How does vocabulary shape our knowledge?

From the aspect of culture, Scotland is famous for its alcohol beverage: whiskey. The word “sgirob” is specially invented to describe such specific sentiment with clear indication of this certain type of drink, which no other languages in the world can translate this definition within a single word. On the other hand, Italy has great reputation of sea transportation and local cuisine. Despite from the given definition, “culacino” also means, “ the trail of a vessel leaving a place” and “the round end of a salami”. Although all definitions indicate the trail of something or the certain part of a specific object (that could leave trails too), but none of which has an absolute word that could fully represent them in different languages.

However, such uniqueness also result some global consequences, where people of other culture or language are difficult to understand the importance of a particular vocabulary, because they don’t have the experience of the historical or cultural aspects of such word, thus unable to relate themselves to it. This questions the existence of universal knowledge within language: if knowledge can’t be converted or even exist in another language, how reliable can language be to restore and transfer knowledge?

As the qualitative side of vocabulary consists of limited knowledge, it’s likely that the vocabularies of quantitative meanings can cause the same result. Pirahã, an Amazonian community with only 300 speakers of their language, can only identify items of “few”, “some” and “lots”, because the lack of vocabulary for numbers. Based on a specific experiment for them, they showed no difficulties in duplicating the same amount of balloons if they were to line them one by one, but failed to perform the same when they are asked to line out balloons through memory.

This experiment shows the influence that language could create on knowledge. The Pirahã has showed that they understand the meaning of “same amount” in the first experiment. The reason to why they did not succeed the second experiment may link the unfamiliarity to the concept of numbers. Pirahã don’t have words for specific numbers, thus they do not contain the knowledge of what numbers like 2 would look like in visual form. The phenomenon of this result is the same as asking a person to picture specific amount of objects without counting. This task would be simple to accomplish if the number is small (e.g.: 2), but would become rather difficult to imagine with numbers such as 38, without calculating objects one by one to fulfill the task.

The visual obstacles that the Pirahã faces could be the reason of lacking emphasis on calculation in their culture, which other regions such as Europe and Asia have great reliance on it. Calculation provides the basic yet important skill: count. With the ability to count, people can perform precise techniques through varies aspects:  the rhythm of music, the scale of architecture, even the proportion of ingredients in cooking. The Pirahã’s disability to count is caused by the narrowed perception that is shaped because of its culture, which affected the structure of its language by the lack of numeral vocabularies, thus causing the counting experiment to be visually challenged.

Vocabulary to some extent, does limits the boundary of knowledge, by culture differences and formation of language in each country. However, there are situations when vocabulary represents the absolute linkage between knowledge.

My own experience of the incredible impact of vocabulary was formed by a phone call I made to my grandmother in childhood, complaining about my mother’s bad temper. In the middle of conversation, I found myself struggling to describe my mother’s identity to my grandmother. When we were little, we learnt that mother’s mother is “grandmother”; mother’s father is “grandfather”. We understood that grandparents are the parents of our mothers. On the contrast, nobody tend to teach us what our mothers are to grandparents. While I was trying to describe the situation of the fight, I had a vague idea of the meaning of “daughter”, but failed to understand it completely due to the unfamiliarity of this word. The absence of the word “daughter” somehow created a sense of confusion and doubts between the relation of my mother and my grandmother, furthermore, the relation of my mother and I.

Afterwards, I learnt the meaning of “daughter”, with a weird feeling to absorb this new information into my vocabulary. It shaped my basic knowledge of this moral connection to “the identity of a girl to her parents”. However, later on I realized the existence of other possible ways to become “daughter” in both biological (e.g.: artificial insemination) and social aspects (e.g.: adoption), which reshaped my knowledge of this word and proved the possibility that the meaning of a word may not be represented completely, thus created doubts on the truth of vocabulary. This not only challenged the ways we function language, but also our logic towards processing the vocabularies into meanings.

From the aspect of history, we can see that the invention of vocabulary depends on the diversity of culture, which results some knowledge to be concealed within individual languages. When translating certain vocabularies, there may be words that can be expressed similarly to the original meaning. However, some pieces of the meaning will always be lost to a certain degree, causing gaps within the translation of vocabularies and the doubts on their absolute meanings. When we observe from the aspect of mathematics, where Amazonians are restricted to count due to the limitation of numerical vocabularies, this proves vocabulary has the power to limit our ability to perform certain actions, especially actions that require a degree of knowledge to do.

However, regardless of the limitation of knowledge that language has shaped us upon, we have also generated other form of communication that does not have the necessity to access through language. The existence of emotion enables us to transfer messages such as emotions of sadness and happiness, or even expressions that are complexly intertwining and cannot be put into words easily without the limitation of vocabulary. The use of “facial language” is based upon the ability to change expressions that is built into us biologically in general, we are able to understanding others emotion mutually because we can create the identical expression on our own, such form of communication indicates that an absence of a word can sometimes be overcome and can even create less uncertainty, thereby decreasing the doubts of the existence of an universal knowledge within communication.

To conclude, vocabulary to some extent does indeed shape our knowledge, which furthermore restrains our ability to perform knowledge. Language can only be reliable of transferring knowledge when there is a mutual or similar base of history or culture underneath the vocabulary, or when it’s accompanied by another form of communication. We cannot doubt the importance of culture and history of what they can do to effect language; however, it’s also notable that both aspects are somewhat artificial, which certain fragments of truth may be misinterpreted by accident or on purpose. However, it’s also possible to retain the universal understandings through other form of communication with more accuracy, thus we should digest the truthfulness of the knowledge within language, by knowing the possible uncertainties hidden beneath it.

Word Count: 1598