RE: Liberty or Freedom? Moral or Ethical? How the language influences our perception of the world.
words are only a symbolic representation of an ideal concept, if we pervert its use, and if we don't take care of knowing the ideal words and concepts that we use daily, then we will simply lose them. There is no real correlation between words (graphic signs and/or sound units) with the meaning of this (ideal concept), therefore, the only thing that unites them is our knowledge, which makes its use something more delicate than we usually think.
Well said. Fortunately nothing is truly lost forever. If something is lost, it just take more time for another person to discover it. BTW have you heard about Metal Gear Solid or The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
http://rwu.io/language-and-culture-a-review-of-metal-gear-solid-v/
I subscribe to the weak version of it. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Another experience I can add is watching so many anime with subtitles to a point that now I can read between the lines of English translations and understand things that are structurally impossible to understand from the translation itself as long as I know that the text is translated from Japanese. It doesn't happen always.
I understand many things that most English speakers are incapable of understanding about the above video. I've had almost no real education when it comes to the Japanese language. 99% of it is watching anime with subtitles. But I've picked up on the culture and memetics and I almost exactly knnow what they mean when any translation of a word is inaccurate.
I just figured out while writing this that the nature of Japanese swearing could also have contributed to them creating the best psychological villains in entertainment. For an anime fan (if they are fans of certain sub-genres) someone like Hannibal Lecter is no big deal.
Western swear words are aggressive and sexual and some might even call a little over the top. But in Japanese calling someone "dog " could be harsher than "Cunt". Why? They are much more likely to mean in a death by thousand cuts fashion. It's not just offensive. It means the person in question is literally compared to an actual dog that is less than a human being. Of course people can say it in a more casual sense like how some black people call their friends niggers.
Also try: https://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+101578
There are other instances where certain psychological and spiritual terms in Sanskrit and Pali that are almost impossible to be translated to English.
You'd also love to hear about the Tau Meta Language: http://www.idni.org/
It is interesting all that you attach. I had not heard of that hypothesis as such, although if I share that idea, like you to the weak version, in fact, thinking about that was one of the causes of the post.
I also thought about adding something to the terms in Sanskrit. It seems interesting to me that when a society progresses in philosophical fields, it begins to create new terms to represent the new conceptions that they have created (discovered). Such is the case of the northeastern Indians of the Vedic period, or of the ancient Greeks of the classical period.
I think the same, although losing a word means a huge delay, because not only does it mean that society is in decline, but it must also take a long time after having passed its decline to recover that word again. If a word represents a true concept, however much it is lost, it will always be recovered, since it is not a human creation, like false concepts, but rather a human discovery, therefore it exists independently of these.
Language is certainly a very interesting topic to reflect on.
Linguistic relativity
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. Also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined to include two versions: the strong hypothesis and the weak hypothesis:
The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.The term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later invention; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often in their writings their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation.