I just finished listening to Lex Friedman’s interview of Yeonmi Park (here), a North Korean survivor living in the US, which I fully recommend, it touches on some of the things discussed here.
First, I agree with you in the fact that limiting our vocabulary does not necessarily mean that we won’t be able to talk about a specific idea. I also think that signalling is part of the reason, though I don’t think is the main one.
Words are forged to refer to clusters of reality that we consider worth referring to in an abridged way: remove the word, and you still can refer to that thing, but now it becomes harder and you need more effort. So in this regard, I do think that removing words from our vocabulary really conditions the sort of things we can talk about. You don’t need to make something extremely people in order to make people not use it, just a bit more difficult is enough. Even if you develop your own words to refer to certain unnamed clusters, you still need to transmit what those clusters are to other people in order to make a conversation going, and convince them to use them, which also takes effort.
Interesting post.
I just finished listening to Lex Friedman’s interview of Yeonmi Park (here), a North Korean survivor living in the US, which I fully recommend, it touches on some of the things discussed here.
First, I agree with you in the fact that limiting our vocabulary does not necessarily mean that we won’t be able to talk about a specific idea. I also think that signalling is part of the reason, though I don’t think is the main one.
Words are forged to refer to clusters of reality that we consider worth referring to in an abridged way: remove the word, and you still can refer to that thing, but now it becomes harder and you need more effort. So in this regard, I do think that removing words from our vocabulary really conditions the sort of things we can talk about. You don’t need to make something extremely people in order to make people not use it, just a bit more difficult is enough. Even if you develop your own words to refer to certain unnamed clusters, you still need to transmit what those clusters are to other people in order to make a conversation going, and convince them to use them, which also takes effort.