In the last post, I told you that I'm sure that "The way that we use our language may help us to fight against discrimination and help to reach gender equality in the real world". I think that it will be interesting to develop a little bit this idea. If changes in the vocabulary of a language may be an element of the fight aginst negative phenomena, we can pose such a question:
If we deleted all the words that express hate, would we get rid of it?
Imagine that you open a dictionary and you can't see the following words: "hate", "to affront", "discrimination" and so on... if you can't find them, you can't use them, right?
Sometimes we think about dictionary as a place where we can find all the words that exist in a language and that can be used be its spakers. But we need to remember that a dictionary is a result of linguits' work. They observe how speakers use the language and note it. So, if we "threw the bad words" out of a dictionary, nothing would actually change.
But if all human beings somehow stopped using these words, something would change, right?
Yes and no.
You wouldn't find any terrible comments on your posts on Facebook.
No one would never be verbally agressive to another person.
But does that mean that the hate would dissapear? Negative emotions are something that's in each and every one of us. Hate and agression are natural and biological reactions of our body when it fells endangered or scared. If we didn't feel anger, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves. That means that if we wanted to completely get rid of hate, we would have to kill the negative emotions that are a part of human beings' nature.
This example shows that in some cases we can try to employ language to make a change in real world but it's only one element of this issue. If the whole society don't want to transform, nothing will change. Because the people creates language and only the people can change it. Together.
If we deleted all the words that express hate, would we get rid of it?
Imagine that you open a dictionary and you can't see the following words: "hate", "to affront", "discrimination" and so on... if you can't find them, you can't use them, right?
Sometimes we think about dictionary as a place where we can find all the words that exist in a language and that can be used be its spakers. But we need to remember that a dictionary is a result of linguits' work. They observe how speakers use the language and note it. So, if we "threw the bad words" out of a dictionary, nothing would actually change.
But if all human beings somehow stopped using these words, something would change, right?
Yes and no.
You wouldn't find any terrible comments on your posts on Facebook.
No one would never be verbally agressive to another person.
But does that mean that the hate would dissapear? Negative emotions are something that's in each and every one of us. Hate and agression are natural and biological reactions of our body when it fells endangered or scared. If we didn't feel anger, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves. That means that if we wanted to completely get rid of hate, we would have to kill the negative emotions that are a part of human beings' nature.
This example shows that in some cases we can try to employ language to make a change in real world but it's only one element of this issue. If the whole society don't want to transform, nothing will change. Because the people creates language and only the people can change it. Together.
That's a very good conclusion to your work on the blog. You undertook a difficult task of addressing quite advanced linguistic issues here, and I hope it was as interesting for you to write your posts, as it was for us to read them. I hope you will continue next semester. Well done!
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