Humans are conquerors. We conquered the manipulation of nature. We conquered the understanding of the mind. However, our best conquest was communication.
Language is the most powerful tool of humankind, so powerful it can’t be demolished. Communication removed all kinds of barriers and set human beings free. The ability to express one’s feelings, emotions and ideas lead to evolution.
This all happened due to language. Regardless, we as conquerors are more complex than that. Language could just be one conquest, but then society moulded what we now call vocabulary. Communicating means to convey our beliefs and practices to one another. Nevertheless, we need to pay attention not to naively accept what is passed on to us. Hence, humans became powerful, egocentric, jealous and materialistic, so through vocabulary, they found a way to obscure facts and shape what they wanted to be society’s knowledge. Through speeches, religion, science, the media and through publicizing people’s words, what we know as a society might be limited. Through the power of words we are lead to reason and knowledge; still, these may not be true or simply a mere perspective.
This question is whether vocabulary merely communicates knowledge or if it can actually change it.
Indeed, communicating goes beyond the common transfer of information. The vocabulary can determine the way we see the world. A person’s vocabulary usually develops with age and serves as a useful and important tool for acquiring and communicating knowledge. The Nobel Prize-Winning writer José Saramago once observed that “Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt”; in spite of that, we know today that a large amount of knowledge is reflected through vocabulary, personal and cultural. In fact, a person may be judged by others based on his or her vocabulary.
In this sense, we first experience the world and then we learn the language in which we express our experiences and our knowledge. Reason and emotion, which separate human beings from animals, make perception and understanding possible. This is why knowledge parts from a subjective belief i.e. it is put into test with reality and is argued whether it is reliable or not. Although Plato’s perspective of knowledge as “justified true believe” relates facts with knowing, it seems inaccurate, as knowledge is not the same as opinion. Furthermore, knowledge is different from information as it implies thinking and understanding. It also differs from second-hand knowledge, which is valuable but limited because it is passed on by authority.
The Saphir-Whorf hypothesis states that the vocabulary determines our experience of reality and the way we think. Despite this linguistic relativism, the opposite seems to be more credible. For example, the Portuguese word ‘saudade’ doesn’t translate to any other language. It expresses a nostalgic feeling for someone and reveals a lot of the Portuguese people and their culture. This can serve as an example of how our knowledge can be shaped by vocabulary.
Moreover, the vocabulary has a greater function, which is to frame our knowledge. For instance, due to globalisation and improvements in technology the world has shrunk, allowing us to connect and spread our vocabulary. We acquired a new vocabulary and now we ‘surf the web’, we ‘like’ pages, through messages we abbreviate words. Certainly, this changed our knowledge in what refers to communicating with family, friends, at school, at work and leisure. Internet, social networks, skyping, blogging have altered our reality and consequently our understanding of reality. A new vocabulary was created.
These tools gave us the opportunity to communicate between cultures, namely with global languages such as English. Knowing and speaking a mother tongue is completely different than speaking a foreign language, as Charlemagne declared, “To have another language is to possess a second soul”. Sometimes we can get lost in translation, as we have grown with our own vocabulary and it is difficult to adapt to a different one. This is mostly evident when we struggle to translate directly from one language to another.
In primary school, we are taught to communicate our knowledge. Logic is simple; there is only one perception (the teacher’s) and no emotions. When we reach secondary school the vocabulary we learn in these areas is both aimed to communicate and shape our knowledge. Therefore, vocabulary is directed to you to form a perspective, in other words, it shapes your mind.
In conclusion, human beings have the power to shape knowledge in the form of vocabulary, misleading information and obscuring the truth. Albert Einstein said that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’ This contributes to the study of the individual and society. Society shapes the individual’s knowledge but our imagination and dreams cannot be controlled.
