On the arbitrariness of the relation between thoughts and the words to describe them

What I am about to write is not necessarily something I need to say… I just have it somewhere in my brain… and I want to let it go as it is stuck somewhere within. I would hope it flows as I start to write. I am not sure it would but why shouldn’t I try. Perhaps, as much as we don’t know the universe and many other “solar systems”, we also don’t know this microcosm inside of us… our brains have been picked-on and dissected but we do not understand the nature of thought and all those interconnections we make every fraction of second (many people have studied this but it isn't common knowledge). I want to understand something as arbitrary as language. I am writing right now in a foreign language. My mother tongue is arbitrary too. I know it better than I know English as a second language. I am writing in it.. but does it matter? I would never be able to decode thoughts purely and put them into paper. That is the drama of a writer… language and how we decode thoughts as if they floated in our minds and we were trying to fish them and then package them and send them into our nervous system for them to be processed in the area where the western alphabet has been engraved… right there the thought starts being carved, shaped, as we try to find the word that would define it according to the cultural paradigm that associated a meaning to that signifier… the signifier is the floating thought and the meaning is given by me according to the conventional word I find more appropriate to it… the one that seems to fit the mold of the thought, according to my limited knowledge of this foreign language. It is bizarre… how much of what I think cannot be translated into words? That’s the tragedy of the writer and the beauty of literature. Despite these limitations we insist on trying to grab those thoughts and express them on a written form. We also add style and literature imagery… that makes the thoughts flamboyant or practical… yet, we censor or transform those thoughts once again because we cast them as we want them to be represented. They exist, they say, in their natural form, and when we manage to apprehend them in our brains… and when we package them and transport them to the alphabet centre… then we apply norms of conduct, stereotypes of time, cultural elements, learned knowledge… we chose the form we are going to translate them into… they get transformed… shaped to fulfill a style, a public, an idea… the cannot come raw… like… straight from the garden to the table. They need to be processed, washed, cut, cleaned… their roughness is sharpened and their smell refined… like we do with most products. That’s a second tragedy… not only we are unable to grab thoughts in their natural form but we also dress them according to a determined idea (and please not that I don't want to get into the unconscious mind and Lacanian psychoanalysis). I, right now, am trying to avoid thinking too much and just letting go to see what happens. I still have to go back and erase, re-think... correct misspelled words… think about the option I am using and whether it expresses all I am meaning to convey… convey to whom? A possible reader… S? E? P? Someone who visits my blog… a philosopher who may think that my ideas are revolutionary… or not… boring… the “same shit someone else has thought about” before… perhaps thoughts can only exist because of language? Saussure would disagree with me… language is the subjective shape of objects… yes, like my theory of objective/subjective… the object exists out there and as we name it, it gets transformed. Words are not even as accurate as printers (and printers aren’t accurate at all)… printers decode an image from a source, let’s say a computer or a digital camera… and try to convey that image in a “realistic way”. Words try but would never do so… to start with… the image of an object is nameless but we have given it a name (Foucault would disagree with me… things had names and what Adam did was just ‘read them’)… … according to a language or a dialect… let’s say… an apple… hmmm… I am thinking of another object that I can express in a different language… all I can think of is this sticky rice cake filled with tuna and wrapped in seaweed… in Japanese it is named “onigiri” I don’t know how to spell it or what it means but when I think of “onigiri” I think of this rice cake… does the word “onigiri” describe it? Define it? I don’t know, perhaps it does… but as I do not speak Japanese I just refer to the codes I understand… rice cake… thus I limit the object to my limited knowledge… however, I am able to convey and idea and perhaps order “onigiri” in Japan… If I order it in Mexico… not many people would know what I am talking about… if they do at all.

