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Language Equals Thought

817 statements
154 feature instances
68 referencing feature instances

Language Equals Thought	type	FeatureClass
Language Equals Thought	label	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought	page	LanguageEqualsThought
Language Equals Thought	comment	Linguistic relativity states that a person's language(s), through its vocabulary and structure, shapes the way that person habitually perceives reality, thinks, and behaves. In Real Life, this theory is usually misunderstood and, as a result, highly controversial; it comes in a semi-infinite variety of interpretations, some of which are trivially false ("if you don't have a word for it, you can't think about it"), some trivially true ("it's a lot easier to speak intelligibly about things you've got words for"), and many untested, possibly untestable.note Hypotheses in science are defined as being testable and falsifiable. That means none of these things count as hypotheses until you've come up with an experiment to test them with. People go right on saying "hypothesis" when they mean "conjecture"; linguists get really mad, nobody learns anything, and We Keep Using That Word anyway. In actuality, linguistic relativity refers only to how people casually and habitually approach reality. According to the theory, language does not keep anyone from consciously taking the effort to meditate and focus upon something for which he or she knows no words; rather, the theory points out the eminently logical point that people doing so will have to construct new terms if none already exist in their language and, naturally, their native language(s) will shape how they do so. Regardless, this makes for an interesting device in fiction, particularly for characterizing a Planet of Hats through their vocabulary (grammatical structures can also indicate a certain way of thought, but vocabulary is easier to write about without a comprehensive background in linguistics). For instance, one can characterize a very warlike race by saying that they have no words for "peace" or "surrender" but plenty for "war" and "hate"; conversely, the inhabitants of a pacifist Utopia may lack a word for "war" or "hate" but many for "love". This sort of thing also shows up frequently on lists of Little Known Facts, the most common version being "the Eskimos have [some large number] words for snow" (Not exactly.note English may actually have more words for frozen water. Inuktitut has two base words for snow, but it is a polysynthetic language, meaning new words are more easily created at need from existing ones.) On the other hand, Americans do have a large number of words for "being drunk."note However, many of these words are regional slang words, and may not be recognized as meaning "being drunk". For example, an English-speaking person from outside the United States might interpret the phrase "totally wasted" not as "very drunk", but rather "thin and starving", or more literally as "wasting his life." Meanwhile, Americans might think "totally pissed" means "extremely angry" rather than "really drunk", like the British do. The idea that language equals thought also raises the possibility of a novel form of Mind Control — restricting people's thoughts by forcing a different language on them. A limited form of which is the staple of Real Life propaganda — such as when followers of a particular leader always refer to him by an evocative nickname. If you meet aliens speaking a Starfish Language, you may be in for some truly strange psychology. Black Speech is a related trope, in which the sound of a language reflects some aspect of the speakers' character. Note that a common variant is that the language has some terminology for the concept. It could be more clunky — the Proud Warrior Race might explain peace being 'time after fighting', or more humorously 'a long period of time in which you and your allies are not fighting your enemies and their allies, and in which it is acceptable to trade for needed goods and attend the same social gatherings without fighting'. Or it might be outright borrowed from another language which already has a word for it (a common occurrence in real life languages). It still gets across the point that the concept is not one encountered commonly in a culture, but does not make them look like complete morons. After all, it should be possible to describe any concept in any language — it's just that some languages might require a very long description where others use a single word. Another subversion is that they have no words for something very familiar to them — "they have no words for war... because they've never stopped warring long enough to think about it". Also note that most instances of this trope implicitly equate languages with their words, which is a failure to understand even basic linguistics. Linguists see languages as grammars, systems of rules according to which people can form complex expressions (sentences, phrases, words) out of smaller, discrete parts (morphemes, phonemes). The more solid versions of the linguistic relativity are about how grammar, not words, influence thought. People consciously invent new words or adopt foreign ones all the time, in an offhand manner without any effort, which in Real Life enormously weakens the "they can't think X because they have no word for X" trope. People, on the other hand, rarely consciously invent new grammatical tenses for their language, much less invent new obligatory grammatical rules for things like evidentiality. Subtrope of The Power of Language.
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Language Equals Thought / int_114e569f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_114e569f	comment	Rihannsu: Mnhei'sahe, the Romulan honor concept, is extremely difficult for even USS Enterprise's best linguist to translate to English but is intrinsic to Romulan behavior. In practice it's best defined as some combination of personal integrity and "face" + value of family and The Clan + Enlightened Self-Interest. The Romulan dictionary in The Romulan Way notes that the word "galae", usually translated as "fleet" (as in a Space Navy), is actually closer to an aircraft squadron in connotations, hearkening back to the Romulan adoption of massed airpower in internal wars in their early history. This implies that culturally the Romulans favor Space Is Air to Space Is an Ocean, in turn explaining the use of "warbird" in place of "starship".
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Language Equals Thought / int_12fd8e7f	comment	In Destiny, the Cabal are a massive species akin to rhinos or turtles, and are intensely militarized and lack any idea or concept of subtlety. Everything they build is done so on a grand scale, from military equipment to cities to festivals. In warfare, they have no concept of retreating, to the point that a Cabal legion deployed into battle is essentially exiled and unable to return home until they have completed their mission... or die trying. Even their equivalent of the Icarus legend, the Legend of Acrius, simply ends with the Cabal in question seizing control of the sun and becoming the first Emperor. Appropriately, they have no known words for "retreat" or "hubris."
