I took a course in linguistics as an undergrad. Our teacher assured us that there were no primitive languages. You could talk philosophy in any language. If you had to make up and define new words, that was always possible. I gather he didn't care for Sapir-Whorf, weak or strong.
I didn't attempt to prove him wrong – that's too many languages to learn. It seemed plausible, people being people everywhere. You can't talk about nuclear physics without words for nucleus, but you can explain what those are, just as you can teach the relevant math. To an adult, anyway.
But. Poverty of language makes it harder to communicate some things. If you have leisure, that doesn't matter, but when you don't have time to define nuances that aren't part of a common language heritage, you've got problems.
That matters a lot for slogans, which we often use as a shorthand for thought.
Step back from individual words and think of phrases, or words that have changed meanings. If a culture has succeeded in framing a dispute in terms that admit only a handful of options, you can theoretically describe an alternative, but in practice it's not easy.
Though some people make it look easy. Maybe the most famous framing situation is the one when Pharisees and Saducees tried to get Jesus to take a side in a political quarrel about the legitimacy of Roman oppression – should they pay taxes to the Romans or not? Answer "Yes," and the average folks give up on Jesus, "No" and the Romans will kill him. Jesus was able to rephrase the problem in two sentences (and change the course of Western Civilization). You or I would have been struggling to be nuanced and wind up looking spineless, and disgusting everybody.
The language includes things taken for granted (denotation or connation), most of which most of us never think through. Who has the time to think through what we mean by "liberty" when the the kids need supper? We quote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but those invisible assumptions mean that John Adams would be startled at how we interpret the phrase. (Liberty: is it intrinsic, something granted, or something achieved? An addict is effectively a slave no matter what the law says. "Slave to one's appetites" is a real condition.)
Orwell went with a strong version of Sapir-Whorf: without appropriate words there are no concepts. But if you expand what you mean by language to include the cultural associations of words and phrases, and think in terms of average behavior, a weaker version seems to be true for populations – subject to the caveats that languages and associations(*) can be made to change, and one on one dialog can go anywhere the participants have the endurance for.
Insofar as slogans rule us, weak Sapir-Whorf seems true.
(*) E.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the image and mental associations of "slave owner."
1 comment:
It is also complicated that there are some people in any group that are not going to be able to understand complicated things no matter how well they are explained. That is not the fault of the language, which might be able to distinguish easily between mother-in-law born in another village and mother in law born here. Yet it does start to get at least theoretically tricky at that point, because what if no one in the tribe was ever smart enough to understand the concept? What if they were all numb as a hake?
The tentative answer is that even the dumbest of us handle some pretty complicated stuff without blinking, so the language could probably be shaped to describe solar flares.
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