Language Influences Thought

*sigh* I work in areas for which English is far less convenient than, say, Lakota, Hawai'ian, Sanskrit, or LAadan. If you are not talking about a major monotheistic religion, there are a great many spiritual concepts for which English either doesn't have the words or has words with the wrong connotations. If you're talking about magic, there are few words period, you're short on verbs especially, and again the connotations are more derogatory than useful. If you're talking about sex and gender, and you want to go beyond the standard male/masculine and female/feminine, the grammar fights you and it's hard to find good substitutes that don't sound horribly awkward. Putting two of these together, for instance, there's no pronoun set for Deity and no elegant way to talk about Deity without assigning a gender (because "it" is subtly pejorative). And all of these cause very significant problems for certain people all the time.

All languages have their own strengths and weaknesses, just as individual people or cultures do. They focus on things that are important to them, which makes sense.

At present, I'm interested in asexuality, which has a developing community awareness around a sexual orientation that hasn't gotten much attention previously. The semantic landscape for this topic, in English, consists mostly of lexical gaps interspersed with rubble ripped out of some other part of the language. Frex, "asexual" was borrowed from biology (such as amoeba reproduction) and carries with it certain connotations that haven't been rubbed off yet; a drawback of this is that there are still plenty of people who argue that using "asexual" in reference to humans is WRONG. Well, they had to pick something. They're still trying to identify concepts and borrow or create terms for those, so that they can talk about their experiences. It's hard work. English is just not designed to handle this. It can be beaten into a shape that will serve, but you have to do a lot of beating before you can even start the conversation. Then you have to do it again every time you come to another gap where there's no previous word for what you want to say. That's exhausting and frustrating. Right now, English is not a good language for discussing this topic. Wait 20 years or so, and we'll probably have a much better vocabulary for the subject, but the grammar may be the same. (Normally, the grammar WOULD be the same; but the language is in total flux, probably due to online interactions, so all rules are subject to change.) At that point, English will be a better language for talking about asexuality. Right now, it's rugged.