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Language Equals Thought / int_13609e75	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_13609e75	comment	This was first posed by Heinlein in his novella Gulf, which featured a one-phoneme-per-concept "Speedtalk". It's extremely interesting and has been written about by many linguists. An attempt at creating a speed talk-like language has been made. Ithkuil is listed under Starfish Language and described as "You Head A'splode, the Language." Mark Rosenfelder debunked this idea as part of his Language Construction Kit.
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Language Equals Thought / int_16fc4335	comment	In the Collegium Chronicles, the language of Mag's native culture (who are assassins for hire) only has words that they deem important to their society. Concepts that aren't important, or aren't native to their area, such as 'games' and 'snow', they instead use the words of other languages, usually those of the small country that they live in.
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Language Equals Thought / int_1825e407	comment	Astonishing X-Men: During the X-Men's trip to the Breakworld, their host Dafi at one point mentions that her people have no word for "hospital", because the concepts of mercy and compassion are entirely foreign to them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_1ad1e0d2	comment	The language of the Imperial Radch has no gendered pronouns. Radch society does not recognize the concept of gender roles (and possibly not even gender as a concept), and thanks to genetic engineering the limitations of biology vis-a-vis reproduction and lineage have been eliminated. The entire book series is written using Translation Convention for Radch language (using female personal pronouns, ("she", "her") and male title pronouns ("lord", "priest")), meaning that none of its characters (with a few exceptions who are talked about using different languages) are gendered.
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Language Equals Thought / int_1bfb41c6	comment	In The Colour of Magic, there is a mention of Black Oroogu, a language containing "no nouns, and only one adjective, which is obscene". We never see its speakers, but there are presumably either not many of them left or, um, quite a few of them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_1f76648	comment	Angelic language in A Certain Magical Index. When angels try to express certain concepts, it comes out as incomprehensible gibberish. This is apparently because those concepts cannot be accurately explained using any human language. Best seen when Aiwass is discussing its "birth" into the world:
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Language Equals Thought / int_21810fae	comment	RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: Discussed in a story focusing on the dragons, who have problems here. Since dragon society is based mainly around greed and being the strongest, the dragon speaking to Cheerilee and Raindrops explains there are some terms he has to use Equestrian for, because the dragons just don't have the words.
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Language Equals Thought / int_2250e67e	comment	Star Trek: Enterprise: In the pilot, Hoshi informs Captain Archer that she doesn't think the Klingons have a word for "Thank you", and that he "didn't want to know" the actual phrase he had taken for gratitude. (This is either Hoshi's mistake or the writers: The Klingon Dictionary actually does include a verb for "to thank", tlho', though this is indeed not what the Klingon Chancellor said. However, since this is a prequel, it's quite possible Hoshi doesn't have access to this information.) In one episode, the crew met some aliens whose word for "eating" was intrinsically linked to their word for "sex." They took one look at the mess hall and stormed off screaming in outrage. Once they're contacted to help solve the episode's conflict, they expect an appology for people eating in front of them because "[to] put food in your mouth... it's like mating!"
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Language Equals Thought / int_23553960	comment	Skullface's motives in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain stem primarily from his and Zero's belief in this idea. As a child, he was made to forget his native tongue by foreign invading forces, and he claims to have felt his mind and personality change each time he was made to learn a new language. Because of this, he also seems to view English as an inherently violent, colonial language with certain politics attached to it - his way of dealing with these ideas, then, is to breed and attempt to spread a parasite that kills the host if they speak in English, creating a world where the "only language" is that of nuclear warfare. The main reason he stopped working alongside Zero was him finding out that Zero had similar ideas and wanted to "unite the world" by making it so that there were only a select number of languages that could be spoken.
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Language Equals Thought / int_247c6b20	comment	The Anime Man discusses this in his video "Why My "Personality" Changes When Speaking Japanese." He's fluent in both English and Japanese and usually laces his English videos with a lot of sarcasm, but fans noticed that this disappeared when he did videos or segments in Japanese and were wondering if he was doing it deliberately. After thinking about it, he realized that sarcasm as it's understood in English is just about impossible to do in Japanese.
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Language Equals Thought / int_25f39000	comment	Between Planets: Don Harvey is trying to decide who he can trust with a very important secret.
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Language Equals Thought / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons parodied this in an episode about Joan of Arc. Lisa (playing Joan of Arc) tells her family that she got a vision from God to lead the French to victory. Homer then whines, "We're French! We don't have a word for 'victory'!" note The word "victory" is in fact Anglo-Norman French.
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Language Equals Thought / int_30963b69	comment	Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: In Callahan's Legacy, the alien creature the gang nicknames "The Lizard" has 360-degree vision, its three eyes spaced around its body. This comes into play when they're trying to talk with it. Though it doesn't trust them...
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Language Equals Thought / int_30c1ffd0	comment	In Stardew Valley, the Dwarf may at times mention that he obtained his merchandise from peoples' homes and glibly remark that he doesn't understand the term "personal property". He may be trying to play you for a fool, though.
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Language Equals Thought / int_31a48eed	comment	The Outer Limits (1995). In "Quality of Mercy", Cadet Bree Tristan has learnt some of the language of their alien captors and says they don't appear to have a word for "mercy". Though as she's an alien spy pulling a False Innocence Trick, it appears they can understand the concept well enough to manipulate it.
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Language Equals Thought / int_32fb0c3a	comment	Avenue Q lampshades this trope in their song "Schadenfreude":
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Language Equals Thought / int_334120fc	comment	In 8-Bit Theater, Princess Sara comments that there is no word for the degree of stupid for the Dark Warriors. In another comic, Black Mage says that no word can accurately describe his hatred for Fighter, so he asks Red Mage to help him invent one. RM suggests several good candidates, of which BM chooses "Omniloathe". Fighter, as usual, misinterprets this and spends the next few minutes inventing new words to describe what good buddies he and BM are.
