Personal Language
What if everyone made their own language?
I was talking to a friend and we were talking about nostalgia and progress when I brought up how language affects our notions of time. My friend was puzzled, so I sent him the following TED talk.
The talk discusses how languages can affect retirement savings. Swedish and Chinese speakers save more for their retirement, supposedly because of how their language handles tenses (past tense, future tense, etc). Surprisingly, my friend was pretty resistant to accepting the main thesis of Mr.Chen’s talk, which was that language affect perception. This is actually a well-known theory in linguistics, called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
In addition to finances, this language relativity can be found in a few interesting places. There is a tribe that only has the words “one”, “two”, and “many.” They have a hard time counting higher numbers. Speaking of numbers, its often proposed that Chinese and Japanese students are, as per stereotype, actually better at math because the language makes it easier to do math mentally. There are several debates about how language affects color perception. This was discussed in the much acclaimed RadioLab episode “Colors.”
Colors
Radiolab rips the rainbow a new one.www.radiolab.org
But my friend is right to doubt this hypothesis. Most of the examples I’ve offered are heavily disputed. Still, this is a beautiful idea not because it might explain every day phenomenon but because it might provide us tools to manufacture our own experiences. Most specifically, by constructing or creating our own languages.
When I was a kid, I used to create alphabets and write codes to pass notes to my friends. I remember that at one point, around 5th grade maybe, we all decided to use the Bionicle language. One student was caught writing some unsavory things about a teacher and we were not allowed to write in code again. Ah well. But this form of constructed language is probably most familiar to all of us. The artistic or literary constructed language.
Think of Elvish in Lord of The Rings or Klingon from Star Trek. These were languages constructed to develop a rich fantastical world, with their own grammar and vocabulary. These went a step beyond just an alphabet cypher, because there was actual semantics involved. There was actual vocabulary and grammar in these cases, not just a letter-for-symbol swap. Nerdy, but ultimately harmless. And useless in the grand scheme of things.
A more useful constructed language might be Esperanto. Esperanto is what is called an “international auxiliary language.” It is a language that is meant to help facilitate learning other languages. It by itself isn’t meant to be a universal language, but can help unite different language speakers in the same way a universal language might.
Esperanto is the largest spoken constructed language and has sometimes been empirically been able to show that it can help learn other languages faster. It is also largely the work of one L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish medical doctor. I bring this up to show that, 1) a single person can construct a language and 2) that person does not have to be a linguist (although I’m sure he must be reasonably intelligent).
But where exactly does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fit into all of this? Esperanto has not shown to profoundly affect perception. Neither has Klingon or Quenya. So what constructed languages use, or try to use, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and what could this possibly mean for us?
One literary example might be Orwell’s Newspeak. Recall, in 1984, the construction of a language that was devised to reduce complexity. “Excellent” and “Great” no longer existed and were now “doubleplus good” or “good.” The main point the book was trying to make was that restricting language was to restrict thought itself. That authoritarianism is enforced by not allowing for the idea of freedom at all.
I think all of this is fascinating, but not captivating. It still does not feel like this line of thought has any relevance to us, right?
Underlying all of this is one assumption — that language is used to communicate to others, external to our selves. I think all of these thoughts take on a whole new dimension when you consider that you are constantly communicating to yourself. So now the question is, how does the language you think in affect your perceptions about yourself?
Perhaps most dangerously, would it be possible to construct a language specifically for yourself, to affect your perception about yourself?
I don’t think this is as absurd as it may initially come off. Millions of people give themselves positive self-talk. And the idea of languages affecting your own personality is well established. In fact, its often noted that language super-learners (“polyglots”) share characteristics with actors and comedians, being able to slide effortlessly between characters and voices and accents.
I also think there would be a strong connection to meditation and mantras. Repeating mantras in meditation is often recommended to help focus and de-clutter the mind. There are many types of meditation, but the type of meditation I’ve been exposed to speak of noticing when the mind drifts and not trying to control that, but let that thought go and circle back to the mantra. It’s like how saying the word “pigeon” over and over makes it sound weird. At first you will notice how weird it sounds, then your mind will drift, but eventually you will come back to the repetitiveness of the word.
