A Language That Speaks for Itself
Linguistics is not my field of expertise, yet I spend a good amount of my time thinking about the code we use to communicate. Something I reflected on recently during an afternoon walk, much to my girlfriend’s dismay, was how precision of language — and what we choose to be precise about — influences receivers’ impulse to reflect on what we’re saying.
Our primary device to propagate information is language. We use many linguistic tools, some consciously, most without thinking about them. Which of these our cultures and languages support shapes how we interact, sometimes negatively.
Ambiguity is a Feature
Our languages have expansive vocabularies with words to describe a myriad of concepts from a multitude of angles and we are encouraged to be as descriptive and varied as possible. You should not start a sentence with “I think”. Repeating words is bad practice. These ideas, hammered into our heads by school stick with us way beyond when our style of speech is regularly judged on its own merit. They are a display of good education, of intelligence.
I think these ideas are bad. Beyond being classist, they encourage us to turn the collaborative process of communication into consumption. Reading the start of this paragraph, perhaps you thought I was merely making a joke. Perhaps you expected me to clarify later. But maybe your own opinions on the subject also came to mind. You made connections to the last time you came to a conclusion about a related topic and how it relates to what I’ve said so far. Now imagine if I had stopped writing there.
The less we say, the more we encourage the listener to connect our thoughts to their own. We do not need to ask a question to pull the other party in. We can talk in ways that make them ask questions about what they care for. They know that best after all.
Implicit Confidence
Why do we feel like saying “I think” so much in the first place? It is a much more common phrase than “I’m confident”. I think this is also bad.
We can categorize our relation to information into three major categories:
- Things we don’t know, like where my dog is exactly.
- Things we assume, she is not outside because it is raining.
- And things we know for certain, she is not in Czechia, I just saw her a minute ago.
Without clarification, it seems like we know what we’re saying, not just assuming it. Therefore, good actors clarify when something is assumed, rather than known. While this is efficient, it once again jeopardizes collaborative communication as it presupposes absolute trust in the speaker. Having to prove your thesis to the other party is essential to fostering an actually productive discussion, even in lack of time, simply stating something is true explicitly encourages them to consider why.
We should develop a language, or at least a culture, where confidence and truth are explicit. This is especially important because people lie. Not everyone is a good actor, and it is very easy for people to say things they would not be able to confidently argue for without parts of them staying unnoticed.
Arguments That Make Themselves
People pick up on things that don’t make literal sense very easily. This is why the history of most languages’ vocabularies is so bittersweet. They have been built up over thousands of years with influences from hundreds of interwoven cultures. It is beautiful, but it also means that the semantics of most words are barely connected to their literal meaning, if such a thing is even visible to the naked eye.
People are more free to make their own connections between words and meaning. Some concepts can completely lose the connection with their agreed upon definition and certain associations can become much more important than ones that really matter.
What does the word “immigrant” mean? Something along the lines of “A person that lives here but wasn’t born here.” If this meaning was inscribed in the word, to argue that immigration is bad, it would be obvious to argue against living somewhere you weren’t born, moving. One would have to either change the word to be more specific or go against what feels natural if they didn’t wish to, both of which would be suspicious.
If the smallest building blocks of our languages represented concepts still relevant today, maybe we could speak about the concepts themselves more freely and reduce the time it takes to establish a shared reality.
I wish for a language that encourages thinking, one that helps us live in the same world.