Language: Lens on the World

In a previous post, I gave my simplified take on the nature of language and meaning-making.  Today, I'd like to take that same idea, that words and meanings arise out of each particular person's history and experiences, and explore how that relates to the fact that we all learn about the world and how to talk about the world using different languages.

Although in my previous post, I made a strong push to characterize the meanings of words as completely individualized, maybe it's more fair to say that what a word means to a particular person is like a negotiation - one between that individual's life and experiences and the broader cultural zeitgeist that exists around that word.  In that sense, how we describe the world is informed in multiple ways by the cultures we live in - both to the extent that those cultures determine the experiences we have, and to the extent that others' use of language in those experiences reinforces our own descriptions of the world.  Put more simply - there's a norming effect.  People that grow up in a similar context to you have many of the same experiences, and in an attempt to communicate about those experiences, we agree upon language that captures some, but not all, of our overlapping experiences, which tends to flatten out the nuances and shades that might initially exist in our minds.  As we reconstruct our pasts over and over in written and verbal communication (which certainly is exponentially more common than it was 500 hundred or even 50 years ago), the raw sensory and emotional experiences we describe with our language gets distilled into a sterile set of symbols with only abstract relationships to what we experienced in the moment.

So, then, language shapes our experience and memory.  Imagine how we are controlled as individuals by the range and organization of concepts we have access to for describing our experiences!  I lived in French West Africa for about two years on and off, and reached respectable conversational fluency in French - I used it at work and in 90% of my social conversations.  And once I reached a point where it came naturally, where I "thought in French" instead of constructing my thought in English and manually translating, I began to notice that certain thoughts and experiences flowed more naturally and easily.  For instance, French has a much more robust distinction for the subjunctive, a case intended for the discussion of hypotheticals.  A second example - French has two conjugations in the past tense, one that implies recurring action, and one that implies a discrete event.  Information which would be expressed in a much more circuitous way is encoded into the French verb structure.  Probably there are opposite cases, where certain sorts of information are more easy to express in English than in French (any number ranging from 80-89, for instance).  My point isn't that French is better than English - only that the two are different, and although they have competing strategies for communicating similar sorts of information, the fact that the differences exist in the first place suggests that perhaps there could be something different about the world view of Francophones that's expressed in their language structure.

Just imagine - there could be whole new ways to relate to and understand the world that we haven't even begun to conceptualize yet.  It could be the case that physical phenomena that seem blatantly impossible - multiverses, time travel, multi-directional time arrows, collapsed 10-dimensional spaces - are only mysterious because our language, and therefore our world view, hasn't made space for them yet.

Whenever we assume that the rules and definitions we've imposed on the Universe are objective and absolute, we risk falling victim to our own intellectual cowardice.