Many years ago, in a meeting of Esperantists, somebody displayed a book, or maybe, just an essay of more than one hundred pages, called "Language To help our Thought". I don't remember the name of that language. I looked at the book very superficially, and I don't remember the details. It was a language planned only to help us to think.
It seems that our thoughts are formed by ideas, not abstract ideas, but ideas formed by words that we know, that is to say, each word represents a unit to express, or to form a thought. Then, we can deduce:
1. Knowing several languages increases our stock of units of thought, we can create more thoughts, and more variety in our thoughts.
2. If we knew more words, of any language, we could increase the spread of our thoughts.
3. Since we need the word to think, if we have a thought that we cannot express by a known word, we have to invent a new word.
4. Language is not only something like English, German, Esperanto, or Italian, but also the language of the watchmaker, the plumber, the boat, the school, the automobile, the mathematics, or chemistry.
Examples: Words like port and starboard, are only spoken on a ship; sergeant or lieutenant, in a military or police atmosphere. The specialized vocabularies of chemistry, zoology, or botany, need complete dictionaries for each one of those specialties.
When the first mathematicians began to develop their ideas about trigonometry, they had to invent words like trigonometry, tangent, cosine, cotangent. Previously they had invented words like algebra or logarithm.
Many years ago I borrowed from a public library in New York City, an LP disc that contained a radio program. It was about two young men who had made a friendship through correspondence. One of them lived in the city of New York, and the other in a coastal little town, on the north of Alaska.After corresponding for some time, the Newyorker went to visit his friend in Alaska. The local boy explained their customs and objects. Do you see this skin? Because this coloration it is called... and pronounced a word in his Eskimo language. Do you see this other? It has horizontal stripes and it is called... and it said another word in his language. And it continued showing a variety of skins with different tones, or consistencies, or because they came from fish slightly different, or because they had been processed in different forms, dried under the sun, on the wind, smoked...
The boy showed and named more than thirty classes of skins. These skins came all from the same kind of fish, possibly the only abundant fish in that area, and the way of life of that people, who ate that fish, and made clothes, and other things with those skins.
When the Newyorker finally returned to his neighborhood, he was telling his friends, about the experiences he had lived in Alaska: -- How strange these Eskimos are! They have thirty different words to name the skin of a fish!
A few months later the Eskimo boy went to visit New York. It was the first time in his life visiting a city. They were standing on a street corner, and he said: "What is that box with wheels that is coming our way?"
"That is a Cadillac," said the Newyorker.
"There is another Cadillac coming over there..."
"No, that is a Ford."
"Over there..., another Ford is coming..."
"No, that is a Ferrari." And then came a Dodge, a Toyota, a Mercedes...Then the visitor returned to Alaska and told his friends: Do you realize how strange these Newyorkers are? They have more than fifty different words just to name a box with wheels to carry people around!
* * *Once I heard that in the Hawaiian language there was no word for "snow."
I also heard that when Cuban ladies visited New York City for the first time, they would hurry up to some department store, where they enjoyed trying on fur coats, unknown in their country...
Enrique Ellemberg
Fremont, CA, Usono
Aŭgusto 31a, 2005
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