"Pei-Ying Lin solicited the list of "unspeakable" words from colleagues at London's Royal College of Art, and found that their definitions in English usually came down to something like, 'it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D).'"
The full article and map here
This is SO cool. Oh my gosh! I would love to do something like this with my students in Public Speaking when we're discussing language and its importance. Thank you for sharing this. This looks like it would be a cool visual art project as well. I know your own art incorporates words/phrases. Students who have difficulty articulating their thoughts might find this a unique and useful way to accomplish that. Woo! I love stuff like this!
ReplyDeleteLanguage is (maybe so far) only media and means to conduct our thoughts and feeling to others. It is a complete compound of our representing and understanding of the world (and ourselves as a part of it). If we have no some word in our language, this particular "thing" does not exist for us. For example, there are some people who have not the word "time" in their language. And they live only here and now. For them there is no past, neither future. Now, if there is no a some particular word(s) in some language that represent some particular feeling, does it means that people who native for that language have no such kind of feelings? And, on the other hand, if we introduce a new word representing some specific kind of feelings and society excepts it and begin to use regularly, does it means that this society develop a new kind of feelings? I have some more questions, but it is enough so far.
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