Greetings and salutations! I come to you as the newly installed member of Carpe Forum, and am frankly quite thrilled to be here sharing my perspective with you all. As some of you already know from watching my YouTube discussions (The Wandering Humanists), I am someone who is fascinated by and obsessed with language. This obsession led me to spend over a decade acquiring an advanced degree in languages and cultures of the past. Of particular interest to me are the ways that languages evolve and change over time, and the ways that the cultures that spoke those languages changed alongside them. These investigations get to the heart of our being as humans who use language to interact with other humans. With this obsessive focus on language use, I’ve been thinking for a bit about the current push to enforce “unity” with the “new normal.” What follows is where my linguistic thoughts have been taking me.
Language is perhaps the single greatest tool that humans have developed in our evolution. Imagine living your life without the ability to communicate with those around you. If you’ve ever attempted to speak to someone who does not share a common language with you, you know what this is like. The ease in communication that we take for granted in our everyday lives goes away, and is replaced by us stumbling over a Latvian phrasebook or using florid hand gestures and mouth noises to mimic a bus station. These experiences remind us just how amazing it is that any of us are able to communicate with each other at all.
Don’t get me wrong; language is for far more than figuring out how to get from point A to B, or ordering your daily iced coffee (looking at you, Wyatt). Language is the tool cultures use to live, grow, and relate to their past. Languages are the products of thousands of years of human communities using language to engage with the hardships of life in order to make meaning. Indeed, making meaning is what language ultimately is for.
In all this meaning-making, we share and reflect on our thoughts in light of the ideas of others. We use language to posit new solutions when they are needed, as well as to look back to the past to keep healthy traditions alive. All of these actions require that we hear/read/share/experience ideas. Language lets us do this. A string of thematically connected ideas develops over time to produce a tradition. Like changing your contacts after chopping jalapeños or getting enough sleep, some ideas are good and some are bad. Don’t we want to avoid the bad ones at all costs? Wouldn’t it be great if we could just purge those out of existence by controlling how people speak? After all, we use language to express ideas, so if we control language we can control ideas, right?
This notion of language determining thought really begins with the work of linguists Edward Sapir:
and Benjamin Lee Whorf:
In the early 20th century, they claimed that because the Hopi language doesn’t encode time like European languages, therefore the Hopi people must perceive time differently from Europeans. This became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It doesn’t matter that this idea (Whorfianism) has been thoroughly debunked by linguists such as John McWhorter (check out his lecture here) or that the Hopi language actually DOES encode time. This Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has pervaded popular conceptions of language-thought connections, and was the basis for Orwell’s Newspeak. While Newspeak is fictitious, real-life attempts have been made for years to attempt to “purify” or “fix” languages. Because, you know, central planning always turns out so well.
Never mind that language censorship movements are almost always linked to awful regimes, let’s look at what actually happens when you attempt to control how language is used. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure provides wonderful insight into the connection between our language, our thoughts, and the world around us.
In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure conceives of the connection between the literal word for something and the actual thing/idea/concept/action it refers to as a linguistic “sign.” You get the meaning of a word coming together with it’s actual production via voice, print, or (in the case of sign languages) hand sign. This looks like: CONCEPT + SOUND-IMAGE = SIGN.
As an example, he talks about the connection between the word “tree” and an actual tree (p.67 of “Course in General Linguistics”).
You can walk out to a tree, touch it (or hug if you’re in the Bay Area), and get a pretty decent sense of what this big plant is. We call that big-plant-thing “tree” in English. In Latin, it’s “arbor.” If you’re in France, It’s an “arbre.” In Germany it’s a “Baum,” et cetera, et certera, et cetera. The main idea here is: a word indicates something, but that something could be referred to by any other word. The only reason “tree” means “tree” is because people who speak English agree that that’s what it means. There’s a slipperiness between what we say and what we mean, and you can exploit this slipperiness if you want to for nefarious ends.
Let’s do an experiment: you ban the word “tree” and punish people who use it most harshly. What have you accomplished? Basically, you ruin anybody’s life who talks about “trees,” but you’ve changed NOTHING. People might start referring to trees as “big greens” or “greenies” or any other kind of euphemism. Banning words, or phrases, or even whole languages (a particularly egregious example here) does NOT change peoples’ thoughts. Imagine trying to discuss your culture, literature or traditions (or even order your iced coffee) when someone is monitoring even the most basic elements of your language.
But these were language crimes of the past. Surely no one is trying to control how we think and act via controling language now, right? Anyone who exists in the broadly “dissident” space now (and that includes you if you’re reading this) will be the first to tell you otherwise. An obvious example of this is the pronoun debate happening right now (this Subreddit hurt my brain). Is it sexist/homophobic/transphobic to continue to use the system of pronouns that English has had for over a thousand years? Progressives have simply decided that it is, and are trying hard to smear anyone who doesn’t go along with this (say what you want about him, Jordan Peterson’s fight against compelled speech was epic). They’ve enforced “unity” at the expense of linguistic diversity, something that they normally tout quite strongly. Because it was never about “diversity” to start with.
Removing “problematic” elements (like gendered pronouns) from a language simply cannot remove “problematic” ideas. People can and always will find ways around this censorship (remember that linguistic slipperiness from Saussure above?). So what really happens when you try this? You simply slander people for speaking. You ruin their ability to communicate and be human with other humans trying to make meaning of the world. Basically, you just fuck shit up.