AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Kindling in a Blaze

A couple of friends have prodded me about my from the Great Online Sapir-Whorf debate ongoing at Emptybottle and Chez Delacour and IMprOpRieTiEs and birdLand and Caveat and Wealth Bondage and, well, pretty much the whole of this nexus of Blogaria (and I have to go reacquaint myself with Language Hat to connect even more richly). I’m not up to substantive contribution, but I’ll toss some thought-shavings into the heat of the conversation, as a sign of whence I’coming in this discussion. One, I’m a broadly Wittgensteinian guy, so I’m inclined on one hand to doubt that “language” has intrinsic power as such (it’s people talking and writing and acting, not a reified semi-animate linguistic Force) and on the other hand to observe that the ways people use language in speech and writing and action tend powerfully to influence how they think, in ways that recede from conscious apprehension. So (in the context of this argument) I may be able to have both my cake and the satisfaction of having eaten it, though perhaps that amounts to nothing more than the weak version of Sapir-Whorf that Mick Underwood sketches. Language makes differences, but people make language.

Two, I wanted to remind everyone (in this grim political moment) of something George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”