Language Equals Thought: Difference between revisions

** This is slightly subverted as Severian notes that Loyal to the Group of 17 is able to use the phrases to communicate meanings different from their original intention.

* ''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}}.

{{quote|Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.}}

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

*** Which, while awesome, is also kind of silly: we have words describing air and wind after all...

*** 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."

{{quote|'''Vimes:''' They certainly make their language do a lot of work, don't they?}}

*** 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".

*** In the same book, an enraged Rincewind is trying like hell to swear at Twoflower over his latest example of boneheadedness, but since the only language they had in common was Trob, which had no profanities, the result is... rather odd.

*** [[Truth in Television]] here: in [[Real Life]], a pejorative Chinese word for foreigners, Europeans specifically, is "lo fan", which means "white ghost".

*** From the same book, there's a Borogravian folk song called "Plogviehze", which means [[Translation: "Yes"|"The Sun Has Risen, Let's Make War!"]] Vimes notes that it takes a very special history to get that into one word.

**** 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.

{{quote|"She didn't think the word, because as far as Tiffany knew it meant 'slightly cold'. But she thought the thought."}}

* 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".

** 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.

** Played for some laughs in the same episode when another group of war-like aliens show up to claim her as a trophy, she describes them as "not nice".

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Newspeak]]

[[Category:Artistic License Linguistics]]

[[Category:Language Tropes]]