Using words to describe reality is tricky, albeit necessary and oftentimes the only means we have available to communicate our experiences. There are over seven thousand languages, and each one of them has different shades and structures. The culture we are born into and the language that we speak greatly affect our personality and view of the world. However, the very nature of relating a symbol or a set of symbols to an object in the world becomes problematic when we talk about abstract concepts. When I point to a piece of furniture that is used for sitting, let’s say, I can use the English word “chair”, the Russian word “стул”, or the Spanish word “silla”, and each one of them will indicate an object with a function attached to it that is clear and simple. It becomes much trickier when describing a finer layer of experience, like an emotion, bodily sensation, or a cultural tradition.
From my personal experience as an immigrant in a country where I had to learn a third language out of necessity, I quickly noticed that communicating certain things was almost impossible in languages that are not native to me. I realized that there are feelings that I have words for in Russian, but could not find any analog in English nor Spanish, both of which I could by then speak with fluidity. I started to investigate, first anecdotally by speaking to people I knew, then using the literature I could find, how the way we describe a phenomenon affects the way we experience it. My curiosity came from the realization that I could understand my Spanish husband and friends better the more proficiently I spoke their native language because there were words that had no sensible translation to other languages, but communicated something very specific that only this culture has. I could relate to people who spoke Spanish in a more profound way when I had a better idea of how they describe reality to themselves inside their heads. In the literature, I have found evidence that, as I have intuited, when a language does not have a word for something, it is very likely that the person native to this language does not experience this phenomenon! At least not in the same form as someone who does have a category and concept for that specific emotion or tradition embedded in them from birth. In Persian, to give an example, the word ænduh can be used to express both grief and regret; in the Dargwa dialect, spoken in Dagestan in Russia, dard means grief and anxiety. It follows, therefore, that Persian speakers may understand grief as closer to regret, and Dargwa speakers as closer to anxiety.
Understanding the connection between words and experiences can build bridges between different people, but it can also be malignantly used for manipulating the way people think and relate to each other. George Orwell wrote about it extensively in his chilling novel “1984”, where he described what he called “Newspeak”: a made-up language with simplified grammar and a narrow vocabulary that was artificially created to limit the critical thinking of individuals, their self-expression, and free will. While “1984” is a fictional story, there are examples of similar occurrences in the real world, unfortunately. In North Korea, for instance, the words that mean “love” and “friendship” in the way that we understand them were eliminated from the language as these are considered “Western concepts”. This fact shapes the relationships between people in the country. They still likely feel a form of affection for one another as any other human being, but as there is no precise way to describe it, the bond between people is not that strong and they can be manipulated much easier.
On the other side, being bilingual or trilingual is a huge advantage. The more different languages you speak, the richer your perception of the world is, because each language offers a very distinct way of categorizing reality. The sooner in life you start learning another language, the more profound your experience of describing the world in this language will be. When the human brain is processing language, there are different parts of the structure of language that the brain needs to make sense of. It includes semantics (meaning of words), syntax (grammatical structure), and phonology (the sounds and tones). Each of those categories is processed in different parts of the brain. Researchers compared the differences in wiring of the brains of native German and Arabic speakers and got astonishing results. The languages for the study were chosen precisely because of the stark difference in the role of semantics and syntax. Arabic is a Semitic language, while German belongs to the Indo-Germanic group. German has a more complex grammatical structure than Arabic, whereas Arabic is semantically more pronounced. The researchers examined whether native German and Arabic speakers showed differences in the patterns of connection in the brain at baseline. They found that the two groups showed significant structural differences in the wiring of their brains owing to the unalike demands on the system during the processing of each language and that the difference in the wiring also affected the way native speakers of each language perceived the world. Native German speakers have shown greater activation of regions involved in syntactic processing, emphasizing the importance of structure and order in their worldview. In contrast, native Arabic speakers have shown greater involvement of regions involved in semantic processing, showing a predisposition to higher emotional differentiation and intensity (H.Taha, 2019; S.Rossi, M.Gugler et al, 2006).
