The Stream of Language

What may be called the particular formal structures of a language are intrinsically connected to how a consciousness that uses that language sees itself, or has the capacity of seeing itself. And also connected to the previous post on a culture's inseparable entwining within its own language, to look at the simple expression of basic emotional experiences as expressed in the Irish and English languages.
In English one says "I am happy," or "I am sad." In Irish these would most simply be said, "Tá áthas orm," and "Tá brón orm." These are however far from parallel senses of being. In the English, such expressions begin infallibly with "I", and this I is then happy, sad, etc. In the Irish language, consciousness pours itself into a linguistic form of very different significance. To truly translate to English, "Tá brón orm" is to mean "Sadness is upon me." Here the self is placed within life and in a humbler more unified relationship to that life as a whole, as opposed to the narrower English form that begins with a solid entity of a self that is placed at an artificial centre of of the world, rather than dwelling within and part of that world. In English, everything reaches out from this centre of the individual ego, whereas in Irish this self is a far more passive aspect of existence.

Here the Irish is a much more satisfying form by which the human consciousness understands its place in life. There is then, of course, the question as to the sensibility- Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, etc- that forms the language into which it then flows in the first place, but what is clear is that when a culture loses its language and has an alien one grafted into itself, as in Ireland, what is occuring is far from a superficial window-dressing of the soul.