Avik Gangopadhyay
Book Title : Glimpses Of Indian Languages
Language, is the force which defines man’s intellectual nature, and determines his relation to reality. The a priori which makes of cognition a subjective construction is the Weltanschauung inherent in language. The ‘inner form’ of language makes it possible to transform the world into a cognitive construction. This transformation of the world need not be entirly subjective. Granted that it is the individual who comes to know and hence who creates the world, but the creative force of language is objective in the sense that it is conveyed to him socially. The epistemological position is that language has the function not only of communicating the results of cognitive activity, but also of shaping cognition itself by transforming the chaos which we call ‘the world’ into the ordered product of human knowledge. Language is the maker of the only world that is accessible to human beings. Because each human tongue differs from every other, the resulting shape of the world is subtly, or even drastically, altered. In order to determine just how this takes place, and with what consequences, linguistic studies should move towards a comparative study of various languages.