It has been shown time and time again that differences in language structure shape the perception of the world, decision-making, and emotional experiences of an individual. Here is another example: English has only one word to describe the color blue, both dark and light shades of it, while the Russian language has two distinct words for dark blue and light blue and they are seen as two distinct colors (goluboy/siniy). In tests that compared native Russian and English speakers, the former were much faster in discriminating various shades of blue (J.Winawer, N.Witthoft, et al, 2007). If differences in language can shape our perception of something as tangible as color, what does it tell us about more subtle layers of human experience as emotion? In her book “How Emotions Are Made”, Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are not universal to human nature, as commonly believed, but that they are constructed from our experiences and that the language we use to describe the world is one of the primary factors that contribute to it. She calls it “A Theory of Constructed Emotions”, challenging the common view that our nervous system comes pre-wired with certain emotional experiences. We use language to support conceptual knowledge and to make meaning of the sensations that occur in the body when we are experiencing emotion. As in the previously mentioned example of North Korea, if you do not have a word to describe a specific feeling, you will likely not experience it or at least not in the same way as someone who does because the conceptual meaning that forms part of what we call an emotion will be missing.
Psychologist Tim Lomas from the University of East London has published a lexicographic project where he compiled over 1000 untranslatable words in different languages that pertain to well-being. He writes about the “14 flavors of love” and describes how in different languages there are different words that mean different forms of affection. In his research, he found that out of all languages, Greek has the most subtle descriptions of different types of love. There are at least 3 different words that describe fondness and passion for certain activities (meraki), places (choros), and objects (eros). (Note that the word “eros” in classical Greece was often used in a context of aesthetic appreciation rather than romance.) The connection to a place in the form of love is also symbolized in other languages: “turangawaewae”, “cynefin” and “querencia” – from Māori, Welsh, and Spanish respectively. The Greek language also has different words to describe non-romantic love between people: towards family (storge), towards friends (philia), and towards yourself (philautia). The Japanese language has the term “koi no yukan”, capturing the feeling that falling in love with a person at first sight is inevitable, same as the Chinese notion of “yuan fen”. Each of the examples above represents a very distinct feeling that is often shared by people of different cultures but just as well might be missing in others when there is no specific word for it.
In a 2015 paper on Constructivism, Kirsten Lindquist and her colleagues reveal that language is a fundamental element in emotion that is constitutive of both emotional experiences and perceptions. According to the psychological constructionist Conceptual Act Theory (CAT), an instance of emotion occurs when information from one’s body or other people’s bodies is made meaningful in light of the present situation using concept knowledge about emotion constructed through language. The CAT suggests that language plays a role in emotion because language supports the conceptual knowledge used to make meaning of sensations from the body and the world in a given context. According to this theory, language serves as a “glue” for creating meaning by connecting bodily sensations and a word that describes it. When we put a label on physical sensation, it becomes part of our conceptual understanding of the world. More importantly, labels appear to modulate sensations by altering which of them is selected for conscious awareness. Bilingual and trilingual people have a broader pool of concepts that they can use when describing physical sensations. It gives them the advantage of being more precise when classifying their emotional experiences. A number of studies suggest that multilingual speakers have less emotional reactivity, mainly because they can produce more “distancing” from the sensation when describing it in a non-native language (Kross et al., 2014).
So far, I have presented the use of language as a net positive, helping us to navigate the world and describe our experiences. I strongly hold the belief that the more languages a person can speak, the better understanding of the world he can develop. However, we must learn to see that understanding provided by words is also limited. Here comes the caveat within the CAT theory: the conceptual knowledge about emotion feeds forward in a given instance of experience in order to help predict the meaning of bodily sensations in a context. It means that the brain interprets and imposes on reality something that might not correspond to it, solely based on previous experiences and comparing the current situation to it. It constructs for us the picture of the world that might be outdated, or simply wrong, but this emotional information still guides and motivates our behavior, which then quickly becomes an issue. If we always try to compartmentalize every living phenomenon, there is not much place left for an actual experience of it. The extremely intellectualizing cultures, which abuse the language to make sense of the world, miss one important detail: the word, however subtle it is, is just a pointer at the experience, but not the experience itself. Just like in a parabola about the finger pointing at the moon, we often stare at the finger, but forget to see the moon itself. Words are as much of a construct as any other abstract phenomenon; they are a form of social contract that helps us to communicate but also takes away direct participation in the ongoing flux of life. Think about this: however meaningful the word “любовь” might be for a Russian speaker, for someone who cannot even read Cyrillic, it is just a bunch of useless symbols.