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Language Equals Thought / int_34b7ce64	comment	Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency pokes fun at this:
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Language Equals Thought / int_3b72d0a5	comment	In The Weaver Option, the Necrons of the Throne of Oblivion issue the ultimatum "Surrender and die" when engaging in combat. The Ork Brukk-Brukk finds this confusing as Orks have no concept of "surrender", ultimately concluding it must a cultural thing.
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Language Equals Thought / int_3d19218e	comment	A Changed World has Captain Kanril Eleya of the Federation Starship Bajor introduce herself in Bajoran as "Colonel Kanril Eleya of the Federation Spacecraft Bajor". The Bajoran she's talking to also addresses her as Colonel Kanril.
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Language Equals Thought / int_3defe34c	comment	Discussed in the Knights of the Old Republic fanfic Destiny's Pawn. Kairi (the mind-wiped Revan) had been given a new identity as a linguist. Even Zhar is a little baffled by why she would rather use conventional language study rather than relying on the Force. And Kairi is frustrated by the Jedi Masters' lazy assumptions about Mandalorians partly because of her association with Canderous and partly because they haven't a single document in the Mandalorian language in the archives: "Language tells you how a culture thinks. Learn it, and you learn them."
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Language Equals Thought / int_3f633fb4	comment	Cracked's 5 Surprising Ways Your Language Affects How You Think starts by citing a study that found the correlation between grammatical gender in the language (der, die, das, or el, la) and a measurable lack of female workforce participation in the culture. It goes on to mention more studies about how use of a particular language by a bilingual speaker leads to more analytical thinking, shifting of ethnic prejudices, and shifting of expectations of family unity.
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Language Equals Thought / int_3fe6b4fb	comment	New Jedi Order has a bioengineered creature used by the Yuuzhan Vong invaders that seems to be a Shout-Out to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the tizoworm, a little wriggly thing one places in one's ear that translates for one. However, bred as it was by Yuuzhan Vong, it doesn't really have a word for "peace".
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Language Equals Thought / int_4053ecda	comment	In the world of This Perfect Day, the words "hate" and "fight" survive only as cuss words (whereas "fuck" is just another transitive verb). When the hero gets angry enough to say "Fight Uni!", he has to explain that he's not swearing, he literally means they should take violent action.
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Language Equals Thought / int_42ffb88e	comment	Inverted with the SCP Foundation's SCP-444: A memetic virus which, once heard by a human, starts to alter their brain and simplify the language. The more they speak it, the more docile and less individualized they become. It's virulent and hereditary in infants — the Foundation considers it a precursor to an alien invasion.
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Language Equals Thought / int_43dfe888	comment	This is how the people with soft-cypher chips manage to get around Korozhet mind-control in Rats, Bats and Vats. The Korozhet language has one word for every possible concept they've ever thought of, and one word only. The elasticity of the English language means that native English speakers can think of alternative terms to think of their masters by, which they are not programmed to unconditionally love. The same trope gets displayed in the speaking habits, and thusly personalities, of the genetically engineered rodent warriors. Rats, who talk in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and name themselves after various Shakespearean villain characters, are a race of Loveable Rogues who spit on most human forms of honor, are only interested in food, drink and sex, casually steal whatever they fancy and have sex whenever they feel like it. Bats, meanwhile, speak with an Oireland accent and use Oireland names, and are also politically fractious, ever-speechifying types who are big on unity and brotherhood and taking the fight to the "oppressors". Rats were given language training out of Shakespeare plays, whilst Bats used "Wobbly" song lyrics and Irish patriotism speeches.
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Language Equals Thought / int_468bebb0	comment	Discworld: Witches Abroad uses this, with specific reference to the legend that the Inuit have twenty words for snow, by saying it's false. Similarly, dwarves don't have a hundred words for "rock". As per their obsession of mining, they have words describing the precise kind of rock — igneous, sedimentary, and that's just to start — but not one for just "rock". "Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes." Small Gods: Vorbis (a powerful Omnian Quisitor), while visiting the Ephebian Tyrant to persuade them to surrender, notes that "slave" is an Ephebian word, and Omnians have no word for slave. The Tyrant replies: "I imagine fish have no word for water." Another character is a fisherman from a tiny tribe that has no word for "war", because they have no one to fight. When the gods appear and tell everyone (in their own languages) to stop waging war, his god has to explain, "Remember when Pacha Moj hit his uncle with big rock? Like that, only more worse." The fisherman complies, but can't understand why so many people would want to hit Pacha Moj's uncle with a rock. In Hogfather, Death has difficulty explaining to his granddaughter exactly what happened to the Discworld's version of Santa Claus, because there is no precisely accurate human word for it (essentially, the Hogfather ceased to exist due to lack of belief). He eventually settles on "Gone". In The Colour of Magic, there is a mention of Black Oroogu, a language containing "no nouns, and only one adjective, which is obscene". We never see its speakers, but there are presumably either not many of them left or, um, quite a few of them. Interesting Times: In the language of the xenophobic Agatean Empire, the word for "foreigner" is the same as the word for "ghost", and very close to the word for "victim" when written down. Truth in Television here: in Real Life, pejorative Chinese words for foreigners, Europeans specifically, include "lo fan" ("white ghost") and "gwei lo" ("ghost man"). Played straight with the D'regs who appear in Jingo. For one, that isn't their original name, but all their neighbors used the word for "enemy" and they adopted it out of pride. They use the same word for "stranger" and "target", mirroring how some Native American languages like Navajo or Apache use the same word for "foreigner" and "enemy". Their word for "freedom" is also the same as their word for "fighting". Trolls have only one word for plants, because they don't have to interact with them — all plants can be squished if they are in the way, and they aren't needed for food, since trolls eat rock. In Moving Pictures, this leads to Detritus presenting his sweetheart with a large uprooted tree rather than the flowers she tried to request. One short story has Death posing an Armor-Piercing Question (which would later be recycled in Night Watch): Hex has a similar opinion of human languages: Monstrous Regiment: This is brought up in the narration, when Polly is talking to her friend about her odd behavior and possible miracles. The narration mentions that her language had no word for "freaky", but she would have welcomed its inclusion. She settles on calling it "strange". There's also mention of a Borogravian folk song called "Plogviehze", which means "The Sun Has Risen, Let's Make War!" Vimes notes that it takes a very special history to get that into one word. The song also includes a phrase that roughly translates to "glowing opportunity" but more literally means "a great big fish"; this is what clues Vimes in that the country is not just backwards, but completely insane. In Snuff, goblins' way of speaking initially makes them seem stupid. Miss Beedle later explains that their vocabulary and mode of thought simply doesn't translate well; for example, rather than naming lots of different colors, they name only a few but have lots of phrasings that express how they blend together. In Guards! Guards!, we're told that noble dragons don't have a word for "friend", the closest concept being "an enemy who isn't dead yet".