I am sitting in a café, downtown Toronto… people pass by before my eyes, walking north or south… they seem to be in a hurry like most Torontonians… I wonder what their thoughts are… and how they decode them… they may be silent… but their thoughts take the shape of a sound that can also reverberate in their minds… even if they don’t speak their minds… they think they think what they think they are thinking… as they name their thoughts, they manage to agree with the idea of the sound or visual image of those thoughts… we are not talking “deep meaning”… they are not necessarily decoding those thoughts to understand additional loaded signification to them… they are just thinking and naming their thoughts… let’s say: “I am late, I better hurry up”.
This person has just looked at her watch and thinks… “shit, it is 3:55 and my meeting is at 3:45” She looked at a conventional way of telling time… a watch… and she knows how to read either digital numbers or analogical watches… she remembers that she had an appointment at a specific time and by the look of it… she’s late because ten minutes have gone by past that time… somebody (or a group of people) must be waiting for her. She assumes that… therefore… she tries to find a way to decode that thought… and she then translates it into the expression “I am late”. She’s not really taking the words apart to analyze each of them individually… or trying to identify the origin of the expression “being late”… from the Greek or the Latin adopted by the Anglo or the Saxon… “I” refers to “me” (in this case “her”, the first person singular”, “Am” is the conjugation of the verb “To be”, also in the first person… and “late” is the word that is used to express the opposite of being on time… “late” may have other meanings (“at night”, “at an older age”) or look/sound like other words (latte, lait, plate)… but in her context the word seems to translate what is happening to her. She doesn’t need to try to understand the grammatical quality of her choice, its ideological meaning of it (is she being subjugated by a system which exploits her, slaves her to the point that she’s being stressed and nervous?)… “she’s simply late”… and her degree of “lateness” could depend on many factors (how realistically she set up the appointment, how reliable public transit or traffic is, if she’s often late, if she was not paying attention to time, if she had a problem at home, etc)… it could also be that her watch is ahead of time… which may mean that she’s not actually late but she feels that way… it could also be that the person or group of people she’s supposed to meet are also “running late” consequently “it’s ok to be late”… Attached to the idea of being late, there is a code of conduct… “it is not polite to be late”, that may be motivating her thought… or her appointment is important hence it is not ok to be late… she’s not seeing a friend, it is someone who will offer her a job… etc… that could be the reason for her second translation of the thought “ I better hurry up”. She’s giving herself an order, and also connecting her first thought to an action that, despite the fact she won’t make it “on time”, she doesn’t want to be “too late” or try to ameliorate her “fault” by running a bit faster… it may show people at the other end some respect, or make her feel less guilty… or less nervous about the appointment… But… when she translates thoughts into words thus into actions, is she fully conscious of what she’s saying? Of how she got to speak that language that made her translate thoughts the way she does? Perhaps her language is also associated to the culture that tells her that “people should arrive on time, especially to appointments with third parties”… Did she use the right words? Could she have used alternative options “I am a bit late” ( the expression “a bit” would change the meaning of her statement a bit… as she gives it less importance)… she could’ve said “it’s late” (in that case it is not putting the pressure on herself… but on time itself. Time is running “too fast”)… she could’ve blamed the others… “I told them to set up the appointment for four”… or say… “Good, I don’t want to be the first one to arrive!” It is possible that she’s “ironically saying that she’s “on time” by saying the opposite. She could also have her own “code” where the word “late” has a meaning she herself has given to the word… so it doesn’t have a negative “connotation” but a “good meaning” for instance… “things are going well, I am late”. All this translations belong to different feelings and she could’ve grabbed any of them. The abovementioned expressions are not strictly related to the statement “I am late” but are “personal approaches” (feelings). Those would be different reactions to that specific “time” than to the linguistics of thoughts and words… If she wanted to translate her thoughts by using “synonyms”, she should’ve said “Voy tarde” (“going late” in Spanish), “I am behind schedule”, “I am delayed”, “I am not on time”… the use of these expressions could depend on “knowledge of vocabulary, of other language, on habits, laziness to employ “difficult” terms, etc”. Is there anything wrong with a “person approach” to language? Not at all… we all do it… but it becomes less conventional. Some couples may use their own codes of understanding and they add “coded or symbolic meaning” to certain expressions, sayings, objects… “it’s sunny” may mean “ I love you”… so if they use this expression between them, nobody else would understand it but them.

As Saussure said, the relation between thought thoughts (objects) and the names we give them is arbitrary… not only by the language used but by the person who chooses the words. My questions are… are thoughts richer out in the space where they float… or we make them richer as we acknowledge them and name them? Is the perfection of the language a way to enrich thoughts? Are there thoughts that cannot be translated into words… like certain feelings or dreams? Do words limit thoughts thus our main priority should be to perfection a language before we attempt to produce knowledge?
Thoughts and words to ponder on… I should talk about non-verbal communication some other time. Share