The trouble with words
Shifting gears today from the psychological to the linguistic.
It's hard to talk about the importance of words without sounding trite — a testament to the privileged place of language in our human-ness. The problem is that we can get ourselves into trouble if we're not clear about what we mean by "word."
Language is about the relationship between form and meaning. By "form" I mean something perceptible, tangible. In the case of spoken language, "form" means a stream of sound, which the language-comprehending mind breaks up into smaller pieces called phonemes.
There is a way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, independent of the world's writing systems. It's called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. The English word cup, for instance, is written /kʌp/, with the "wedge" symbol, /ʌ/, representing the short "u" sound. Each IPA symbol represents a phoneme.
As children grow into native English speakers, they learn to associate the form, or sound string, /kʌp/, with a set of meanings having to do with drinking beverages, and with other things. Consider:
coffee cup
cup your hands
brassiere cup
half a cup of sugar
the putt missed the cup
This gets at just a small sampling of the rich set of meanings and images associated with the English sound string /kʌp/.
Now the trouble: When we use the word word, are we referring to the form or to the meaning? Depending on the context, it could be either or both. An example of word referring to just the form would be: "The English word cup consists of three phonemes." Here there is no reference to meaning; just to sound.
Word can also refer to form-plus-meaning, as in: "No language has yet been found that doesn't have a word for cup." Here word refers to the combination of form and meaning.
The trouble starts when we treat words as if they were meanings and only meanings, with no form. Consider this sentence:
The Chinese word for cup is bēizi.
In this sentence "cup" could only refer to the meaning or meanings associated with the English-language form /kʌp/. Why? Because we all know, or can at least guess, that whatever the Chinese word is for "cup," it isn't pronounced /kʌp/. So "cup" must be referring to meaning alone, not form. We might paraphrase the sentence as, "The Chinese form that is paired with the same meaning as the English form ‘cup' is bēizi."
Now we're in trouble, because bēizi and cup are in fact not paired with "the same meaning." First, bēizi covers a broader range, including what English refers to using the word glass. Second, images of Chinese bēizi will differ from images of English cup: "teacups" look different, you might not see a "coffee cup" in some parts of China, and there are some types of bēizi you wouldn't see in the U.S., like the special kind of bēizi used for toasting with hard liquor.
At this point you might object that cup and bēizi are "close enough" that we shouldn't be bothered by all this. Fair enough. If intercultural communication were limited to such simple categories, it might not be worth all the trouble.
But what do we do questions like this: Are there human rights in China?
We'll take that up next time.