But whereas meditation gently guides one to non-thought, developing a personal language would explore and express entirely new thought.
Let’s say you are meditating and you notice that the feeling of “I am in great pain” comes up quite often. Let’s say instead you decide to call this “Wabba-labba-dub-dubs.” Imagine now that you notice a whole host of internal states like this and relationships between those states, enough that you could construct a whole vocabulary around it. Would this not be a personal language?
You might think this is an extreme undertaking, but look to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — a one man project to identify and name various internal states. Several of the words John Keonig (the creator of the project) have been used publicly, like sonder and onism.
Pardon the Tumblr-yness of it. Still interesting in spite of itself.
And it doesn’t have to be entirely new vocabulary. E-prime, for example, is a constructed (destructed?) language that simply removes “to be” and other existential variants from garden-variety English. The idea behind E-prime is to make English less dogmatic. I personally have also wondered what speaking English without every using “I” or “myself” would do to a person. One way to construct a personal language might be to take away words when talking to oneself, rather than build up new words. Maybe both.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t an entirely original idea. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought of the idea of a “private language” similar to what I’ve described, but rallied against it claiming that a private language would be incoherent. Wittgenstein specifically called on the “Beetle in a Box” metaphor,
Imagine that there is an obscure tribe that has few if any insects on their land. You hand each member of the tribe a box and tell them that there is a “beetle” inside of it. No one can look inside of anyone’s box but their own, and only knows what a “beetle” is by looking at the one they’ve been given. Wittgenstein posited that this “beetle,” like pain or colors, was only useful linguistically by its discussion. I don’t know for sure if the pain I feel is the same thing you feel, but we both can refer to the same unpleasant sensation with the word “pain.” Similarly, we don’t know what’s in each others box, but we know what we refer to when we say “beetle.”
The idea that language is socially constructed and socially used would seem to put a damper on the idea of private language. Wittgenstein had other rules as to what constitutes a private language, like that one cannot simply be the last speaker of an established language. A private language must be untranslatable. What I am proposing though, does not have to be untranslatable. It just must be personal.
It is possible, that if adopted on amass scale, this personal language could drastically change human understanding. After all, anthropologists are quick to recognize the beginning of civilization coincided with the written word. It is evident that the first revolution, before the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution and so on, must have been the language revolution. But where there have been multiple industrial revolutions there has only been one language revolution (unless the written word counts separately I suppose). While it would be logical to believe that a Second Language Revolution would be a universal language (a return to the Tower of Babel?), maybe the Second Language Revolution is actually the universal adoption of personal languages.
But that’s a bit grandiose, no?
The use of the personal language is, as already mentioned, to gain a deeper understanding of the self. One framework for how we might perceive ourselves is the Johari Window.
I think its pretty self-explanatory, but to walk through it quick there are things that we know about ourselves that is known to other, things known about ourselves not known to others, things others know about us not known to our selves, and a mysterious part of us not known to ourselves or others.
It is possible to change these areas. They are not static. One could, of course, ask for feedback. Which might be somewhat painful.
I was first exposed to this Johari window through my father who told me at the time that another, more common and more tragic way of changing the areas within the window is enduring a trauma. Obviously enduring a great pain gives one a greater knowledge of self, in some form or another. Too often it is regretfully realizing something was lost. But I think the personal language idea allows one to gain a greater understanding of the self in a traumaless way.
In the Johari window, when someone suffers a trauma the cross hair moves up and to the right. Basically, the Arena (whats known to others and you) and the Facade (known to you but not others) grow bigger. A personal language, I believe, would achieve a similar effect but without the pain. It might even help mitigate depression or trauma. I don’t have proof of this, but I do believe that creating things is the best way out of a funk and there is nothing as low cost as making up a word. So drafting or engineering a language doesn’t require resources but engages that creative part of the brain while gaining a stronger sense of identity, which might help combat some errant thoughts.
Which I think would be a beautiful thing.