world-outside-me", this
shining light in me gets its fuel. It is called individual learning which
results in tacit knowledge as the fuel. This fuel is then converted into
the shining light by language as the catalysis. I prefer to call this
catalytic conversion by "onlighting".
What about Polanyi's concept of tacit knowing? Sometimes my thinking in
language, hearing its sounds in my head without involving my ears, comes
to a point where the language fails to accompany my thinking. It is as if
I become mentally deaf at that point. I cannot go on thinking unless I
began to think about the language itself. What is the word at that point
which I need to hear in my thinking? Finding a word which already has the
desired meaning to other people is a difficult task. I begin to search in
my memory using various techniques like association, similarity and
opposite. If that does not help, then I have to search the word in a
dictionary in the same manner.
What strikes me as extraordinary is that by hearing the language as I
think, I am providing in my thinking for all other speakers of that
language. This onlighting of my thoughts enables me to participate in any
organisation with other speakers of the language. It enables me to match
my own individual learning with any subsequent organisational learning.
Language which has to serve as communication vehicle between us to share
our thoughts, act in advance as catalyst in each individual's thinking to
enable such communication. Through the years it became clear to me that
this catalysis value of a language is just as important as its
communication value.
Meanwhile it also became clear to me that those who want to manage any
organisation as information driven rather than as knowledge driven, are
ignorant to the catalysis value of a language. Thus they stick to Rote
Mental Behaviour (RMB). Whenever two or more languages are involved in
that organisation, the stress on one language to communicate in favour of
RMB impairs the catalysis value of the other one for those who think in
it. When these disadvantaged persons want to reclaim their mental
authenticity, they are judged to be unfit to the organisation. This
language imperialism together with RMB are responsible for many a conflict
in multilingual organisations.
People can onlight me as I can onlight them. When we do it together, it is
called organisational learning. We need a common language to do it because
the language is doing the onlighting! I am onlighting you fellow learners
right now by writing in English. English as communication vehicle is also
the catalyst which will convert your own fuel of tacit knowledge into a
shining light. But my writing will exclude all who think in Afrikaans.
Let me try to illustrate conversely how I will exclude you who think
in English. Here is a sentence in Afrikaans with the English word in
brackets behind each Afrikaans word:
Wanneer (when) ek (I) dit (it) in (in) Afrikaans doen (do), sal (will)
dit (it) Engelse (English speaking) mense (people) uitsluit (exclude).
My thinking in Afrikaans had the pattern
"When I it in Afrikaans do, will it English speaking people exclude".
Can you imagine how different it is to think in Afrikaans or English?
Also bear in mind that Afrikaans and English share the common
parent Saxon= "Nederduits". It is the fact that English emerged on
English soil and that Afrikaans emerged on African soil which causes
the vast difference in thinking in language, English or Afrikaans. The
cultural interactions in England were far different from those in
South Africa.
Monolingual nations have it easy in organisational learning. Bilingual
nations do not have it so easy. Organisational learning in multilingual
nations is definitely difficult. Impose language imperialism as well as
RMB and many peoples are going to suffer while conflicts will abound.
Although monolingual nations have it easy in organisational learning,
individual learning may suffer severely in them. It happens in individuals
exactly where their tacit knowing as fuel has to be converted into light
which gets subsequently committed to information. The less the whole of
both the vocabulary prowess as well as grammar fluency of a person, the
less the power of this whole acting as the catalyst.
There are many ways to improve this "personal whole of vocabulary prowess
as well as grammar fluency"="personal language"(?). But the one which I
myself prefer and enjoy most, is the open dialogue. It is a pity for me
that in cyberspace we have to do it be reading and writing. Speaking and
hearing is for me much closer to what is going on in my mind -- thoughts
heard without ears, having emerged by "personal language" as catalyst --
onlighting.
The Afrikaans word for information is "inligting" ("in-lig-t-ing"). Its
literal translation into Eglish, with "in"=in, "lig"=light and
"-ing"=-ing, would be "inlighting". What a wonderful match. But here is
the scary part of reversing the new English word "onlighting" into
Afrikaans. We cannot assume that since "in"=in that also "on"=on. Should
we do so to arrive at onlighting="onligting", it would mean rot or tripe
since the "aan"=on and "on"=un. Although the word "onligting" will not be
found in a dictionary of Afrikaans, we may easily create it as
[un="on"]+[lighting="ligting"] to have IN CONTEXT the meaning
"onligting"=rot=un-information. Such is the creative power of my beautiful
mother tongue Afrikaans which defies dictionary makers.
It got the "genes" of this creative power from its two parents, Dutch and
Saxon. The outcomes of these "genes" were honed into a great tool by the
many midwife languages during its emergence on South African soil -- Xhoi,
French, Malay and Bantu. Should you fellow learners follow Jan Lelie's or
Leo Minnigh's (Dutch speakers) contributions more closely, you will become
aware how these two men want to use these "genes" in English. Modern
English is a powerful langauge because it has annexed so many words from
mainly Latin and Greek. But I think that, sadly, this destroyed the
creative power of Old English. May the word "onlighting" become a reminder
to you that it is possible to "onlight" the creative power of English once
again.
One thing strikes me as particularly important about this "personal
language". It has to function in terms of all the 7Es (seven
essentialities of creativity). In other words, it must have balance in
liveness, sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, spareness, otherness and
openness. As it becomes bigger, it has to increase in each of the 7Es.
However, when one of the 7Es is seriously impaired in this "personal
language", its catalytic power is reduced drastically too. For example,
should I keep on using the same word for a certain concept (knowing no
synonyms) which is refered to by different names in different
organisations, the otherness of my "personal language" is impaired.
I know that people are usually far more interested in topics rather than
in how they understand topics. I know that most people try to avoid any
"how question" as the plague. But I want to invite all you fellow learners
to contemplate the how of your thinking. Perhaps we will reach a deeper
level of understanding.
I want to caution that some of the things which I wrote about in this
essay, each of us can observe in the "world-outside-me", but that many of
the things can be observed only by the person self in the
"world-inside-me" of that person. Thus all the organisation which I am
aware of in the "world-inside-me" have to be considered by you fellow
learners as mere speculation. I do hope that a little bit of it rings a
bell within you ;-) Let us keep up with our onlighting.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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