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Language Equals Thought / int_46a4b34d	comment	The Elenium: In The Tamuli, this pops up with the Troll language when the knights have a working alliance with the Trolls. It turns out that the Trolls don't have a word for 'I'm sorry', 'I apologize', or even anything close to it, since a troll never does anything he's sorry for. In this case, it's not supposed to show them as particularly virtuous, but rather as childlike — or even animal-like — innocents.
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Language Equals Thought / int_49defd67	comment	A Good Compromise: Tyria Sark, a joined Trill, apparently equates Vorta reincarnation-by-cloning with Trill symbionts' ability to Body Surf (giving subsequent hosts the memories and some of the personality traits and tics of preceding ones).
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Language Equals Thought / int_50bcf7a6	comment	In Homestuck, the Troll language word for 'friend' is the same as the word for 'enemy.' Considering the general nature of Troll relationships, this is quite fitting. The Troll language is also much more complex than the human language when it comes to the subject of romance. Human culture would, for example, have difficulty diagnosing kismesisnote Described in the comic as as "an especilly potent arch-rivalry", you might consider it a form of hatesex, but stretched out into a relationship with the same level of investment and intensity as a marriage relationships but approached from the opposite direction. — but would also have trouble with moirallegiancenote Trolls being extremely volatile as a species, they will have an attraction to a "more even-tempered" troll, who will attempt to pacify them and keep them calm. Usually this leads to the pair complimenting each other in temperament and emotions, leading to both becoming better people, though it's also shown that sometimes a moirallegiance will break apart as they stop being a good match for each other., and would use less positive words for it, likening it more to codependence. Troll culture, on the other hand, has no term for homosexuality, since troll reproduction works so that any pairing can produce progeny (it's complex, and it involves birth by proxy). This disconnect was only recently learned: Karkat also claims that Trolls have no word for "dare." You gotta take these remarks with a grain of salt, however: the one about "friend" and "enemy" being the same word was said by a troll, to a troll. There's obviously a difference, or else it would come across as "The troll word for blarg is the same as the troll word for blarg", and make no sense. Especially since, due to the trolls having created the human universe, and presumably not having the time or imagination to create a fully-fledged Conlang, the Troll language is almost EXACTLY THE SAME as English, but written right-to-left, in upside-down Daedric script.
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Language Equals Thought / int_53a0bd32	comment	The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby".
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Language Equals Thought / int_553051f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_553051f	comment	Green Lantern: In Alan Moore's "In Blackest Night", GL Katma Tui traveled through a starless expanse of space called the Obsidian Wastes to seek out a native on a planet in that region as a recruit for the Green Lantern Corps. The alien she discovered, Rot Lop Fan, is of a species that, due to there being no light in this sector of space, evolved without eyes. As a result, when Katma attempted to communicate with Fan her ring couldn't translate any words pertaining to vision, light or color, such as 'green', 'lantern', 'ray' or 'sight', which made explaining the nature of the Green Lantern Corps impossible. She got around this by getting Fan to turn the ring into a bell construct that produces an F-sharp sound (the sound that Fan found them most soothing) and describing the constructs as being made of sound, not light. Thus Rot Lop Fan became the universe's only "F-Sharp Bell".
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Language Equals Thought / int_57a3683f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_57a3683f	comment	Not Always Right has this story of someone from Washington moving to Arizona, working at a clothing store, and discovering that the people in the latter consider any item of cold-weather clothing a "jacket", as opposed to a cardigan, coat, windbreaker, parka...
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Language Equals Thought / int_58d80a4a	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_58d80a4a	comment	Played straight with the D'regs who appear in Jingo. For one, that isn't their original name, but all their neighbors used the word for "enemy" and they adopted it out of pride. They use the same word for "stranger" and "target", mirroring how some Native American languages like Navajo or Apache use the same word for "foreigner" and "enemy". Their word for "freedom" is also the same as their word for "fighting".
