Last week I looked at names and the power of names, this week I want to think a bit about language.
Let me begin with a question. If you lived in a culture that had no word for love would you ever fall in love? Can you experience something you have no name for? Which comes first the emotion or the word to describe that emotion?
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Miranda (or Prospero – editors do not agree on the correct assignment of the speech) seems to suggest that it is words that give our actions and emotions meaning. Miranda (Or Prospero) has taught Caliban their language, explaining how they
“Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known.”
There are two things of interest here, the idea that Caliban had no language and thus did not know his own meaning, and the secondary point that it was only learning (Prospero’s) language that ‘endowed’ his ‘purposes’ with meaning or knowledge of their meaning.
The assumption here seems to be that it is language which allows an experience action or emotion to have meaning for an individual and that without language we are meaningless.
But Caliban tells a slightly different story. He says
“When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,”
Again several interesting things come to mind in relation to the question of language and meaning. Caliban does not use Prospero’s words for the things he was taught to name, he does not talk about the sun and the moon, he talks about the ‘bigger light’ and ‘the less’. In this way we can guess that Caliban had not only his own language which he is now translating into Prospero’s language to arrive at the words ‘bigger light and … less’ but that he also had his own understanding of the relationship between the sun and moon. Caliban also describes showing Prospero ‘all the qualities of the isle’ things he learnt presumably before Prospero’s language endowed his purposes with words that made them known, when he was still as he puts it ‘mine own king’.
Thus it seems Caliban does not need a word to understand a concept, at least not a word from Prospero’s language.
If Propsero suggests that without his language Caliban is purposeless then Caliban has the intellect to remind him that without his subjugation Prospero could not be ‘king’ of the island.
I have enjoyed sharing these blogs with you in the last six months and would like to wish all our readers a very happy Christmas.
