25. The Limits of Language

I recently heard about a story of two friends: a fish and a frog. The frog jumps out of the water and goes on the shore, experiences a brand new world, and comes back to describe it to the fish. The fish, being limited in world-view, tries to understand everything in terms of its own world — understanding a mountain to mean a coral reef, etc.

I’ve been realizing increasingly that language is not only a medium of communication, but a medium of thought. There are many words in other languages for which we either lack or don’t readily know of a word in English. Take schadenfreude for example. Based on the sophistication level of our vocabulary, we may translate it as:

  1. Bad
  2. Evil
  3. Sadism

‘Sadism’ gets close, and maybe a level 4 word gets even closer, but they are all mere asymptotes to ‘schadenfreude’, but don’t quite capture the essence of the word. When we learn a new word, we can not only use it for expression, but also use it for identification. Our understand grows in sophistication and nuance as our vocabulary expands.

Imagine having machines that can dramatically expand our vocabulary. For starters, imagine a microchip attached to us that helps us “know” all the words, the way Neo “knew” Kung Fu once it was downloaded to him in The Matrix. I think we can not only describe, but can also experience the world in ways that we couldn’t before.

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