Hyper-intellectualization and the desire to categorize and describe every single thing in the world that surrounds us are normalized in Western societies. This view does not take into account that the biggest part of our lives are mainly non-verbal experiences. Thinking about the body is not the same as experiencing, sensing the body. Sensations and experiences are of different quality than thinking is. Thought is made up of accumulated knowledge in the form of associations, and it blurs the experience only to fit it into the known category. The words provide us with meaning and help us navigate reality, but they have a tendency to corrupt the experiences themselves. Abusing words and the thinking faculty limits our perception and conditions our mind. George Orwell, who understood this very well, wrote: “If thoughts corrupt language, language also corrupts thoughts." Often being stuck with a label for an experience can generate back unpleasant sensations and throw a person into a loop of negativity. It can create fear where there was none and make you dislike someone for no good reason. The ruminating thoughts, most of the time distinctively verbal inside our psyche, distract and pull us away from what is going on in the present moment. It is imperative to understand that words can only describe the past because the name for a sensation comes only after it has already manifested. Moreover, whatever ideas we project into the future, they are always based on our previous experience and rarely coincide with reality. Therefore, we cannot trust the language. The thinking always transforms a sensation into something old, something already known; it can only entertain new when it is completely quiet.
If you do not engage in non-verbal experiences, your whole reality is then constructed from the concepts and abstractions provided solely by the language. However varied and subtle it can be, especially for multilingual people, it does not embrace the whole experience of living. When it is certain that we cannot for sure know what the nature of reality is and there is plenty for us to discover, there is still a glimpse that is available for us and it is accessible only through the body. The body is the only part of ourselves that exists in the present moment; it does not rush towards the past or the future but is anchored in a place in time and space that is non-negotiable. It is a point that allows all the other parts of ourselves to gravitate into the now. Japanese writer Yukio Mishima understood how words can corrode our experiences, and he dedicated a lot of time to these ideas. He brilliantly wrote: “In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.”
Mishima used words in an incredibly skillful way, and he is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century, carrying 4 Nobel prizes in literature. However, at the age of 30, he realized that identification with words had the effect of “divorcing him from physical reality”. Mishima found that something was missing and committed to intensive physical training—weightlifting, running, boxing, and kendo, Japanese fencing with bamboo swords. He compared it to acquiring a second language, the process being “an aspect of spiritual development.” His autobiographical essay “Sun and Steel” is an ode to the link between flesh and consciousness, the realization that the two form an inseparable whole. By engaging in physical practice, and soaking in the non-verbal experience that it provides, he reported sensations of “wholeness” and “unity”, an arrival to a destination where he could be present to the flux of reality, without any interventions that impose themselves on it. Despite his tragic end, it does seem that Yukio Mishima had found some magic formula to experience life in a much more profound way than the trap of constant intellectualization. The rumination on the past or future is a disease that is hard to get rid of, but there is a treatment. Turning back into the body, and engaging with such a simple yet complex idea of physical movement, is a remedy for a life that is not being lived in the present moment, the only one that really exists.
“If that were all, it would merely mean that I had trodden somewhat belatedly the same path as other people. I had another scheme of my own, however. Insofar as the spirit was concerned—I told myself—there was nothing especially out of the way in the idea of some particular thought invading my spirit, enlarging it, and eventually occupying the whole of it. Since, however, I was gradually beginning to weary of the dualism of flesh and spirit, it naturally occurred to me to wonder why such an incident should occur within the spirit and come to an end at its outer fringes. There are, of course, many cases of psychosomatic diseases where the spirit extends its domain to the body. But what I was considering went further than this. Granted that my flesh in infancy had made itself apparent in intellectual guise, corroded by words, then should it not be possible to reverse the process—to extend the scope of an idea from the spirit to the flesh until the whole physical being became a suit of armor forged from the metal of that concept? The idea in question, as I have already suggested in my definition of tragedy, resolved itself into the concept of the body. And it seemed to me that the flesh could be “intellectualized” to a higher degree, could achieve a closer intimacy with ideas, than the spirit.” Y. Mishima