The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy

Words have the power to mold thought. Complex thinking, conversely, demands an adequate vocabulary in much the same way you can't work on an engine without a large box of specialized tools. When we don't have a suitable word, we are likely to concoct neologisms as needed and/or borrow liberally from other languages that do a better job of expressing that particular idea. But does the lack of a proper grammatical framework actually make certain types of thinking difficult or impossible? Does the structure of the communication systems we have created reciprocally alter the structure of our cognitive patterns?

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984

Imagine a person who speaks a language that lacks a true future tense. This can lead to awkward sentence constructions (and misunderstandings) when trying to convey something that hasn't happened yet. (E.g., "I am being there for the editorial conference tomorrow.") This raises the inevitable question: do people whose native language lacks a future tense actually perceive the world differently? Do they somehow exist in a perpetual capital-N Now? And what about languages with no past tense? When a man speaks of his friend who has been dead for five years and mentions, "Elathóu likes to play music," does that indicate that he somehow actually feels, at least on an intuitive level, that Elathóu never died? And if so, is that a literal or figurative belief? How does it alter his sense of the universe he inhabits?

These are qualia, obviously, and we can never hope to fully understand another human being's subjective personal experience, any more than you can know how I perceive the color red.

That impossibility only makes the issue more interesting, however, and I would love to see some ingeniously designed behavioral and attitudinal experiments in which linguists, neurologists, evolutionary biologists, ethnologists, sociologists and maybe a caterer all get together and do everything from careful interviews and testing to functional MRI scanning and see if they can tease out some fundamental, underlying contrasts in modes of thought (and even the nature of conscious awareness itself) directly related to language differences.

Scientists such as Steven Pinker (author of The Language Instinct) believe that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. It's just something we're wired for. In his book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Journalist Charles Seife argues that the ability to symbolically represent abstract concepts (such as the titular number zero) is what enables a civilization to become great. Zero might not seem like an integral principle of normal primate life, and I suppose it probably isn't, but until some proto-hominid is smart enough to draw a circle in the dirt and tell everyone it means "no bananas," advanced math (and everything that math makes possible, from astronomy to engineering) is impossible. Until then, history never moves beyond picking fleas off each other.

“Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness; if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.”
― Alan Moore

For me, I think the grammatical key to my personal doctrine lies in the gerund. A gerund is a verb used as a noun. The verb “skydive,” for example, can be turned into a participle by adding -ing, and then it can be used as an adjective. (I.e., “She won the skydiving championship.” What kind of trophy? A gold trophy. What kind of championship? A skydiving championship.) That same word can also be used as a noun, in which case it becomes a gerund. “She enjoys skydiving.” (What does she enjoy? Skydiving.) The word now indicates not a description of an event or occurrence, but the activity itself — or even the idea of the activity.

I tend to strongly prioritize experiences over material possessions. And yes, I am well aware that the American economy would collapse if everyone did this. I would much rather live in a very small, simple, modestly furnished house (if I lived in a house at all) and travel extensively than live in a comfortable sprawling mansion and never leave.

Things are appealing to me only when they facilitate adventures. A sailboat, for example, appeals to me because I can use it to go on ocean voyages. The idea of owning a big shiny sailboat that never leaves the dock just to impress my rivals at the yacht club does not appeal to me. It's not that I like airplanes, it's that I like flying. It's not that I like motorcycles, it's that I like riding.

An excellent example of the extreme opposite of this line of thinking is a story I was told about a woman whose wealthy fiancé gave her $20,000 and told her to go buy herself a wedding ring, and that they would use whatever was left over to go on the honeymoon of her dreams. She spent the entire sum on the ring. “Who cares about a honeymoon,” she laughed later, waving the sparkly rock in her friends’ faces over lunch.

If there is one area where I feel English is a bit deficient, it's in the area of describing very specific feelings, social roles, situations and sensations related to universal human experiences. This is where we have to steal from other languages. Déjà vu. Schadenfreude. Quid pro quo. Prima donna.

We can never escape from within our own skulls. Language is a squishy mechanism that imperfectly and inconsistently shares elusive, ambiguous truths. Perhaps this is not always a bad thing.

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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