It comes down to intent; I play the language games I do to drive ever close to satsifying, useful, life-generating observations and communication.

At this most basic level, this can come down to the difference between “You’re an asshole!” and “When you interrupt my sentences I feel really irritable and I lose interest in our conversation.” Something empty of relevant, life-generating content, compared to something full of it.

You can see here too, that one sentence attempts to enslave, and the other tells a story.

My friend Joe MacDonald has come to call a lot of these emerging communication tools “story-based communication”. http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/2009/09/23/buried-without-ceremony-next-attempt/

I actually love the questions like “what is is is?”. By whatever grace, I’ve been saved from the perception that those language games _must_ be solved, and if I do, it’s by attaching them to a dynamic framework and picture.

So is is is when someone reflects
on how they distinguish patterns of their experience,
how they have related to consistent things outside themselves
and so made solid
and time-independent
their persistent experiences of those things.

Saying what Is is is when they take that very act of perception and distinguishing
and make it a thing itself in their minds.

What is is is is, is what I just did then!

As I say, these language games are just that, fun diversions. To me at least.

In the end, the primary difference of animist language from “modern” language comes down to the ability of the former to actual carry content; actual observations containing actual useful information.

The “wealth of information” you point out, to me, constitutes yet another kind of “wealth” that modern folks don’t see as “real”, and so don’t recognize their poverty.

Hun’q'umi’num (Downriver Halkomelem Salish), which I speak some of, has tons of nouns - although they’re often quite transparently derived from verbs, admittedly - and tends to nominalize its verbs for certain uses. E.g. Nustl’i’ ([it is] my wanting) kw’s nem’s (his/her [hypothetical] act-of-going) - “His/her going is what I want” is how you translate “I want him/her to go.” Notice that the sentence is composed of a noun used predicatively in first place (”(it is) my wanting”) followed by an article and another noun.

Similarly Hawaiian uses nominalized clauses very frequently, especially in older literature: ‘o kona hele ia, “it is/was his/her going” = “(and so then) he/she went,” no ka’u hele ‘ana “from my going” = “because I do/did/will go,” and so on. Classical Nahuatl also has very clear boundaries between verbs and nouns, but has a huge variety of ways to turn one into the other.

Inuktitut has many words that alternate between categories: can’t think of a specific example off-hand, but basically the process goes: verb + noun-suffix = noun; that derived noun + verb suffix = a verb again; rinse and repeat till done.

I do think the important characteristics of “animist language” are:

(a) an ability to coin new words easily,
(b) a strong preference for description rather than labelling, and labelling by “set” rather than “item” when it’s used at all - e.g. a “washer” in English (other than the hardware part) is generally taken to be a specific machine used for washing clothes: tlapācalōni in Nahuatl means something to wash things with, but could mean anything from a washing machine to a basin, soap, a rag, a scrub-brush, etc. etc.
(c) frequently also sets of terms to define directionality and relationship to place, e.g. Hawaiian hele mai “go/come this way” = “come” vs. hele aku “go/come that way” = “go”; Nahuatl onyauh “go that way” = “go (there)” vs. huallauh [hualyauh > huallauh] “go this way” = come.

Hun’q'umi’num not only prefixes nem’ “go” and m’i “come” to other verbs, e.g. t’akw’ “go home” is usually either nem’ t’akw’ “go home” or m’i t’akw’ “come home,” but also has two sentence prefixes i and ni: i indicates that the action of the sentence does/did/will take place at the location where the sentence is spoken, and ni indicates that the action does/did/will take place elsewhere. AND it has three sets of words for “the” depending on whether the noun in question is (a) visible to the speaker, (b) nearby or in a definite location, but not currently visible to the speaker, or (c) remote, indefinitely located, or hypothetical.

Put those three things together and you get a wealth of information about who was where doing what in Hun’q'umi’num that you just can’t translate into English without at least doubling the length of the sentence. E.g. ni nem’ t’akw’ kwthu nunen, “my father went home,” includes the information that his home is not here (ni), he was specifically going away from here (nem’), and I can’t currently see him (kwthu, non-feminine near-but-invisible “the”).

Anyhow, I like the concept of “animist language” very much!

From the perspective of emergence (in eg. zen-buddhism or complexity theory) all conceptual thinking and languages are animistic in the sense that they suppose separate “living” existence for things and concepts. In “reality” things (paterns) emerge only in connection to other things, being impermanent and without autonomous existence.

It is convenient for our limited pattern recognition capability and logical thinking device, to assume that things are permanent and have separate existence an sich. It is a kind of modeling simplification. Understanding impermanence and connectedness conceptually is more complex and secondary conceptual thinking.

We are not able to track the flux of all being, we can be in connection to it. Just to be able to predict and make decisions, we give attributes to things, try to guess why and how things or beings behave. You may look for different descriptions of reality from modern physic, cognition research, etc.

Language is greatly affecting the world where we live. Concentrating to the conceptual model world is potentially alienating us from our senses and experiences, limiting the way we perceive the world. On the other hand we need differentiating analysis to perceive things.

I see it as a personal choice how much you want to immerse in the experiential world, how much you want to take distance and analyze. With the support of language too.

Best Wishes
Ari

Secondly, while it is tough to talk about quantum mechanics in English, it is far from true that scientists are unable to productively speak of such things (as your composition seemed to insinuate). Mathematics, the language physicists use to understand quantum mechanics, describes nonlocality, flux, vibrations, and nearly all quantum-scientific notions with profound elegance. In my opinion, the mathematics of quantum mechanics are a great deal more elegant than other physical theories (i.e., classical mechanics, electromagnetism), and certainly this language is unrivaled in its ability to discuss quantum phenomena.

Knowing this would help me have a conversation about why I speak of “original ways” and cheerlead “mythways resynthesis”.