The World is a Word

How often do we turn to think about the words that we use that form a vocabulary? Vocabulary, our habits of speech, a whole lexicon of imagination, which in turn becomes the apparatus through which we build our internal world, through which we process our emotions in whatever box of sadness, happiness, melancholy or joy that we might assign them. Language is not only the building block of our inner emotional landscape, but also the foundation of our political systems and our scientific frameworks. It's wrapped inside the envelope of the noble ideal that we term truth. It's a thread that connects science, politics to poetry, stories, and myth. Through it, philosophically, we create terms such as objective and subjective, truth and fiction, reality and unreality that somehow seem so definite, palpable, intangible to us. We can map language, define it with computational precision, and develop large language models that generate meaning through a process of statistical probability assignment. But no closer have we understood language than understood color through absorbing the world's corpus of Wikipedia articles on the subject. How is it possible to articulate the lived experience of language? Language eludes us. To articulate a thought is to set sail on the ship of language. It both calcifies our thinking, filling our minds with carcasses, cliches, myopic worldviews. It also emancipates our thinking, offering us windows for new ways of seeing.

Longly I feel how much more good I could have done if I had acquired normal speech. >> Well, within this sorrowful experience, I understand. But out of this sorrowful experience, I understand more fully >> all human strivings ambition >> and the infinite capacity of all. >> When Helen Keller was 19 months old, she contracted an illness which rendered her deaf and blind. She communicated primarily using home science until the age of seven when she met her teacher Anne Sullivan. In an extract from her autobiography, The story of my life, Helen Keller describes the exact moment that she had learned the word for water. We walked down the path to the wellhouse, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water. First slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly, I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought. And somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w a t e r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the wellhouse eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with a strange new sight that had come to me.

Imagine yourself in the position of Helen learning the word water for the first time. You cannot hear anything nor see. The phenomenon of water is not something that you can even name. It simply sits in the background of your consciousness. It is there but you have no name for it. The phenomenologist Morris Merlo Ponti wrote extensively on the subject of language. The question often asked by Ponty is not what is language but how does language disclose itself to us through how we actually encounter language in our immediate experience. Here he examines the way language lives in speech. Speech is not a mere translation of existing thoughts but an act of meaning making itself. The act of articulation is where thoughts become clarified where their meaning grows, expands beyond what may initially have been conceived. This can encompass both inner and outer speech, the musings of the inner dialogue as well as spoken utterances and writing. He writes in the phenomenology of perception, "Our experience of language proves that it transcends us, for we discover that our thoughts have never been pure thoughts, that their actuated meaning always exceeds what was meant during the genesis. that Le Paho resists the grasp of thought in the very act of appropriating." Meru Ponti places a magnifying glass to this threshold space between thought and language, idea, and word. This is something we can all investigate independently by observing in slow motion the process whereby we articulate an expression. Some questions we can ask here are: do we possess the thought and then translate it into language, or do our thoughts evolve as we find the words to express our meaning? How can we speak of our thoughts without first imagining this in terms of language?

In another excerpt he points to the subtle phenomenon through which we turn to words when we articulate something to ourselves. I turn to the word just as my hand moves towards the spot of my body that is pinched. The word occupies a certain place in my linguistic world. It is part of my equipment. My sole means of representing it to myself is to pronounce it. As the artist has only one way of representing for himself the work he is fashioning, he must fashion it. In the same way our hand might turn to a spot in our body that is pinched, we as subjects, a mind and observer or whatever word we may use turn to words pronouncing them as soon as our awareness crosses into their territory. The only way an artist can express their vision, their conception is to create it. Likewise, the only way that our ideas can find fulfillment, move through their growth cycle, is through verbalizing them. Whether internally in our awareness, in conversation, or through the written word. For Meru Ponty, words are not just signs pointing to something else, assigned on an arbitrary basis. The sound and rhythm in a word is a detail within its meaning. Further, each individual word is a detail within a larger meaning of the text that it's a part of. This in turn modifies the meaning of each word. The entirety of a work of Shakespeare offers a lens for understanding each micro meaning, constituent sentence, and word. With further information of a story, we may judge the character's dialogue as suspicious, untrustworthy, when earlier in the story, this could be taken at face value.

