Language is a Prison: Expand Your Cell
German philosopher Nietzsche famously wrote, "We cease to think if we do not want to do it under linguistic constraints.”
I am monolingual, I only speak English, which means any feeling or thought I could possibly have is limited to what the English language provides me. Language shapes, defines, and constrains us while placing an uncrossable trench between us and animals. While language obviously dictates what we say, it would be silly not to think that language dictates what we feel and what we see. If I have only ever thought and spoken in english, the way I perceive and feel about the world is going to be catered to fit inside of my language, so that my brain can easily categorize these perceptions with the words that I know.
Imagine that you walk outside with a friend, and it is raining. Imagine that the language you speak does not have a word for “rain” so you simply say “look what is falling from the sky! Water.” I’d imagine that would be the end of the conversation. But in English, we have a multitude of words to describe rain, based on the intensity of the rainfall: drizzle, shower, downpour, sprinkle, hail, and sleet. The options to choose from naturally are going to force you to pay more attention to the rain and its intensity, in order to categorize it into the correct language. Now you might say “it’s a light sprinkle” instead of simply noting that water falls from the sky.
So why does this matter?
Image Courtesy: Instagram
Language literally makes up our entire lives, it dictates what we pay attention to, how much attention we pay, and how we perceive our experiences. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British Philosopher, said “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
Humans have the unique ability to symbolize an immense range of ideas and symbolize parts of the world in terms of language. Symbolization relies on signs. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that there are two things that make up language: the signifier (the symbol or word itself) and the signified (what it symbolizes).
For example, the word "tree" means the real thing we know as a tree. The signifier is the word "tree" itself, which may be pronounced or written in a different way depending on the language. The signified is the thing of a tree, the concept that everyone knows, regardless of how it's expressed in different languages.
Studying linguistics made me want to rip out my hair because everything I learned further dismantled my idea of the world. The overall message is that if we examine language more closely, we can see that it's made up of propositions about the world. In a sense, language is a model of the world, but all models are flawed—since models are simplifications of the world. The limitation of language is that it can never provide us with absolute truth, since it can provide us only with an approximation of reality.
Though the models may be wrong, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t useful. We can never beat the prison language puts us in, but we can definitely expand that prison to be larger and more accommodating. We can read more, learn more vocabulary, even outside of our own language, and create new linguistic pathways in our brains that will broaden our perception of the world. There are several free apps that improve your vocabulary, as well as libraries that quite literally offer you the ability to check out any book for free. We need to utilize our resources more in order to improve mentally and as people. Language irrevocably shapes the way we know and perceive the world. It constrains our knowledge but offers a template through which we chart reality. Although it is a prison that confines us in a particular way of thinking, feeling, and sensing, it is not a prison that we cannot mold. Through concerted effort—either through learning new vocabulary or exploring other languages —we expand the boundaries of our minds and enrich the depth of our knowledge regarding ourselves and the world in general.
Strike Out,
Indigo Carter
Saint Augustine
Editor: Kaya O’Rourke
Indigo Carter is the Creative Writing Copy Editor for Strike Magazine. She loves Hello Kitty and reading books about fairies. You can find her at indigocarterr@gmail.com or on Instagram @prettypretty.princesss.
