Language Equals Thought: Difference between revisions

== Comicbooks ==

* This trope is lampshaded in Larry Gonick's ''[[Cartoon History of the Universe]]'', after it's mentioned that the people of Athens were decimated (i.e., killed every tenth person--though in actual Roman times this was reserved for executing deserters, but [[Rule of Funny]] reigns in this case):

* Subverted in [[Justice League of America|JLA]], in one issue of [[Grant Morrison]]'s run. [[Mad Scientist|Mad scientists]] T.O. Morrow and Dr. Ivo decide to find out which one of them is the better scientist by creating an android super-hero named Tomorrow Woman to invade the League and then destroy it. Morrow (in charge of the brain while Ivo was in charge of the body) deliberately leaves the word "freedom" out of her vocabulary. Despite this, when the time for her to destroy the JLA, she defies her very programming, making a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] to save the other members of the JLA. When Superman asks her remains why she did that in the last seconds of her activation, she says [[I Die Free|"word not present in vocabulary"]].

** Showing his true character as a scientist (if a mad one) T.O. Morrow was so thrilled by his creation's transcendence of her programming that he didn't mind being arrested (though it's also likely that he's just happy that he "won" the dispute)

* Inverted in ''The Basalt City Chronicles'', a race known as the Deltharians have no word for sound. This is because around 98% of the population has a genetic condition that renders them entirely deaf.

* Discussed in the ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' fanfic ''Destiny's Pawn.'' Kairi (the mind-wiped Revan) had been given a new identity as a linguist. Even Zhar is a little baffled by why she would rather use conventional language study rather than relying on the Force. And Kairi is fustrated by the Jedi Masters lazy assumptions about Mandalorians part because of her association with Canderous and part because they haven't a single document in the Mandlorian language in the archives.

 

== Film ==

* ''[[The Chronicles of Riddick]]'':

* ''[[The Invention of Lying]]''. They have no word for the act of lying; the closest they get, throughout the film, is "saying something that isn't". Even the protagonist, who is the one who comes up with lying, can't think of a word for it.

* Lampshaded in [[John Woo]]'s ''[[Broken Arrow (1996 film)|Broken Arrow]]''. "I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there's actually a ''term'' for it."

* ''Babel-17'' by [[Samuel Delany]] is built wholly around this trope. The smallest (and least spoilish) example is a race of aliens whose language is based almost entirely around temperature gradients but have no word for "house" - because of this, they build incomprehensible starships that look like a mass of strung-together boiled eggs. And of course, {{spoiler|the titular language enables extremely fast thinking and enhanced spatial awareness}}.

* Also used in the [[Discworld]] novel "[[Discworld/Witches Abroad|Witches Abroad]]", with specific reference to the Inuit/snow legend, by saying...it's false. And that, similarly, dwarves don't have a hundred words for "rock". They have words describing the ''precise kind'' of rock--igneous, sedimentary, and that's just to start--but not one for just "rock":

** And then there's how dwarves feel about gold, which is almost a language in and of itself.

** In "[[Discworld/Small Gods|Small Gods]]", Vorbis, a powerful Omnian Quisitor, while visiting the Ephebian Tyrant in order persuade them to surrender, notes that "slave" is an Ephebian word, and Omnians have no word for slave. "I imagine fish have no word for water," the Tyrant says.

*** Also in "Small Gods", we meet a fisherman from a tiny tribe that has no word for "war". When the gods appear and tell everyone (in their own languages) to stop waging war {{spoiler|on Omnia}}, it comes across as "remember when Pacha Moj hit his uncle with big rock? Like that, only more worse."

** Played straight with the D'regs, who have the same word for 'stranger' and 'target'. Many Native American languages—Navajo and Apache, for instance—use the same word for 'foreigner' and 'enemy', so that's not that much of a stretch. 'D'reg' wasn't even their original name, it was just the word used by all their neighbors for 'enemy'. They adopted the name out of pride. Oh, and their word for 'freedom' is the same as their word for 'fighting'.

*** It's actually a bit like that in Indo-European languages. For instance, "guest" and "hostile" (via Latin "hostis") are both derived from the same Proto-Indo-European word meaning "stranger".