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Language Equals Thought / int_5908ee91	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_5908ee91	comment	The Dragons in Skyrim make no distinction between "debating" and "fighting"—two dragons breathing fire at each other are just having a particularly heated argument. Furthermore, dragons' thoughts when voiced are able to alter reality, so when they Shout they are not merely casting a spell, but willing fire into existence with a word. Language equals Thought Equals Being, in other words. This is exploited with the "Dragonrend" thu'um: Dragons have words for the concepts of "mortal," "finite," and "temporary," but as immortal Aedric beings they will never truly grasp them like they do the words for fire, ice and so forth. "Dragonrend" uses those words to briefly force dragons to experience concepts utterly antithetical to their very nature, leaving them temporarily unable to Shout or fly.
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Language Equals Thought / int_59593dcd	comment	In Snuff, goblins' way of speaking initially makes them seem stupid. Miss Beedle later explains that their vocabulary and mode of thought simply doesn't translate well; for example, rather than naming lots of different colors, they name only a few but have lots of phrasings that express how they blend together.
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Language Equals Thought / int_5bb5ad89	comment	JLA (1997): Subverted in one issue of Grant Morrison's run. Mad scientists T.O. Morrow and Dr. Ivo decide to find out which one of them is the better scientist by creating an android super-hero named Tomorrow Woman to invade the League and then destroy it. Morrow (in charge of the brain while Ivo was in charge of the body) deliberately leaves the word "freedom" out of her vocabulary. Despite this, when the time for her to destroy the JLA, she defies her very programming, making a Heroic Sacrifice to save the other members of the JLA. When Superman asks her remains why she did that in the last seconds of her activation, she says "word not present in vocabulary". Showing his true character as a scientist (if a mad one) T.O. Morrow was so thrilled by his creation's transcendence of her programming that he didn't mind being arrested (though it's also likely that he's just happy that he "won" the dispute).
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Language Equals Thought / int_5c4eeedc	comment	A Door into Ocean: In the Sharers' language, subject and object are interchangeable. So, for instance, "X kills Y" is indistinguishable from "Y kills X". This leads them to a view of existence that sees hostile acts as inevitably harming the perpetrator as much as the victim.
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Language Equals Thought / int_5cd1aa89	comment	Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak is the government's attempt to control how people think by changing the English language. Their goal is to make thoughts against the Party impossible due to an inability to put such thoughts into words. Many words are outright eliminated, and the meanings and connotations of other words are changed, so that even though you could still construct statements like "Big Brother is ungood" or "All men are equal", you'd have trouble explaining them; they would seem as absurd as the statement "All men are redhaired," and be rejected out of hand.
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Language Equals Thought / int_5d79a99f	comment	Eon: Elvish has no distinction between verbs and adjectives. Humans generally wonder how Elvish is even a functional language, while elves consider the human insistence on making a distinction proof that humans would rather pick apart and over-analyze things than enjoy them for what they are.
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Language Equals Thought / int_5e42de8e	comment	Stranger in a Strange Land: Dr. Mahmoud (a linguist) says that since the Martians don't have words for "war", "weapon" or "fighting", they aren't aggressive. He says: "If a word for a concept isn't in a language, then its culture simply doesn't have the referent the missing word would symbolize." However, this is subverted at the end, when we learn that the Martians are more than capable of annihilating entire planets if they feel the need. Because the Martian civilization we see is so immensely powerful in terms of their longevity and psychic ability, they literally have no "weapons". They think things out of existence, and it happens. "War" and "fight" carry the implication that the other side could fight back and defeat you, whereas Martians have no need to describe anything between "peace" and "extermination".
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Language Equals Thought / int_5fb05bd4	comment	The Basalt City Chronicles: A race known as the Deltharians have no word for sound. This is because around 98% of the population has a genetic condition that renders them entirely deaf.
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Language Equals Thought / int_609e37f5	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_609e37f5	comment	Ringworld: Louis Wu's Kzin friend, a translator at the UN, has a job title (he hasn't made a name for himself yet) that literally translates as "Speaker-to-Animals". He usually renders it as "interspecies translator", of course, but when he's annoyed he uses the literal version, to be insulting. (Although Louis, obviously not insulted, calls him "Speaker" throughout.) His job is actually demeaning to a Kzin, as his sole task is to apologize to any alien in order to avoid a diplomatic incident. In Kzinti culture, any misunderstanding usually results in a challenge and a duel to the death, and they never apologize. Kzinti language contains numerous registers (mislabeled "tenses") for interaction between different classes. Anything spoken in the Dominant Tense is automatically an insult (and anything in the Dominated Tense is an apology), and using the Imperative Tensenote not the Ultimate Imperative Tense, mind you, just the regular one means "Obey instantly or be torn to pieces." Registers are not tenses, but doing the research on theoretical linguistics was a lot harder when there was no Internet. One story mentions that Kzinti have no word for "peace" (they don't have coexisting equals, only masters and vassals) and that to many Kzinti, the word "peace" actually means "human victory" because that's the only situation where people talk about it.
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Language Equals Thought / int_61b1bd67	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_61b1bd67	comment	In the Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- fanfic The Missing Worlds, Mokona normally provides automatic magical translation in every world they come to. But when the travelers come to an ocean world with no landmasses, the first mermaid they come across is stymied by concepts like 'dry' 'land' and 'drown.' They had a similar problem with the word 'feather' in a world with no birds; the word automatically translated into 'fin,' which was the analogous concept but failed to accurately describe the actual object.
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Language Equals Thought / int_630755ab	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_630755ab	comment	Codex Alera: The Canim in the series have a very martial culture, and they supposedly have a dozen different words that translate to English (or Aleran, or whatever you call what the reader is reading) as "enemy". However, the only such word we actually hear is gadara, which means more specifically something like "honorable and respected enemy, whom I alone claim the right to kill". A gadara is considered better than a friend, since they have to defend their claim on the other's eventual death. The Marat had no word for lying until they started talking to Alerans. The closest they got was someone being mistaken, and accusing someone of being "intentionally mistaken" can result in a lethal duel. The protagonist eventually tells his Marat companion to simply use the word "falsehood", in order to avoid confusion with the other meanings of the word "lie".
