Language as Reality

Our mental grammar is the system that we have in our minds which allows us all to understand each other. Much of the knowledge of mental grammar is not accessible to your conscious awareness. This makes it hard to learn a language, because implicit knowledge is hard to explain, measure, and we’re mostly unaware of the implicit knowledge that we have. You can’t explain to me how you read English.

Language allows us to create entirely novel sentences, and understand them when we hear them. If language is a set of rules, then sentences are our attempt at solving these rules. When we solve these rules in a way unseen by an audience, we call this creativity. Learning a new language helps with creativity because some languages make it easier to explain some concepts than others — though any language can express any possible concept.

I’ve noticed while communicating with others, especially in casual settings like hanging out with old friends, we often interpret the same concept differently. Sometimes, while reminiscing about a teacher, one person is laughing jovially while another is clearly distressed. Despite discussing the same person, different emotions come to mind. This suggests that while creativity allows us to express ideas in unique ways, rationality — a universal mental grammar of sorts — allows us to find common ground.

When I set out to master Chinese in September 2024, it was because I wanted a new framework for understanding the world. I firmly believe that the success of Greek philosophers was deeply tied to the development of Ancient Greek, just as the Arabic language played a crucial role in shaping the development of Algebra. In other words, I don’t think that language reflects reality, rather, language shapes it.

This brings me to a point about the development of the Chinese Language. In the preface of the Kangxi Dictionary (1716), the emperor wrote:

Every time I read widely in the commentaries on the classics, the pronunciations and meanings are complex and obscure, and each person protects his own explanations according to his individual view, so that it is not likely that any will communicate everything without gaps. Thus I have ordered the scholar officials to acquire all the old documents, then to arrange them and revise them.

While acknowledging the literary depth of commentaries on the classics, the emperor attempted to clarify and unify the chinese language via the Kangxi Dictionary. Since the rise of communism, the Chinese language has shifted from a broad, diverse system to a more unified, simplified one—much like the concept of Newspeak in Orwell's 1984.

As much as we try to make a language standard, the reality is that language changes every day, and so does culture. Imagine if we turned on today’s news five years ago. I bet that we would hardly know what “Zelensky,” “LLM,” or “Transformer” is — words that are now ubiquitous.

I’ve noticed this shift through my weekly vocab jams on vocabulary.com. After doing enough of the “English Words Derived from Yiddish,” it became clear to me that Yiddish was largely shaped by the circumstances of the underlying population. Words like schmaltz (liquid animal fat) and nebbish (a timid unfortunate simpleton) offer a glimpse into the Jewish framework.

Interestingly, we don’t seem to have a word for “that one asshole at work that we put up with because he keeps the lights on.” Yet there is an entire language of nonbinary pronouns that I haven’t tapped into yet. This seems to be because languages evolve based on social necessity and cultural emphasis rather than logic.