** Also played straight in ''[[Discworld/The Colour of Magic|The Colour of Magic]]'' with a language containing "no nouns, and only one adjective, which is obscene." We never see its speakers, but there are presumably either not many of them left or, umm,quite a few of them.

**** Were it a real language, one might surmise that it's a compound of [[Dawn Attack|"dawn" and "attack"]] with some grammatical feature indicating it's a suggestion.

** Similarly to Polly and "freaky", when Tiffany thinks that the [[Discworld/Wintersmith|Wintersmith]] writing her name on the window in frost is just a bit ... cool.

* In the allegorical fantasy novel ''Crown of the Dragon'', there is a subversion: It takes place in a world divided into two countries, good and evil. The evil country is pretty much what you'd expect, but the good country has things like enforced mandatory smiling, and has wiped out all words with negative meanings. They can still say "not good" when they mean "bad", it's just heavily frowned upon. When the inevitable clash with the evil kingdom comes, they have to dig out ancient pages from forbidden works in order to fight the Black Prince's "scheming".

* [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Stranger in A Strange Land]]''. Dr. Mahmoud (a linguist) says that since the Martians don't have words for "war," "weapon" or "fighting," they aren't aggressive. He says: "If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." However, this is subverted at the end when we learn that the Martians are more than capable of annihilating entire planets if they feel the need.

** Similarly Louis Wu's Kzin friend in ''[[Ringworld]]'', a translator at the UN, has a job title (he hasn't [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|made a name for himself]] yet) that literally translates as "Speaker-to-Animals". He usually renders it as "interspecies translator", of course, but when he's annoyed he uses the literal version, to be insulting. (Although Louis, obviously not insulted, calls him "Speaker" throughout.)

* In [[Callahan's Crosstime Saloon|Callahan's Legacy]], the alien creature the gang nicknames "The Lizard" has 360-degree vision, its three eyes spaced around its body. This comes into play when they're trying to talk with it. Though it doesn't trust them...

** They obviously had concepts for "[[Trap Door]]" and "[[Death From Above]]", however.

* ''[[The Culture]]'' apparently invokes this intentionally with 'Marain', their official language, which in-universe was [[Con Lang|created from whole cloth]] around the time of the Culture's foundation. Some of the Narrators take time in their '[[Literary Agent Hypothesis|Translation Notes]]' to lambast such 'barbaric' concepts as gender-specific pronouns, for example.

* In ''[[Incarnations of Immortality]]'', it's mentioned that the Romani (Gypsies) have no words for "posession" or "ownership", meaning that the concept of "stealing" doesn't exist for them.

* ''[[Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency|Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency]]'' poked fun at this:

* In ''[[Who Cut the Cheese?]]'' by Mason Brown, it is commented that Germans have as many words for unhappiness as Eskimos have for snow, like ''[[Comedic Sociopathy|Schadenfreude]]''.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' TOS episode "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby"

'''Frisby''': You mean that anything that anybody tells you just goes without saying it's the truth? Hence that everything I've told you you believe... }}

* In the penultimate episode of ''[[Babylon 5]]'', Delenn describes how when she was learning English, she had difficulty with the word "goodbye,"<ref>For values of "goodbye" more equal to "goodbye forever," or perhaps the most exacting form of "sayonara"</ref> because there is no corresponding word in any Minbari language:

** Hebrew actually has the same "problem", if you will. "Lehithraoth", the Hebrew "goodbye" actually means, literally, something more like "we will meet again", or at the very least "I hope that we will meet again."

* In the ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' episode "Loud as a Whisper", the Enterprise crew meet a famed diplomat Riva. Worf comments that Riva had negotiated treaties among the Klingon people; "Before Riva, there was no word in Klingon for 'peacemaker'."

* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' has some fun in this regard with its flavor texts. Some examples:

** [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=130384 Bloodrock Cyclops]:

** [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=48592 Goblin Striker]:

* ''[[In Nomine]]'' has the Angelic language of Celestial, which cannot be used to tell a lie. (It's uncertain how this is accomplished.) When Lucifer and his followers Fell, they created a bastardised version capable of lies. Incidentally, this means that Demons understand Celestial, but very few Angels understand Demonic.

