The development of this thread suggests that
‘psychological complexity of a language’ does not refer to
morphological or syntactic complexity and the unnecessary burdens which
these impose on the human psyche (and which were happily reduced when
Indo-Aryan developed from Sanskrit to Prakrit), but to the semantics of
those items in the lexicon that refer to psychological phenomena.
Initially I myself was drawn to the study of Sanskrit precisely because
of what C.G. Jung wrote about the subtlety of psychological thought in
India, and indeed a huge part of what is discussed in Indian philosophy
is
psychology. Given this interest, along with the age-old interest in
techniques of mind analysis (the entire complex that comprises what in
English would be called contemplation, meditation, etc.), it is only
natural that in Sanskrit, the main lingua franca of the Indian
intelligentsia, a very refined and differentiated terminology was
developed. English has only ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ to cover areas
where Sanskrit has various terms.
A quantitative study (which to my knowledge does not yet exist) in
itself seems not so useful. Lexically one could simply look at the items
that are derived from verb roots like
man,
cit, cint, jñā, kḷp etc. and compile a list. Finished. Then you
do the same with a few other languages and compare the numbers. That
says very little. A statistical search for the use of all these terms
in actual texts? Which texts would you select for that? There is hardly
any basis for a comparison, and so I think any such attempt would tell
us nothing.
Far more interesting would be a semantic study of such sets of
terminology, bringing out the distinctions.
The Zentrum historische Sprachwissenschaften at our LMU
(Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich),
https://www.sprachwiss.uni-muenchen.de/index.html, of which I happen to
be one of the governing members, for years has been playing with the
idea of organizing a symposium on terminologies in various languages for
the inner human being: ‘self’, ‘soul’, psyche’, ‘mind’ and related
phenomena. The idea was unfortunately never supported by a majority of
the members of the Zentrum, because the topic was considered too
philosophical and psychological, and not sufficiently ‘scientific’…
Robert Zydenbos
--
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institute of Indology and Tibetology
Department of Asian Studies
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (University of Munich – LMU)
Germany