Words index Vivian Cook

What does a word mean?

 It seems easy enough to say what a word means. ‘sun’ meansÕ, ‘dog’ means õ. Well of course it doesn’t, õ is a picture of a dog, not a real dog, the same point made by Magritte labelling a picture of a pipe ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe’.

 So does ‘dog’ mean a real dog rather than a picture? If ‘dog’ meant a concrete individual dog, you would need a unique name for each dog, as indeed occurs in the Kennel Club’s rules – ‘Philabar’s Rhythem and Blues’ for example. Instead ‘dog’ means an abstract dog, i.e. dogs in general. It’s the idea of a dog in your mind, which relates to all dogs, not to any dog in particular, so that you can see a Chihuahua or a poodle, Rover from next door or Santa’s Little Helper, and say ‘that’s a dog’ if it fits your idea of ‘dog’.

 The meaning of the word ‘dog’ is then both how the word ‘dog’ goes with the concept of ‘dog’ in our mind and how the concept goes with an animal in the world. The crucial link between the word ‘dog’ and the animal is the human mind; there’s no way of connecting the words and the world without the mind. The word ‘dog’ is the label through which English people handle their perception of the world. When we say a word refers to something, we are making a short cut that leaves out the mind in between. So despite our instincts, there is no necessary link between the sounds of a word and its meaning.  

There is even no need for the actual object to exist in the real world. Unicorns and Martians exist only in pictures and in mental concepts but there are words for them. The words ‘truth’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘education’ are abstract ideas in the mind; at best we can give examples of true things, of globalisation or education. Nor does the thing we are talking about even have to pretend to exist – we can after all talk about ‘nothing’ or ‘the square root of minus one’. Words are clumps of information that represent our mental world, whether real or imaginary.

 So the physical world is not cut up into discrete objects, each of which has a word; it is divided up by our minds into concepts for which our language supplies words. English for example has two words for ‘arm’ and ‘wrist’  where Greek has just one CHECK. English has separate words for fingers and toes, Greek gives them both the same name CHECK. In reverse English has only two words for grandparents ‘grandmother’ & ‘grandfather’ while many languages like Swedish have distinct words for your mother’s parents ‘farfar’ and ‘farmor’, and your father’s parents ‘morfar’ and ‘mormor’ CHECK. For some reason standard English makes more anatomical distinctions, less distinctions for relatives than some other languages, whether for cultural reasons (some English dialects do separate your ‘nan’ from your ‘gran’ and your ‘grandpa’ from your ‘granfer’) or for historical reasons (check OE arm and wrist). The interesting question is what happens when you speak two languages?

 Since human beings confront rather similar physical worlds, their vocabulary may reflect similar organisation of their mental worlds. We all need a word for the sun and the moon, for food and drink, for mother and son. But even the commonest things may be perceived quite differently. Speakers of Hopi, an indigenous American language, don’t have a single word for water but have different words for water in a lake ‘kehi’, and for water to drink ‘pahe’. Japanese doesn’t have a single word for rice but different words for raw rice XXX, cooked rice ‘gohan’ and rice cooked for foreigners ‘raisu’.

This is then the problem with translation. When you go from one language to another, you can’t expect there to be an exact equivalent. Turning English ‘rice’ into Japanese means settling the question of whether the rice is raw, cooked or for foreigners. Many languages have an everyday word for ‘children of the same parent’, ‘Geschwister’ in German; English only has the sociologists’ term, ‘sibling’. So how do you translate ‘Wieviel Geschwistern haben Sie?’ How many X have you got’? ‘Siblings’ makes it sound like academic research rather than ordinary conversation. The only real possibility is to change the concept into ‘brothers and sisters’, not quite the same but the closest English can get to it.

 Our concepts and our vocabulary are then in a symbiotic relationship. A new idea needs a new word; the word ‘i-pod’ wasn’t needed till the gadget was invented. A new word needs a meaning to be more than a sequence of nonsense sounds; making up the word ‘flink’ is useless unless I have something to use it for.

 Of  course there may be concepts that are intrinsic to the workings of our mind. Anna Wierzbicka has spent a lifetime trying to find universals of meaning true of all human languages coming up with sixty or so elements in fifteen groups. One group ‘I, you. Someone, something,. People body’ another ‘live, die’, another ‘kind of, part of’. These are then the basic ideas that all human beings share.

 The fact that all human beings share a particular meaning still does not provide explain why. Why should we all want to talk about ‘I’ and ‘live? It could be our shared human situation; as we all do live and die, we all need to talk about the experience. Or it could be hardwired into our brains; we think in terms of ‘kind of’ and ‘part of’ because that’s the way that our brains work, just as deep underlying the most sophisticated computer routine is a binary sequence of ‘0’s and ‘1’s.  

There is nevertheless the possibility that ideas are independent from language; can we think without words? Some people separate thinking from thinking for language; at some level we think without words; mostly probably we turn the ideas into words to be able to handle them better in our minds or to be able to talk to other people. There may then be a stratum where concepts are separate from language. But how can we tell other people about it without passing through language?