Descriptive Dissonance

This week’s readings by Slobin, Haspelmath, Atkins, and Levins provided a breadth of technical information ranging from the differences in how languages describe motion events to the linguistic significance of “lexemes” and “word-forms”. Lexemes can be thought of as the base form of a word, particularly what we would expect to be found in a dictionary. A word-form can be thought of as all of the variations for a lexeme such as its past, present, or future tenses.

            The topic I found most interesting about this week’s readings was the idea of differences in description suggested by Slobin and the paper by Atkins and Levins. This phenomenon, which I will now dub “descriptive dissonance”, was something that came as a bit of a surprise. I was under the assumption that most, if not all languages, possessed the necessary tools to describe the motion of an owl popping out of a tree, for instance. While it would appear that some languages, such as Spanish, do possess the option to emphasize and highlight the motion of the subject in a sentence, it is also the case that many speakers of these languages tend to not utilize these mechanics in colloquial speech. Going back to the owl example, it is more common for some speakers to merely say that the owl “exited the tree” rather than stating that the owl “flew out” or “popped out”. The mental images I get of an owl exiting a tree as opposed to an owl popping out of a tree also differ greatly. In the latter case, it appears to me that the owl is moving more quickly.

            I wonder what sort of effects this descriptive dissonance has on the imaginations of those who speak different languages. Inuits, for example, have many words for snow in order to describe its different stages. I posit that Inuits can form more accurate mental images for the different stages of snow than a speaker of a language with only one word for “snow”. Similarly, a speaker of a language that possesses many words for shades of blue may have a better time determining an exact shade of blue if given said color. Naturally, such languages have developed a plethora of words for such objects because these objects have become culturally significant.

            My true interest lies in what would happen if we were to create a language that possessed an exorbitant amount of words for various objects and their states of being? How would this language in turn affect human thinking? Unwieldy as such a language might be, perhaps such a language may enable one to attain a greater universal understanding of what different cultures find significant.