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Language Equals Thought / int_633bef5e	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_633bef5e	comment	Old Solar in The Space Trilogy has no words for 'bad' or 'evil' or 'sin' or 'war' or... pretty much anything else that doesn't exist in the sinless society of the aliens; due to not having the spiritual Fall that Earth did (this is extended to the rest of the universe as well, Earth being unique in that regard). In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom tries to translate the villain Weston's speech into Old Solar and has to take an entire sentence for almost every word of Weston's. Eventually he just gives up and has to inform Oyarsa that there is no way to translate Weston's diatribe. In Perelandra, Ransom discovers to his surprise that there is actually a word for "evil" in the unfallen language (in the first book, he had to make do with the euphemism "bent"). Apparently, it's a very advanced concept, and he'd just never run across the word on Mars.
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Language Equals Thought / int_64b67c84	comment	Mentioned briefly in The Secret World - language of immortals has no word for "Patience". Though it could be just a methaphor from the Buzzing.
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Language Equals Thought / int_68b8ff6a	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_68b8ff6a	comment	Shortly after the Exxon Valdez disaster, Jools Holland quipped "Eskimos have 37 words for 'snow'. And now they have just as many for 'oil spill'. Most starting with 'F-' and ending in '-ing Exxon'!"
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Language Equals Thought / int_6a2c6f35	comment	In the Green-Sky Trilogy, the Kindar do not even have any word for things like violence, grief, or anger. The closest they have is "unjoyful" and "sorrow" is considered indecent language. Only the elite priesthood of the Ol-Zhaan are supposed to know the words or the concepts. This is all the better to control the population and "protect" them from the human tendency for violent or anti-social behavior.
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Language Equals Thought / int_6a8aff51	comment	The Stormlight Archive: The Alethi and other Vorin cultures have a Fantastic Caste System where people with lighter-colored eyes are on top. As a result, their only word for "noble" is "lighteyes". Whenever a foreigner talks about foreign nobles (who don't necessarily have light eyes) in Alethi they end up having to refer to them in a roundabout way as "lighteyes who don't have light eyes", and the Alethi among them often have a hard time accepting the concept.
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Language Equals Thought / int_6ac55ec7	comment	Dungeons & Dragons uses the tropes for quite a lot of languages, particularly languages of outsiders, though it's more "Thought Equals Language". In the very first edition of AD&D you can speak your "Alignment Language", which allows beings of the same alignment to communicate at a basic level. This is dressed it up as being Black Speech and the like. However, changing alignment also removes the ability to speak your alignment language. Dark Speech, the secret tongue of evil gods, is so inhumanly spiteful and malicious that it's capable of inspiring instinctive dread in listeners and corroding physical objects; even infernal beings are wary of speaking such words carelessly. Its inverse are the Words of Creation, the lost language of Celestials' precursors, a tongue without words for hate or betrayal but an intricate terminology for forms of beauty and forgiveness. In either case, only a particularly virtuous or exceptionally vile individual can understand these languages well enough to speak them — neutral speakers will stumble over the words and get struck with a Feeblemind effect, while speakers of the opposing alignment will simply die. The drow combine this with Evil Cannot Comprehend Good; they belong to a society that actively encourages psychopathy, and as such, they have no word that really means romantic love; the closest they have is one for physical lust. They don't have a word for "friend", either — that relationship is actually "an alliance for mutual benefit". As a matter of fact, their word for "trust" is a synonym for "foolishness." Goblins and orcs don't seem to have a word that means friendship as we understand it; the closest they have are two words, one meaning something like "willing submission to a greater power" and the other "military alliance between equals". According to one source, the orcish language does have dozens of words for disemboweling somebody. Infernal is characterized by painfully exacting grammar and pronunciation, reflecting the Lawful Evil strictness of the devils who speak it. The Chaotic Evil demons in contrast didn't even have an alphabet until they bastardized Infernal for their own tongue, Abyssal, just another in the long list of grievances the Baatezu hold against the Tanar'ri. The demons' tongue, according to one Planescape sourcebook, is a hopeless pile of inconsistent dialects, which "may well be part of the reason the tanar'ri are so angry all the time — they're constantly and fundamentally misunderstood". Nagas are supremely arrogant beings, and each views themself as incarnate perfection, other members of its specific breed as nearly so, other nagas as further flawed, and non-nagas as increasingly imperfect. Consequently, they have no concept of equal rank, and their language has no word for "peer". A couple of additions to this from fan-made websites: Some website that may not base this on official sources has an interesting version of the Lawful Evil Infernal language(s) of the Baatezu (devils), presenting a fourfold hierarchy: Hellhound is mainly useful for barking orders. Baatezu or Infernal is deceptive and beguiling and it's impossible to tell the truth in it. It also contains a legal jargon that is, somehow, simultaneously binding and meaningless. (So good luck trying to come out ahead in that Deal with the Devil.) Greater Baatezu or Malbaogni is even more exquisite and is used by lower Baatezu nobles, who probably use it with great skill but don't actually understand what they're saying, because that's only possible with knowledge of Mabrahoring, the language of the highest Baatezu elite. There used to be a fan-made explanation on the web of the language of the Slaadi, the toad-like creatures embodying pure chaos. According to it, no-one had been able to study the language until a linguist got to study a human who had been raised by Slaadi and spoke the language. For a start, it was hard to even get this human to understand the concept of a common noun that applied to several different objects instead of just one. When communication was finally established, it turned out one of the reasons the Slaadi language was so weird was because Slaadi "individuals" didn't even exist in integer quantities other than when they interacted with other beings. Obviously it's hard to even imagine what this would mean, but the most extreme creatures in the Planescape setting have always had a bit of an air of complete otherness. (By official sources, or at least 2nd edition Planewalker's Handbook, Slaadi is just another no doubt weird language you can learn, but the language of the extremely orderly Modrons costs extra to learn for "being based on unique concepts".)
