by Xen

Created on: January 07, 2011   Last Updated: January 08, 2011

At first, it was a thought experiment, whether one could develop a language that lacked or made cumbersome descriptions of violent acts as a means to reduce the acts themselves. I was partly inspired by Toki Pona, a contrived language with under two hundred words that forces one almost into a Taoist mindset to convey one's thoughts. I rolled this idea around in my head for days, but it did not seem to fit.

Language is living and people will create terms to suit their experiences, as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, what is self-actualization but rich people words? Surrounded by a world that speaks a language they do not understand, what choice are they given but lashing out, devising a dozen new ways to express their frustrations through violence? I grasp their frustration, though they will never believe that I do. As far as they are concerned, I speak in books and it might as well be Greek to them.

But who can really blame them for relenting to the language barrier? Much of Western culture is based on fallible translation (if not outright mendacity) of religious texts, people claiming to be in touch with the divine and letting themselves be used as mouthpieces. However, there is little to stop these men just throwing in a self-aggrandizing sub-clause or two, carefully omitting bits that might make their prejudices complicated. When people are put in the position to give spoken form to the ineffable, they prefer to use it to screw over their fellow man than to take dictation. In the history of the world, never has a deity cleared His or Her inexpressible throat and said, "That bit with the bat being a bird? Not what I meant. Shall We start over from the beginning then?"

"Kairos" could be translated from the Greek in a variety of ways, but my favorite is "the moment in which the gods act". What does it say about the ancient Greeks that their experience was so pressing that they needed to give it so concise a name? What about the Russian "toska", explained by Nabokov as, "At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom"?

How delightful that Indonesians have "jayus", a joke so unfunny that you have to laugh? The minutiae of cultural mores revealed by having a word for hesitating when introducing someone because you have forgotten their name (tartle, Scottish), the sensation of awe at art (duende, Spanish), or the favors used to grease the wheels of bureaucracy (chai-pani, Hindi) says much more about a people than could even be easily translated. What do we, as English speakers, have?

English is the language most prone to outright theft from other languages, the virulent tongue that other countries have ministries to guard against, the one that contrives words with such frequency that the Oxford English Dictionary will never be a finished work. A new concept is barely in the public eye before it has spawned ten associated terms, abominations of Greek and Latin roots or onomatopoeia that barely make sense. But, to return to the point, we can't begin to express ourselves when it counts, even by purloining beautiful terms from foreign mouths, and we suffer for this insufficiency. 

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