I’m working on a short essay that will be the tenth in my series, “Essential Notes on Linguistics”. Here’s a short excerpt:
[We must come to understand that] our senses are crudely finite, and our languages are crudely finite. In ‘reflecting’ their distinct worlds -- the physical world and the world of thought -- both sense and language are reflecting but the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, we would be more accurate to say we observe but a mere atom of the iceberg’s tip. And yet we imagine our sensual experience to be nearly complete and all-encompassing, and we imagine our language captures the whole of a thought, or at least the better part of the whole.
It is not so. Our languages, like our senses, are grossly limited in the fineness of their resolution. Consider: if we say someone is ‘kind,’ does the hearer (or even the sayer) know anything of the nature of that kindness, what generated it, its sincerity, its depth, how enduring it is in the actor, what positive and negative results it will or may generate in the receiver, what feedbacks will or may follow in its wake?
Our languages, like our senses, are also grossly limited in the range of their ‘apertures.’ We have but five senses and can, at best, barely imagine a 6th or 7th sense. None of us can even begin to imagine what kind of experience we might have with 10,000 senses! The same is true of language. A word is more a ‘closing off’ than an ‘opening up.’ It is more a wall than a window. Grammar is even more of a wall. If you think I’m exaggerating, describe the 4th dimension. Describe a wave as a particle or a particle as a wave. Physicists have been working on that one for the better part of a century now, to no avail.