Do you observe them? Have they influenced your language, thoughts, emotions, personalities, etc.? In what way?
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Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means and modes. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits such as art, science, and philosophy that define us as human beings.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without an actual language. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have been faced with this question: the faculty of language is so fundamental to the human condition that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’
The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, but does it also determine thought?
Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over 7,000 languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, Walt Whitman was clearly able to conjure up both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (orphan), and a word for spouses who have lost their spouse (widow or widower), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies must surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the U.K. for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language enhances cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of 'the wine-dark sea'. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, have more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they had more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.