jiā, house
What are words?! Sometimes I like to get back to basics. As someone who deals with words in my personal, social, avocational, and professional life, I like to take a step back and think about what these crazy squiggles on a paper or screen are actually all about!
Words in and of themselves have no meaning. Words are composed of letters, or in some cultures characters. A particular combination of characters is formed to comprise words or larger characters. In Chinese, some characters resemble the idea or meaning of the character. 家 (jiā) means home, family, or house in Mandarin. The original character for home in Chinese was a pictograph of a pig inside a house. The current character has a hog under a roof! The character for house looks like a house. So there is a concept of a house, and there is a corresponding character of house. And for ancient Chinese culture, a house included a hog! The character is given a meaning, and the image of the character resembles the image of the meaning.
The English alphabet derived from the Latin alphabet around the 7th century C.E. -- the very word alphabet is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta!!. The origins of the English language hark back to the earliest influence on England -- Germanic peoples known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The Norman (French) influence on the English language is also significant. So what we consider the "English" language is rooted in influences from Latin, Greek, German, Dutch, the Netherlands, and France!
Words are composed of letters (in many languages, like English), and the specific combination of letters in a particular order forms a word that connotes meaning. However, this is where it gets tricky. The meaning I imbue to a word may not match the meaning you give a word. And that is precisely where communication goes awry. We use words and we think we are communicating well, but do we check to ensure the words we are using are understood the way we understand them?!
In one of my classes, we had a lengthy debate about a word when studying Socrates. The word was DESK. I asked the class, "what is a desk?" Answers included the following: a table with drawers; a rectangular structure where one can work; a place to work; a place to store papers with a top to work on; a table with file drawers. I asked if the table I was at was a desk. Some said "yes" and others said "no." Does a desk need to have drawers? Is a desk defined by how it looks or its function? If I'm sitting in my backyard grading papers on my lap, is my lap a desk?? The word "desk" is composed of symbols, four letters in this order... D.E.S.K. In and of themselves, those letters have no meaning. The word itself has no meaning other than the meaning we give it. As it turns out, we don't all give it the SAME meaning! One simple word we think we all understand, but it turns out there is great confusion!
In the current political climate here in the U.S. words have been misused, misappropriated, and misunderstood. In my next post, I'll examine how words have power, both for good and for evil.
“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch on absolute truth…” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
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https://www.chinasage.info/chars/fch_jia_house.htm
