Doesn’t exist. Does exist. Is. Isn’t. It’s like. It’s as if. You know how? For want of a better word. For lack of a better phrase. Swings and roundabouts. Between a rock and a hard place.
“These wars of words are pointless, nothing gets accomplished.” – Reuben
There is no denying that some form of language is essential to a functioning and working model of society. In every evolved human culture there has been some form of language from words and sentences, to clicking and singing, language has become an essential part of humanity. It allows us to communicate and thus helps us engage with fellow humans and it allows us to express what we think and feel through the manipulation of words and speech.
So language on a very basic level, allows us to project ideas into a coherent format so the idea can be fully understood. This however poses a problem, it means the human race is inevitably limited. Because if a language is not sufficient enough to express an idea accurately then that idea is lost. If the word doesn’t exist for something then logically we presume that that thing does not exist or is in fact something else.
If we take for an example an emotion we may feel, one we’ve never felt before and one that there is no word or combination of words allowing us to accurately express what we feel. What do we do? We contextualise this emotion, we examine it in relation to what we have felt previously and what others have felt, we would then brand this new emotion as a form of another emotion thereby giving us a way to effectively understand it. For instance “a kind of lonely sadness”. If we do not do this then we presume that since we have never heard of this emotion, because there is no word for it, then it does not exist at all and we ignore it. In both these situations a lack of language has caused us a lack in understanding of the emotion and in both cases we are forced by language to deny that it exists independent of another emotion, if at all.
Since when we think we use speech, our internal dialogue, our thoughts are completely limited to our vocabulary of words, which is drawn from the limited source of a language. Our thought then is limited by our need to express the existence of something through dialogue. Now whether this is an inevitable fallout of the development of a language or simply a human inability to think and rationalise without dialogue I do not know. But this train of thought does bring about some interesting ideas.
One of which is that you can limit human thought through limitation on human language. The most obvious example of this is in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” in which the dystopian totalitarian government begins to forcibly change language. This is done by eliminating all alternative methods of expression, for instance “how are you today” would be answered with “good” or “bad” there would be nothing in between because there is no need for it. Obviously the result of this is people stop feeling emotions other than good or bad due to their inability to express them. Likewise thoughts of political dissonance would be impossible as no one would be able to effectively express any idea they might have. Thus rendering the idea pointless and casting it away.
Now obviously nothing this extreme is happening today, as if we would be able to know if there was, but instead of this we manipulate words and meaning. We teach people to react a certain way to certain words “conspiracy theorist” for example. When we hear this phrase we have connotations and emotions that have been attached to it, such as “crazy”, “idiot”, “terrorist”, etc. All of these connotations have no relevance to it’s actual definition: simply an alternate account of an event. But through the use of these words in the wrong context and by applying these negative tones to it the phrase has come to mean something it isn’t, thus never allowing the phrase to be used without immediately creating an inherent bias due to the ideas associated with it.
I’ve spoken about the use of language and its limitations from thoughts in my own head. I’m gonna finish by quoting Misia Landau an anthropologist who states “Language is not merely a device for communicating ideas into the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply “experienced” or “reflected” in language, but is instead actually produced by language”.
If we take the above statement as a workable truth and evolve the idea then we could infinitely expand our reality by expanding our language. I’ll finish by saying coomploquaw and good health.
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