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Language Equals Thought / int_6e1d5f36	comment	Farscape. Played with when John Crichton has to explain to Aeryn Sun—who as a Sebacean has been raised from birth to be a Peacekeeper soldier—what "compassion" is. Aeryn then says she does know what the word means—she just doesn't like the idea.
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Language Equals Thought / int_7077b93a	comment	In the Divine Divinity universe the Elves live in the moment and thus their language has no past and future tenses. A few Elves learning a human language bother learning these concepts; most don't.
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Language Equals Thought / int_73d7930f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_73d7930f	comment	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Quark states during "Let He Who Is Without Sin" that Ferenginar's awful climate has led to the Ferengi language having 178 different words for rain. Moments later he explains why everyone is complaining about the food by noting there's no word for "crisp" on Ferenginar, either. At one point Worf mentions that he and Martok had a moment of Tova'dok between them. Worf says the Klingon word has no equivilent in English, but he is easily able to define it as "a moment of clarity between two warriors on a field of battle" where "much is said without the need for words."
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Language Equals Thought / int_740815bb	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_740815bb	comment	Interesting Times: In the language of the xenophobic Agatean Empire, the word for "foreigner" is the same as the word for "ghost", and very close to the word for "victim" when written down. Truth in Television here: in Real Life, pejorative Chinese words for foreigners, Europeans specifically, include "lo fan" ("white ghost") and "gwei lo" ("ghost man").
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Language Equals Thought / int_7559ae0b	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7559ae0b	comment	In Dune, Galach has different words for poison in food (chaumas) or drink (chaumurky), which probably says something about the Houses. While the desert-dwelling Fremen have different words for different types of sand, of course.
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Dune (Franchise)	hasFeature	Language Equals Thought / int_7559ae0b
Language Equals Thought / int_764175c4	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_764175c4	comment	The Cartoon History of the Universe: This trope is lampshaded after it's mentioned that the Romans decimated (i.e., killed every tenth person — although in actual Roman times this was reserved for executing deserters, but Rule of Funny reigns in this case) Athens, which leads a local woman to wonder why anybody would even have a dedicated word for that.
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Language Equals Thought / int_769da46e	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_769da46e	comment	Monstrous Regiment: This is brought up in the narration, when Polly is talking to her friend about her odd behavior and possible miracles. The narration mentions that her language had no word for "freaky", but she would have welcomed its inclusion. She settles on calling it "strange". There's also mention of a Borogravian folk song called "Plogviehze", which means "The Sun Has Risen, Let's Make War!" Vimes notes that it takes a very special history to get that into one word. The song also includes a phrase that roughly translates to "glowing opportunity" but more literally means "a great big fish"; this is what clues Vimes in that the country is not just backwards, but completely insane.
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Language Equals Thought / int_76cb191b	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_76cb191b	comment	The Invisibles: Grant Morrison also uses this a number of times. As an example, Key 17 is a drug that causes people to hallucinate whatever a word is whenever they read it. For instance, reading the word "dad" will cause a hallucination of your father to show up.
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Language Equals Thought / int_77677ed1	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_77677ed1	comment	The Morrigi from Sword of the Stars have no word for 'rank'; their society is a meritocracy based on rule by the one with the highest degree of 'merit', and every Morrigi knows more or less instinctively which Morrigi in any given group has the most merit, who would replace him if the most worthy was killed, and so on. The closest thing they have is the word "aanigi'dha", "worthiness-to-lead-people". The Zuul word for "pirate" is simply "Zuul", they're a species of scavengers, slavers, and well, pirates. Additionally, their word for "dreadnought" is synonymous with "fortress", which is a little strange since Zuul ships are the least armored in the game. They do, however, have the most guns, which fits their Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality.
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Language Equals Thought / int_77a899a	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_77a899a	comment	From Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG:
Language Equals Thought / int_77a899a	featureApplicability	1.0
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Language Equals Thought / int_77bda8e9	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_77bda8e9	comment	Witches Abroad uses this, with specific reference to the legend that the Inuit have twenty words for snow, by saying it's false. Similarly, dwarves don't have a hundred words for "rock". As per their obsession of mining, they have words describing the precise kind of rock — igneous, sedimentary, and that's just to start — but not one for just "rock". "Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes."
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Language Equals Thought / int_7832b74c	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7832b74c	comment	Steven Universe: Homeworld doesn't have a word for "art". When Peridot and Lapis Lazuli reinvent it, Peridot describes it as music, but with objects in an attempt to connect it to things she can recognize ("music" also being a concept she had to be introduced to on Earth). Played for Laughs in that they coin the term "meepmorps" for what they're doing.
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Language Equals Thought / int_788767ba	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_788767ba	comment	In Incarnations of Immortality, it's claimed that the Romani have no words for "possession" or "ownership", meaning that the concept of "stealing" doesn't exist for them. This isn't actually true.
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Language Equals Thought / int_78db2b3b	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_78db2b3b	comment	In Gulliver's Travels, the eponymous Gulliver comes upon the Houyhnhnms, a race of sentient horses who live in a simplistic Utopian society and are relatively naive about the evils of the world; for example, they lack a word for "lie". To describe the concept, they refer to "saying the thing which is not".