There is something so peculiar about speech as a whole, something so paradoxical, so elusive and different to other modes of expression such as drawing, gestures, or even music. Speech has this capacity to talk about itself. It's self-reflective. It also carries this historical tendency to treat the self-reflexivity as some kind of route to an ultimate language, a final pure mode of expression, whether it be the language of philosophy, science, or any ideology governed through the self-reflexive qualities of speech. It's only through speech that we can call ourselves an eye, that we can name ourselves and the world as two linguistically distinct entities. In speech, we discover not an object among others, but a being who expresses. And in that expression, a world is revealed that is always still forming.

Think about all the words that you might use to describe your emotions on a daily basis. We might describe ourselves using the words happy, sad, good, bad, restless, bored, fear, love, guilt, anxiety. Not too bad, pretty good, or all right, we might say. There might be anywhere from 20 to 50 words that we habitually reuse on a daily basis. The English language has about anywhere from 300 to 1,000 individual words to describe emotions, although we only use a very small selection from this range. If we look at the mechanical precision available to describe a car, there are around 10 to 20 named systems, a few hundred to a couple of thousand distinct technical component terms, and then tens of thousands of lower level parts that we can describe through a small set of repeated categories like bolts, clips, and connectors. The same would be true for any complex functional piece of technology. A computer, a TV, a remote control, a camera. When it comes to all these tools that we have invented, the amount of words that we have to describe them is staggering. Our technical vocabulary is extremely varied, sophisticated, and precise. For something as universal as human emotion, something which we all share, the bedrock of all our technological artifacts, of all our culture, society, and science. There are comparatively few words we have to express ourselves here.

Now, what do we consider to be more complex? The mechanics of a car or the world of human emotion? As far as individual words, there's way more at our disposal to describe the parts of a car than the world of emotions. Emotion is more elusive to us. It's harder to define in the same way that we can define nuts and screws. It's not obvious where an emotion begins and ends, where an emotion overlaps with another, other than through subjective definition. The German word Waldeinsamkeit is one. It's a compound word made through a combination of Wald, meaning forest, and Einsamkeit, which can mean solitude, aloneness and loneliness. This word is used to describe the feeling of solitude in the woods. The Japanese word komorebi is another example of a word without translation in English. The word describes the interplay of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating dappled, shifting shadows on the ground. The Russian word porosha is another example. This refers to a layer of thin powdery snow that has fallen overnight or very recently, covering the ground and making it look untouched. There is then the Portuguese word saudade, which describes a profound nostalgic longing or yearning for someone or something that is absent, often with the bittersweet realization that the object of longing may never return. It's not to say that these words cannot be translated. The meaning can't be approximated through a combination of English words. But there is no single word that can encapsulate the meaning. There is also a music to the words themselves which lends them a feeling that is unique to the languages.

By learning new words, expanding our vocabulary, we find new ways to express perceptions, feelings, and images that we may already be familiar with, although we have often lacked the vocabulary to know how to express. We limit our emotional vocabulary by confining ourselves to notions of happiness, sadness, fear, love rather than all the inflections in between these feelings that deliver the most richness and vibrancy to our lives. We have been sold this word of happiness through the cultural importance placed upon it. But what would life be without the melancholy, nostalgia, yearning, and saudade that makes our inner lives much more colorful, richer, more full? Language is always evolving. The English language was not invented but it emerged organically through a combination of native dialects originating with settlements of Anglo-Saxon tribes in England speaking Germanic dialects.

If we take for example the word for truth, this word moves through a range of starkly different meanings when we trace its evolution. First, in the modern sense, the word means factual correctness, correspondence with reality, as well as sincerity and faithfulness. The seed of the modern word for truth comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *deru-: to be firm, solid. There is then the Albanian dru meaning tree, the Sanskrit dru meaning tree and wood, the Greek drus meaning oak. The tree was a symbol of steadfastness, with it being firm and solid. This then connected to trustworthiness. The name for the Druid people, the high-ranking priestly class in ancient Celtic cultures, has a possible link to the Albanian druid, meaning knowledge of trees. The Druid people revered trees as sacred. There is first the Proto-Germanic *treuwaz, approximated to mean having or characterized by good faith. This is carried over in the expression of being true to your word. For example, you have some cognates in other languages, words sharing a common ancestral root such as the Dutch trouw meaning faithful and the Old Norse tryggr meaning trustworthy. *Treuwaz then mutates into the Old English West Saxon trīewe. This offers a sense more of faithfulness, trustworthiness, steadiness, and adhering to promises. The meaning becomes more defined of what it means to act in good faith.