* The magical High Speech in ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' is said to be the only language which can accurately describe magic and magical processes. Using High Speech while casting a spell makes it more powerful since it aids the mage in conceptualizing the magic in a way which his human mind is not fully capable of. The fact that High Speech is primarily taught as a language to describe magic also makes it quite difficult to come up with ways of using it to communicate mundanely; the way a word in the High Speech would describe something (and the grammatical structure that would tie such words together) is too far removed from how a mage generally understands such things. This is part of the reason that [[Muggles|sleepers]] cannot so much as ''hear'' the High Speech, let alone understand it; you could say the same thing in High Speech to a sleeper over and over, and they would only hear random gibberish.

== Theater ==

* ''[[Avenue Q]]'' [[Hangs a Lampshade]] on this trope in their song "[[Schadenfreude]]":

'''Gary''': Yup! It's German for "happiness at the misfortune of others!"<br />

'''Nicky''': "Happiness at the misfortune of others"? That ''is'' German! }}

* In ''[[Homestuck]]'', the Troll language word for 'friend' is the same as the word for 'enemy.' [[With Friends Like These...|Considering the general nature of Troll relationships]], this is quite fitting.

** The Troll language is also [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004292 much more complex] than the human language when it comes to the subject of romance. Human culture would, for example, have difficulty diagnosing kismesis - but would also have trouble with moirallegiance (and would be likely to consider it extremely unhealthy). Troll culture, on the other hand, has no term for homosexuality, since troll reproduction works so that any pairing can produce progeny (it's complex, and it involves birth by proxy). This disconnect was only [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004528 recently learned]:

'''EB''': i am just as confused by your troll shenanigans }}

** Karkat also claims that Trolls [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003807 have no word for "dare"].

** [[Unreliable Narrator|You gotta take these remarks with a grain of salt]], however: the one about "friend" and "enemy" being the same word was said ''by'' a troll, ''to'' a troll. There's obviously a difference, or else it would come across as "The troll word for blarg is the same as the troll word for blarg", and make no sense.

* In ''[[8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Eight Bit Theater]]'', [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2003/12/16/episode-364-the-economics-of-pride/ Princess Sara comments] that there is no word for the degree of stupid for the Dark Warriors.

** In another comic, Black Mage says that no word can accurately describe his hatred for Fighter, so he asks Red Mage to help him invent one. RM suggests several good candidates, but BM goes with "[[Neologism|Omniloathe]]". Fighter, [[The Ditz|as usual]], [[Completely Missing the Point|misinterprets this]] and [[Insult Backfire|spends the next few minutes inventing new words to describe what good buddies he and BM are]].

 

== Web Originals ==

* From [[Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do In An RPG]]:

1850: There is also an elven word for "[[Cast Full of Gay|heterosexual]]". }}

* Inverted with the [[SCP Foundation]]'s [http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-444 SCP-444]: A memetic virus which, once heard by a human, starts to alter their brain and simplify the language. The more they speak it, the more docile and less individualized they become. It's virulent ''and'' hereditary in infants -- the Foundation considers it a precursor to an alien invasion.

* ''[[The Simpsons]]'' parodied this in an episode about Joan of Arc. Lisa (playing Joan of Arc) tells her family that she got a vision from God to lead the French to victory. Homer then whines "We're French! [[Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys|We don't have a word for "victory"!]] <ref>The French word for "victory" is "victoire", for those of you who were wondering.</ref>

* In the ''[[Teen Titans (animation)|Teen Titans]]'' [[Whole-Episode Flashback]] [[Everyone Meets Everyone]] episode, "Go!", Starfire, who hails from a warrior planet, is chewed out by the others for attacking them when they try to help her:

'''Starfire:''' Nice? We do not have this word on my planet. The closest is ''rutha''...'''weak'''. }}

** Note that in this case "being nice" was being used to mean "doing something for no gain to myself, possibly causing harm to myself, in order for another to gain." Which could come across as weak.