The Language Impact

The wheel, the steam-engine and the internet may have made our lives easier. But what about our ‘invention’ of speaking and writing? Has not language given us cooperation, which has made all other achievements possible? Its evolution, the author claims, has had the impact of a meteorite stirring up a cloud which is still spreading out further and further even today.

Is our thinking (and hence acting) really at the mercy of our language, as Whorf maintains, or do we think independently of language, as Steven Pinker claims? Linguistic determinism and relativity, but also mentalese approaches are discussed in the central part of the book.

‘Verbal caress can be more stimulating than manual.’ The language impact makes itself felt in the most intimate of situations. But do not words like foreplay and penetration describe love-making only from the male point-of-view? Can we change the way society conceives of women and men – by changing language, or at least by making people aware of its power?

With language, we can make things happen, we can influence, even manipulate other people. But language misunderstood can have disastrous consequences. July 1945: The mistranslation of Japan’s answer to the US ultimatum may have been responsible for the atom bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

This book is a long overdue survey of all the effects of language on the three levels of evolution, system and discourse – and of what thinkers have written about them. From Plato’s critique of Sophistry to Bacon’s idola fori, Humboldt’s ‘language is energy’, and finally Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ – the 21 chapters of the book deal critically with the power of language and what philosophers have said about it. A glossary of terms and an annotated list of thinkers make this book easy to use.

Alwin Frank Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous books include Okolinguistik: Eine Einfuhrung (Gunter Narr, 1993), Das Prinzip Spannung (Gunter Narr, 2003 (2nd ed. 2007) and (co-edited together with Peter Muhlhausler) The Ecolinguistics Reader (Continuum, 2001).