Wonderful comment, and you’re quite right about some of the remaining pitfalls, and about the importance of learning other languages. Language is individual, and that definitely serves to complicate things.

Do remember, though, that language is used not just when communicating with other people, but in our own thought processes as well.

Don’t give up all hope in Linguistics. We might not be able to save the world, but who knows, we might find a way to help out yet.

Thanks for reading!

I think you’re dismissing your plan too quickly. I still think it should be dismissed, actually, but the explanation you used is flawed :)

Let us for a moment consider just one person, freeing his thought in isolation - then we don’t have to deal with the practical issues of getting others to learn this language.

How can you free yourself from the rails of English thought? Learn other languages, of course.
Once you have acquired enough knowledge, you could switch between languages, taking concepts, and combine them into a super language :)
Of course, you cannot invent new concepts (that is the kind of thing that tends to happen slowly and by accident), but I think there would be enough out there to make a substantial improvement.

If you know another language well, and one that is distant enough from English, you will have felt the annoyance of - for example - reading a piece of literature and trying to communicate a concept expressed therein to someone else, in English.
Sometimes, it is not possible. You may be able to give someone an idea by being absurdly verbose, but still the meaning is an approximation.
This proves that you can understand concepts not directly expressible in English, and yet be a native English speaker. Your brain isn’t set to English from now on, it simply uses that because you’re most comfortable that way.

If you have learned a language to the point where you can ‘think’ in that language, and start doing so as a habit (can happen when you are immersed in another culture), you sometimes have a slight change in judgement.
Thinking about something in one language might make it seem much more reasonable than in another language. The examples I am thinking about specifically here are with regard to Japanese and it’s systems for placing people or objects in a proper social context. It can affect how you think about other people and your considered actions a great deal, but in ways I cannot easily explain. And that’s a really obvious one - about as far from a subtle language difference as you can get…

So, why do I think the idea is rubbish anyway, regardless of everything written above? :)
First the obvious, is that if you want to use this to communicate with people rather than just reach enlightenment or something, you’re going to have to get them to learn it. Good luck with that.

But more fundamentally, no language can ever solve the problems of humans trying to communicate with each other.
Words are merely symbols with a learned meaning. How that meaning is learned has different results, and it wouldn’t be exaggerating too much to suggest that no two people feel the same nuance from a single word.
The more detailed you get, the more two people stray while reading the same words. Like piling uneven bricks atop one another, eventually they topple. You can support it with scaffolding - endless clarification, long winded sentences, re-inforcement - but then it becomes hard to make out the shape.

And these differences, between people of the same language… how does *that* affect their thought process? :)

I’d become a linguist too, if I hadn’t convinced myself how futile it all was ;)

Yes, Whorf’s claims about Hopi are often exaggerated and in some cases even false, in addition, his data collection was suspect, at best (taking data from a single speaker in New York City and applying it generally). However, I don’t think that anybody is going to be basing an argument for (or against) Linguistic Relativity simply on the basis of Whorf’s data.

He provided a theory. People have done a variety of studies on the subject which seem to swing either way. I personally don’t think that it can ever be proven (as I mentioned above).

However, one of the points I was trying to make with this post was that it’s not really relevant to the issue (and my ideas) whether or not language does really affect thought. If it does (and that’s a big “if”), then we can’t do anything about it. If it doesn’t, it’s a non-issue. Either way, what I hoped to do was impossible.

Reading back through the post, though, I can see how this might seem a little biased. I’m going to add a disclaimer about the controversy and a larger link back to my initial article. Thanks for the comment.

Maybe you’d be better off with a weaker version:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~marce/trip/UC/2005/05/my-favorite-linguistic-relativity-neo.html

Either way, I’m glad somebody else is thinking about these things too, and I appreciate your comments.

Nah, this just wouldn’t work. If things were such easy in life children wouldn’t die of hunger etc. All we need to do is share just a tiny bit of our wealth with people who have less.

However, I agree that language shapes thought. just because you can think in different ways about the same thing. On the other hand, this is just as arrogant to think as the point I made before. Think about Pidgin or Creole languages. People speak something many people wouldn’t ever consider as a “real” language. It is one nonetheless. It’s perfectly capable of advancing in any direction.

Think of English or German way back in time when Latin and Greek was the proper language of the learned. Many academic thoughts could not be properly expressed so they had to be invented once scholars thought it would be nice to communicate in their own native language. Thats how these languages became incredibly rich languages for academia.

My stream of conscience for today :-)