It has been a quick minute since I’ve last sat down to write an article for The Odyssey. It’s kind of funny how I always get the most ideas when I’m not writing. It also is funny how as soon as I sit down to open a document, to put pen to paper all of those grand ideas flutter away.
Recently my mind has been roiling with all sorts of bizarre ideas and random curiosities that have been suspiciously absent for some time.The trouble in these ideas that endlessly fascinate me is that when I go to write them down, the fear that they will not connect with a reader pressures me to suppress those thoughts slowly coming to boil.
I am led to speculate at what comes first, the audience or the idea? The words or the thought? That cyclical nature of every ‘what comes first the chicken or the egg’ inquiry is something to wonder about.
It is something like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that:
“There is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.”
The hypothesis asks if the language a person speaks molds the way they perceive and thus react to the world.
My obsession with linguistics began with this hypothesis. It stuck out to me because, in a way, it validated the study of linguistics. It begged that there is a possibility that language shapes the way the world is. It suggests that language has the power to shape reality. Reality deserves to be studied and therefore so does linguistics.
If the hypothesis is faulty then that means there is a concrete quality to existence that each language is simply attempting to capture. This could imply that everyone is perceiving the same world (barring the effects of culture and personal experience). To me this could potentially solve one of the big questions of existential philosophy.
I could always go on, but my thoughts in writing always become muddled with too much contemplation of language. For every keystroke becomes an entire lineage to be analyzed. Every sentence a fantastical game of grammar to be torn to shreds. Each idea is question of if the thought chooses the words it needs as describers or if the finite number of words in my language in effect defines the thought.
In contemplating one of my favorite linguistic hypotheses, the question of ‘who are these words for?’ becomes less and less important. The words themselves are enough validation.
Which came first? The audience or the idea? In a way it is like the relationship between one’s perception of the world and the words that are used to describe that world. The two become so intertwined that the distinction only exists to be contemplated. Attempting to separate the two forces would be an act that could take the power from both parties.
