What role do language and language diversity play in the critical thinking process?

Answer

Language diversity is essential for critical thinking. Language is logic. A language contains everything its speakers can think about or consider. For example, in Latin the word for friend is amicus, and the Romans took the idea very seriously. My friend is another me (alter ego), they said. But your basic ancient Roman male had no word for a female friend. The idea of having a female friend did not exist in his mind. The feminine form of amicus is amica, and it does not mean friend, but only girlfriend or mistress, because it was illogical for a male to consider any female to be anything like his equal. In Rome, a female did not even have her own name, only a feminine form of her father's name ( and a nickname, often Greek, to tell her apart from her sisters and cousins ), and she was legally the property of the senior male member of her family, who might be a teen-age adopted great-nephew.

But if this hypothetical Roman had to learn the Celtic language of the people he called Germans, whose females enjoyed more-or-less equal standing to the men in their own society, the possibility of a female friend would necessarily be introduced into his speech. What effect would this have on his critical thinking? A profound one, to be sure, and that is but one single word/idea.

The greater part of the Greek vocabulary in English comes through the Latin, where it was introduced because Latin lacked the ideas most of the words stood for, not just the words. When only the word is missing, but some other language's imagery makes sense already, languages often make loan-translations rather than borrowing the foreign words. The English word superman, for example is loan translation from the German Übermensch.

In either case, by borrowing or through loan translation, the different words do to language and therefore to logic and critical thinking what genetic diversity does to living creatures.

Further reading:

• The languages of Pao by Jack Vance
  
  
• Babel 17 by Samual Delany

ANSWER:

"I said what I said. I did not say what I did not say." Alfred Korzysbki created a discipline known as general semantics which attempts to train people to communicate in a more honest way. Our reliance on spoken and written languages with their ever evolving vocabulary is not enough. The diversity goes beyond the written or spoken word because the word is not the thing. This is not a sentence, it is a digital reproduction of the sentence I wrote. The word is not the thing, and without this understanding we are easily influenced by the manipulation of words. Propaganda relies heavily on the power of the word. Truth need not rely on words, and one who is deaf and dumb can communicate. His power of communication is defined solely by his ability to communicate in non verbal ways. Take away his hands and deny him the ability to write and the meaning of words become meaningless. A tree is much, much more than this word: Tree. Love is far more powerful than this word: Love. The thoughts I struggle to communicate at this moment are not in the words I use to communicate, they are bigger than that and when you read this it won't even be in this moment I am experiencing now. Any communication I have accomplished while you read this will not be a shared communication while you are reading it. The words can only help facilitate communication, it is the efforts made beyond these words that will bring about actual communication. It is not easy to think critically, as we are all hopelessly, inherently subjective. It is not impossible to do so. I've done my best to say what I'm saying and avoid not saying what I am not saying. How am I doing so far?

• What does chime mean?
• What does reason look like in chinese?
• Who was the girl who had recited the tale to chetan in epilogue if she wasnt priyanka radhika or esha?