Does language render us incapable of telling the truth?
Martin Montgomery, in his 'An Introduction to Language and Society' (1995), stresses that nothing in language is impartial:
In apprehending, comprehending and representing the world we inevitably draw upon linguistic formulations. One might say that because of this we always see it slightly askew. But it is not so much a question of bias that is at stake here. What it amounts to in fact is that there is no absolutely neutral and disinterested way of apprehending and representing the world. Language always helps to select, arrange, organize and evaluate experience, even when we are least conscious of it doing so. In this sense representation is always interested: the words chosen are selected from a determinate set for the situation at hand and have been previously shaped by the community, or by those parts of it, to which the speaker belongs.
Some sections of the media are obviously biased and make no attempt to hide this fact from their readership or audience, but even the BBC, which (according to the BBC Editorial Policy written by Mark Damazer, the Deputy Director of BBC News) “sees its audience as citizens who have the right to independent and impartial information” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/hi/editorial_policy), is incapable of representing events objectively.
What you wrote ties in a lot with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis... that a people's view of the world is shaped by their language.
It also relates to the so-called Swadesh list created by the American linguist Morris Swadesh (1909-1967) . The list has 300 words that Swadesh said were universal to all human languages in the world. Thus, any English words not mentioned on the list are arbitrary. They may not have exact translations in other languages or any translations at all.
Many words in the world are purely cultural in nature and pertain to a particular culture. For example, BASSET HOUND' is very English; 'HAGGIS' (a big, round, spicy sausage) very Scottish, 'TAIKO' (a type of drumming) very Japanese and 'DUENDE' (ghost, evil spirit, inspiration, magic fire) very Spanish ; ditto "OMERTà' and 'BESA' the "code of silence" sworn by Sicilian and Albanian criminal gangs respectively. Naturally, these words reflect a portion of the world view of someone in that culture and they have no lexical or semantic equivalents in languages outside the culture.
Grammar is very abitrary from language to language too. Irish Gaelic forms of "It's raining" translate into either "It's putting down rain" or It's making rain". In the Nanai language of eastern Siberia they say something that translates "The rain, it is raining; the snow, it is snowing" etc.
Most of us believe that we think logically but actually we don't. There is only some logic and a great deal of illogic in most natural human languages. Generally speaking, people don't seem to like logical languages. Linguists consider isolating type languages like Chinese and Vietnamese to be about the closest thing to logical languages that you will ever get to in natural human language.
In the late 1950's , an artificial language called "Loglan" was developed based on pure logical grammar with the intention of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that a people's world view is shaped by their language. Though the results have been inconclusive, language structure and lexicon must have at least some influence on the way people see and relate to the world around them. Once again, it is when you study a language like Loglan that you realize that our English language and personal ways of thinking in every day life are largely non-logical.
Below is some internet information on Loglan - worth checking out.
http://www.loglan.org/
I think this notion is antiquated. Cultures have frequently shown that either by creating new words, borrowing words from other languages, or using compound words existing in their current language, they can represent any new idea that presents itself in quite an easy manner. People shape language, language doesn't shape people. Ideas existed in the form of images before language even existed, not the other way around.
Ryan,
Some of what you say is, of course true, but language barriers have been a reality in history too. For example, I've read that some of the mistranslations of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek were due to the fact that Greek is very different morphologically from the Semitic languages (Greek is even a unique language within the Indo-European family).
Many of the problems that English- speaking White Americans had in negotiating Indian treaties in the 18th & 19th centuries were over language problems. This was very true among the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes in the area where I live (Washington State). The Indians simply had no words for some English terminology and lexical concepts and vice versa. Even White interpreters (often fur traders) who learned the Indian languages never unterstood all of the nuances that some words had in their languages. The result was that the treaties often said different things to Whites and Indians because of misunderstandings of what some words meant and their subsequent translations.
Finally, there is nothing "antiquated" about the Whorf hypothesis. It is barely a century old which is almost no time at all to a historian or a scientist.
<< Ideas existed in the form of images before language even existed, not the other way around. >>
Really? Describe the picture that shows, say, 'fulfillment'...
"Ideas existed in the form of images"
This is impossible, to have a mental vision in your mind you need language. (Cf, Lery Gouran, Le geste et la parole).
<< This is impossible, to have a mental vision in your mind you need language. >>
No, I really don't think you do. The things that we can visualize (e.g. dog) can be visualized whether you know the word dog or not, as long as you know what a dog is. The opposite is true with words like, as I said, fulfillment, which can't technically be visualized by anyone, regardless of language-ability.