words
The thing with language
– and I’m
referring to English
because it’s the
one I’m most familiar
with and if you’re
reading this, I assume
you’re also
pretty familiar with
English, is that
we are restricted by
a limited
amount of words.
A book I read
recently ‘Surfing the
Himalayas’
by Rama-Dr. Frederick
Lenz outlined
this quite well.
It’s a
good book for general
philosophy if
you want to have a go,
but it’s more about buddhism. What you learn from
it takes place in a
parable form between a snowboarder and a monk. His writing style
isn’t fantastic, but the ideas are. Here’s a bit from it:
“Consider the word
“love” as an example…now, as you
know love is an emotion.
In your English language you
have just a single
word for what is perhaps one of the
most complex feelings
in all of eternity. But there are
thousands of types
of love, aren’t there? There is
romantic love, family
love, friendship, flirtation,
parental love, the
love of god and the spirit, jealous
and possessive love,
selfless love, innocent love…but
in English you have
just one word for something that is
so complicated.
In other languages, however, there are
sometimes dozens
or even hundreds of different words
for degrees and types
of love that human beings can
experience…language
is the medium of our thoughts.
Thoughts can increase
our understanding or a subject
or…block our understanding
of a subject…if you have
only one word for
all the colours of love, they you may
begin to ‘think’
love instead of feeling it. You may take
it for granted that
when you think the word ‘love’, you
already know and
have experienced all of its possible
permutations…”
I believe this is the
case with most emotive words hate is another
good example.
You may hate someone who killed a relative or
close friend, but also
hate carrots. How do these weigh up? They
don’t. The degrees
between them are massive [well, i’m
assuming you hate the
killer more than you hate carrots] but
there is just one word
to describe it, so our minds confuse the
hates and they might
become similar. We think hate rather than
feel it. Because
language is so restrictive, it is often difficult
for us to explain things
we experience especially those of our
senses.
I was watching a movie ages ago, I’ve forgotten the
name of it, but it has
Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan in it?
[editied: the movie
was called City of Angels] Anyway,he asks her
what the pear she’s
eating tastes like. She’samazed he doesn’t
know what a pear tastes
like, but he says no,he doesn’t know what
a pear tastes like to
her. So she tries to describe it. Something
like it’s sweet, and
juicy. But the thing is, she's pretty much just described the
taste all fruit. And juicy really isn't really a taste anyway.
So the flavour was simply sweet. But it’s hard to do much
better than that because
we don’t have a name for stuff like that. and
we are once again at
a loss for words.