In ancient Greece, the word for truth is aletheia. However, this is a separate word lineage that only later met in the same linguistic space. This word that we can roughly translate into English today as truth was not primarily used in a moral context as the English ancestors of truth that concern the nature of reality and being itself. The structure of this word aletheia is a- meaning not and lethe meaning forgetfulness, concealment and hiddenness. This is the same root as Lethe, forgetfulness. So aletheia means unhiddenness or not concealed. It's about uncovering, disclosure. What is hidden then being revealed. The modern meaning of truth began to evolve rapidly in the 1500s and 1600s, coinciding with innovations such as the Gutenberg press, where you had an explosion of written documents being created. This led to an increase in contracts being signed, where truthful words replaced oral trust. Before this, if a person is true, their words can be relied on. If words are reliable, they correspond to reality. Truth shifts from a social moral concept of reliability to a semantic account of reality itself. Truth becomes a matter of correctness, factual accuracy. This contemporary term has stayed with us today where a statement is either true or false.

The scientific revolution compounded the shift with the emphasis on falsifiability, repeatability, measurement, and prediction as the ultimate parameters of what we define to be true. The other linguistic stream that merges with this modern conception of truth is the Latin veritas. This comes from verus plus -tas. Verus comes from the PIE root *wero- meaning true, reliable and genuine. Veritas has the meaning of correctness, sincerity and validity. Here you have the root of words such as verification. There is a Roman flavor carried with this word where in usage it was strongly linked to the judicial system, courtroom testimony: what holds up under legal and rhetorical examination. With scholastic philosophy, Greek philosophy was translated into Latin where terms such as aletheia would be compressed in translation into veritas as the default equivalent, whereas the original meaning is closer to truth as unconcealedness. The Greek term aletheia is about something being revealed, something previously hidden becoming visible. It captures more of a movement, a process where what is concealed is then revealed to our understanding. The modern term for truth captures an image that is more static in the sense that it either matches or it doesn't. It fits into place or it's in the wrong place. Somehow the quality of a tree's stability, its firmness has become the dominant metaphor for how we access the nature of reality itself as true. So the feeling in the word truth as something reliable, stable like wood or a tree is the part that comes from the English lineage. Then the feeling in the word truth that leads to discovery, the uncovering of reality is the part that comes from the Greek lineage. These two distinct images, feelings of truth are welded together in the modern term that we use. So that is the story of the word truth.

If a word that's generally so obvious to us as to its meaning, such as truth, is shown to be much more dynamic, evolving, than we may have thought, we can only wonder, what does this mean for all the other words that we use? So to wrap up, the world is a word. And the sense that when we use the word world with its distinctive sound, evolution, character, we must not forget that this world, this word has its own story. Just like we have shown with this word truth, this story is one intrinsically connected to us in our search for meaning, understanding, inner ambitious attempt to grapple with the entirety of the so-called world. That it is a word does not detract from the fullness, inexplicable richness and mysterious nature of this world, but enhances it. For it is through language, the words that we use in all their infinite combinations, sedimentations, and regenerations that we are granted a lens that is as much a faculty of discovery as it is one of creation. What do we mean? We may ask when we use these calcified words such as objective, subjective, truth, reality, consciousness, body, or even the world that lays at the heart of these philosophical worlds that we have built. What is certain is that we need new language, new meanings. For there is nothing more imprisoning than being engaged in the same words that dull our minds and disengage our senses. We need new words that can open our eyes to new ways of engaging, relating with what happens to be a word we love to use, the so-called reality. No matter how much we try to clasp it with our words, this mystery we call language always seems to elude the tongue.

Perhaps whatever language is is closer to being understood? We're being created in the same moment that it's discovered. Found not in those moments where it's merely spoken, but rather in those moments where it's sung. For it's in words that we sing the world into being. A language always evolving in so far as new speech leads to new seeing.