An example of this invincible bond can be found in “1984,” where the revelation of whether knowledge of an abstract idea can exist if there is no language to express that idea. Specifically, the deletion of the words “justice” and “freedom” from the vocabulary of the populations that presided under the control of the “Big Brother Regime.” This deletion was accomplished by the “Big Brother” authorities by external systematic destruction of words, in the creation of the Newspeak dictionary, which lacked those non-existing words. In doing so, the people went about their lives never pondering of rebellion against the totalitarian state, because in their reality, they lived in neither a state of “freedom” or “slavery” because there existed no such word to convey that thought. Therefore, this example portrays how language affects knowledge.
An example of how knowledge affects language can be found in a more specific aspect of knowledge, which are values of a particular culture. Through the years, American culture has changed and adapted to fit the modern times of the day, and entailing these modifications of American culture were its many important, although subtle cultural values. A specific example of these cultural values can be extracted from the occurrences of the past third week of September. The word “terrorism” now stirs many emotions in the minds of the American public. This word has always denoted “terror”, “fear”, and even “Middle Eastern”, “Islam”, “Arab”, and “Muslim”. However, before September 11th, terrorism was always looked upon by the American public as something far away or distant, which, of course, has now been completely changed. The many headlines of newspaper articles, television news broadcasts, and radio are, “Attack on America.” Thus, the perception of the American public of the word “terrorism” is felt to be closer to “home.” This change in perception clearly shows how the language has been affected by the cultural values of the American society, which is in essence, knowledge.
In these two examples, two types of bonds between language and knowledge have been given- the relation of how language is affected by knowledge and the inverse relation of how knowledge is affected by language. A valid conclusion can be made that the two types of bonds stated are vastly different in nature, and cannot be switched for the other as the same. However, one general perception can be made when the two examples are viewed as a whole, which is the impossibility of the existence of either knowledge or language void of the other and the invincibility of this bond.
