Language and its limitations?

Question

I am doing my dissertation on language and limitation, and focussing on the spoken and the written word....does anyone out there want to voice their opinions on how we are (or even IF we are) limited by the spoken or written word? Which do you feel limits us less?
I am looking at Wittgenstein and Derrida for their theories too, so anyone who wants to quote them, feel free!!
Thanks
PLEASE no point scoring people just saying 'no' - it's really not helpful

Answer 1

It's very difficult to translate from one language to another and capture all the nuances of the original. I think it's especially hard with poetry (where you have to worry about metre and rhyme) and jokes, which often rely on words having two meanings (for example). In this case, you can be limited if you don't have a word meaning the same two things in the other language. This is true of spoken and written language.

Answer 2

When you look across these message boards and observe the poor standard of the written word, it is fair to assume that the spoken word is also correspondingly poor. For the vast majority of folk it is not the limitations of written or spoken language that affect them, that is an academic view. Rather we should consider basic limitations within personal educational attainment. Let`s have walking before running shall we? Good luck in Academia - I know Wittgenstein is NOT a cheap lager, now tell the others!

Answer 3

One word comes to my mind when I think about language limitations, the Portuguese word: SAUDADE.

I was raised by Spanish/Portuguese parents and even for me, it's a hassle to translate Saudade from Portuguese into Spanish, not to mention try and translate it into English.

It becomes a reall challenge trying to convey the meaning, the intention, the entire barrage of emotions of that single word and make other non-Portuguese speakers understand it.

You always get the feeling that you are adding a different meaning and at the end conveying the wrong idea.

Saudade refers to emotions, longing, melancholy, memories of different things or people or places or the past. Sometimes it can come suddenly and hits you in the face until you gasp for breath because of the intense sad feeling, but you also feel happy at the same time because you accept such fate because you still believe that you somehow will recover or find or substitute the emptiness.

At the end, as you see, you have to use multiple words to get an approximate meaning. But it's never accurate.

What other solution you have to convey the message? Gestures, facial expressions and sometimes, tears and laughter. It works...eventually.

Does this make sense?

Answer 4

Fascinating subject! Good luck. Let me know what you come up with.

I have always thought that one of the limitations of the written word is its incapacity to convey such things as emotion or urgency. There is the notion that the written word is less an event than the spoken word, and more of a record of thoughts that have been completed.

The spoken word has a limitation in the amount of detail it can convey without losing the interest of the audience, I would guess.

I would be very interested to hear more about your thoughts on the subject.

Answer 5

That's really quite a big topic, and I'm not sure if all of the answers here are clear on whether you refer to Wittgenstein's remarks on the "limits of your language" being "the limits of your world" and his dictum "what you cannot talk about, you have to be silent about" (sounds much better and morte concise in German where there is a verb for "to be silent"...) on the one hand or the perceived limitations of one particular (one's native) language (which would go into the "linguistic relativity" direction opened up by Humboldt but often falsely called "Sapr/Whorf hypothesis".

Let me focus on your "little" second question "...the spoken or written word? Which do you feel limits us less?"

I'd say the spoken word limits us less, since language was developed for face-to-face communication and used exclusively so for many, many generations before writing was even thought of.. Not only is spoken language in face-to face- communication normally embedded in paraverbal (such as pitch, loudness, speed, backchanneling signals etc.) and nonverbal communication (facial expressions, body language, proxemics etc). It is also intrinsically dialogical and allows immediate feedback. All secondary communication systems (with writing being the earliest and most important) have to try and make up for the lack of immediacy that spoken face to face communication means. This problem was first discussed in
Plato's "Phaedrus "dialogue".

Answer 6

I think we are more limited by the spoken word. Much of what we say is judged in the context of how we look, our non-verbal language, our enunciation or accents, and even our age.

In the written word, we have the freedom to construct our thoughts before committing them to paper, written material is judged on it's merit usually, and not so much on the presenter's attributes.

The reader can read and re-read sentances and assimilate them more easily, and so we are better understood.

Don't know who Wittgenstein and Derrida are, so won't be quoting from them!

Answer 7

I suppose as language is the basis for thought i.e. you can't formulate ideas without the words to express them, then except in relative terms you can't know of any limitation that language may have. However, in interaction with another person or group then such shortcomings would become apparent. In real terms language seems poor at conveying the experience of anything physical e.g. pain or anguish, our knowledge of these states seem to come from our own experience of them and not from the words that describe them.It is said that people remember about 25% of what is communicated to them verbally so in those terms alone spoken language is a very inefficient medium.

Answer 8

Language (of any kind) is innate and probably unique to the human species. It seems our brains are hard wired to 'languaging'. This would suggest that there exists in the brain a 'proto-language' or 'meta-language' preceding any spoken English, French, Spanish etc.
I think that no language is sufficient to convey the richness of the totality our experiences. Otherwise why would we have Art, Music and Mathematics? (bet some some smart **** philosopher could deconstruct these last sentences!)
Language has logical limitations too. Russell came across 'holes' in any logical system similar to the 'Cretan liar paradox'. He used the example of the catalogue of all books that did not catalogue themselves. Very similar to Godel's proof of the non-provability of any sufficiently complex axiom sets.
My naive thoughts on the whole subject are that language itself must be an inadequate tool for analysing 'language'- bit like painting the floor you're actually standing on, or worse still sawing off the branch of the tree you're sitting on!

Answer 9

Woaw. You've picked a very very large subject. Are you planning to write a book?
Language is limiting because it's only a symbolic representation of how we perceive the world. So from one person to another the world is different. Your feelings and understanding of the colour red for example will be different than mine. Language is also culturally, ethnically, religiously and geographically influenced. English is great for expressing very concise and precise ideas, French is great for developing ideas with lots and lots of words, Japanese (spoken) is very simple. Spoken and written: both limiting. Read a bit of Capra and quantum physics to get the idea of symbolic representation and the reality of the world.

Answer 10

I think this has been skimmed over by many others here, but it seems to me that the limits of language are the limits imposed by the fact we don't have a common history of experience. By that I mean when one of us makes the statement 'I feel great', or 'I feel so-so', it is based on the assumption that we have had a similar experience to be able draw a comparison, and hence be able to understand fully what was meant by the statement. However, should someone say 'I feel queasy' or some such phrase, the possibility of someone FULLY understanding the ramifications for that person are extremely remote. They might be able to come close to understanding, but never would truly nail the feeling.