How do we know that language is more than denotation? - Leonardo Kim

A word’s denotation simply means the actual meaning or the dictionary definition of the word that refers to the actual thing or idea it represents. Therefore, through the meaning of denotation, we can say that language is more than its denotation. If we take a look at two examples, one from the article “Does Language Shape How You Think” and one from the telephone game we played during class, it is possible to analyze how different languages when translating brings new and altered meanings and different interpretation to it. An interesting example used in the article was a situation where two people were talking. One of them said in English “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor”, but the thing is that we don’t know whether the neighbor was a woman or a man and the only way to know is by asking to the person. However, if this same sentence was spoken in a different language, for example, in French or German, because of the way the language is structured in its vocabulary, it would be possible to know the gender. They would have been obligate to either use between voisin or voisine, nachbar or nachbarin. Therefore, we can see that if we translated certain sentences or words, the meaning of it would have been altered because language is more than denotation. Another example that can enforce this statement is the telephone game. We tried to play this game twice during class and I thought that the second time we played had a more interesting idea about language. When the teacher gave the word tortoise to be passed by through the use of different languages, consisting of Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Mandarin, the word changed to something similar. There are many languages that do not have a one word that means tortoise. For example, in Portuguese, there is no word that differentiates tortoise and turtle; it only has the word tartaruga that can mean tortoise or turtle. From the beginning of the telephone, the word tortoise became turtle because of the different languages used to transmit the word. According to our Theory of Knowledge book, language carries a perspective. This connects to the video we watched last class about the experiments with the two babies and the tribe. This shows that the language does affect how you perceive certain things. For example, the Himba tribe had a different categorization or classification for colors, where a word for them meant some tones of green and blue, while for English, green means all tones of greens and blue means all tones of blues. The experiment they made with the Himba tribe was showing two different images for them. One of the images was a set of green colors, that for me looked all of the same, and it was asked to one of the member of the Himba tribe to find the different color from the set. Without much difficulty, according to his perception and plasticity, he chose one of the green as being the different colors. However, for me, as a English speaker, was completely sure that all of the colors were the same. Then they showed to the same guy a set of green colors but with one as blue. It was obvious to most of us that the color that was different was the blue one. But the person from the Himba tribe had a lot of difficulties to determine the different color. This shows that because of their language, that some colors are classified with different words due to their unique language; they tend to perceive things, in this case, the colors in a different way than people that speak other languages.