Anyone well-versed enough in philosophy knows that linguistic considerations have some great power over how philosophers reach their conclusions, right? But it often seems (and I emphasize that this is just seeming) to me as if this power is regarded as one of imprisonment: dispirited (or dispiriting) talk of "the limits of language" or whatever might be an example of this.

How many people practice coining new words in already existent languages or constructing totally different alternatives (conlanging)? I'll conjecture: not very many. To those unskilled in lexical construction, the limits of language could easily look like jail-cells for our thoughts. (Contrast this with Aristotle, who was happy to point to the existence of a virtue for which ancient Greek had no name.)

It's good to know what a given sign represents on a given occasion, and for ease-of-conversation's sake accepting the same representation for most occasions is also good, I guess. But we're free to represent something else by the same terms, if we like. What I'll suggest in concluding this OP, then, is: it'll do you a world of good, philosophically, to exercise your own linguistic power for more than just passively relating yours and others' thoughts. Don't think of yourself as therefrom locked in some dungeon: think of yourself as helping to build a tower that can truly reach to heaven.

EDIT:

I'm not sure how to fit this with the above except to just mention it, but when I was like 12-14, I made up this word mi for some fictional vernacular spoken and written in by a lot of the characters in my stories. I knew it had some affinity, semantically, with American English's identity, but my intuition told me that there was some difference in meaning between the two. So I hit upon the concept of haeccity thereby and then (although I wouldn't recognize what I'd done until much later).

Language isn't the prison - the limits of experience, which sets the limits of language, is the prison. But this prison contains all possible thought.

If anyone here thinks that we are limited by our language, in what way do you mean that? Is it that we have a tendency to use the words we are aware of?

Erosopher wrote:
If anyone here thinks that we are limited by our language, in what way do you mean that? Is it that we have a tendency to use [only] the words we are [from others] aware of?

I knew as I was posting that my metaphor was painfully imprecise... I'll try to find an example that I vaguely remember to spell it out some more.

Szav:

How many people practice coining new words in already existent languages or constructing totally different alternatives (conlanging)? I'll conjecture: not very many.


A bit off...perhaps, more like many thousands. More influential groups
include musicians, reporters, novelists, and columnists. The shift
is continuous, and somewhere in the hundreds of word per year.
Some fade (after a few years), but many stay. The Web accelerates
the process and enables new sources.
You need to know where to do your research.
The teams at the Oxford dictionary and at Webster's are fairly busy.
I've seen a few great shows about that.

Look up language in the dictionary. Also you should know that a word translated into any language means the same thing so you cant blame a language. I see what you mean by mixing/changing up things you will find a different outcome. Let say I said yo quiero instead of saying i want; it would make people think differently. Yes it could be a negative thought rather than a positive one but thats why people think before they speak(well some).

Hard to know where to begin
pecking at that one. The most
whopping flaw is...most languages
do not in fact translate word-for-word.