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Language Equals Thought / int_79a1465e	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_79a1465e	comment	In Speaker for the Dead, the porcine alien Pequeninos (or "piggies") live in a highly matriarchal society. When a male human colonist asks a male Pequenino translator to speak a phrase to a female Pequenino involving him issuing her a command and her issuing him a request, the translator replies, "I can't say that!" There's a moment of confusion when the humans believe that he is merely offended by the idea or afraid of the consequences of speaking it to her, but it turns out that it's literally true: there is no way of expressing these ideas in the Pequenino language with the male in a position of power and the female in a position of submission. The translator has to ask the female's permission to refer to her as if she were male before carrying on with the conversation.
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Language Equals Thought / int_79bf0b84	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_79bf0b84	comment	Slightly Damned has the angelic language, which has no actual curse words. This gets played with when people are shown to attempt to curse in that language, the literal translation of which is...rather bizarre sounding.
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Language Equals Thought / int_7b039953	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7b039953	comment	In a deleted scene from Avatar, it is stated that the Na'vi do not have their own word for "lie," but were taught the word by humans. The canonicity of this statement is debatable, since it is a deleted scene, and no Na'vi dictionaries on the web make any note of "lie" being a loanword or anything.
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Avatar	hasFeature	Language Equals Thought / int_7b039953
Language Equals Thought / int_7c884aca	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7c884aca	comment	Fishgirls in Ennui GO! are primarily obligate carnivores who subsist on fish and thus lack a word to describe the flavor sweet, though they are capable of tasting it. This causes Manta some difficutly when trying to describe cotton candy to Piranha.
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Language Equals Thought / int_7dc116eb	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7dc116eb	comment	Kris Longknife: The avian Alwans lack any concept of commerce, having been pre-industrial when contacted. To get them to work as soldiers or factory workers, the humans resort to spelling out what they need to do in order to earn "gifts" from a catalog. Also the arboreal "Rooster" subspecies doesn't have any concept of war, but the plains-dwelling "Ostrich" subspecies does, and the Ostriches become some of the best fighters on Alwa Station. Once Kris's expedition deciphers the Human Alien Planet Looters' language in Tenacious, they discover that while it has over a dozen words for "submission", it interestingly has no word for "war", as the Absolute Xenophobe marauders consider all intelligent life other than themselves to be vermin. It also turns out to have no word for "surrender", so when a squadron of enemy ships seemingly tries to surrender, they attempt to get this across by transmitting, "We will be your slaves", over and over. (Kris has to destroy them because they're refusing her commands to cut thrust and divert from a strategic jump point, meaning that she can't tell whether the surrender is genuine.) The Sasquans, a mostly friendly race of Cat Folk, refer to Kris as having "pounded" a Sasquan head of state who tried to nuke her flotilla of battlecruisers shortly after First Contact (Kris shot down her missiles and then reduced her mountain redoubt and the mountain it was housed in to molten slag with Orbital Bombardment). Kris's sentient computer Nelly informs Kris that "pounding" is something prey animals do, whereas cats "slash" and "cut". Kris phrases her response accordingly.
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Language Equals Thought / int_7fc78282	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7fc78282	comment	In The Lord of the Rings, the elves do not appear to have a word for "magic," since it's such an intrinsic part of themselves and their world that they do not distinguish between it and what we would consider "natural" phenomena. They do however, have a word for witchery: gul. They seem a bit perturbed that the hobbits use the same word for the skills and abilities of the elves and the deceptions of Sauron. Galadriel herself even directly invokes Clarke's Third Law when discussing her mirror with Frodo and Sam.
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Language Equals Thought / int_7fd403f8	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_7fd403f8	comment	In Galaxy Quest, the Thermians don't have a word, associated concept, or anything else for "acting" or "pretending," which explains why they thought that a TV show was a historical document. The closest they can come up with is "falsehood", a concept they only know from Sarris.
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Language Equals Thought / int_81692f99	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_81692f99	comment	Star Trek: Star Trek: The Original Series: In Harlan Ellison's original teleplay for "The City on the Edge of Forever", the Guardians of Forever had some difficulty explaining the danger posed by a renegade Enterprise crewman: Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Loud as a Whisper", the Enterprise crew meet a famed diplomat Riva. Worf comments that Riva had negotiated treaties among the Klingon people; "Before Riva, there was no word in Klingon for 'peacemaker'." When celebrating Worf's birthday, the Enterprise bridge crew sings "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in Klingon. Then Riker points out that they had trouble translating it, since there's no Klingon word for "jolly." In reality, "jolly good fellow" is a colloquial expression meaning "very good fellow" rather than "fellow who is good and jolly." In "Peak Performance", the Zakdorn tactician Kolrami is asked what the Zakdorn word for "mismatch" is. His immediate response is "Challenge!" Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Quark states during "Let He Who Is Without Sin" that Ferenginar's awful climate has led to the Ferengi language having 178 different words for rain. Moments later he explains why everyone is complaining about the food by noting there's no word for "crisp" on Ferenginar, either. At one point Worf mentions that he and Martok had a moment of Tova'dok between them. Worf says the Klingon word has no equivilent in English, but he is easily able to define it as "a moment of clarity between two warriors on a field of battle" where "much is said without the need for words." Star Trek: Enterprise: In the pilot, Hoshi informs Captain Archer that she doesn't think the Klingons have a word for "Thank you", and that he "didn't want to know" the actual phrase he had taken for gratitude. (This is either Hoshi's mistake or the writers: The Klingon Dictionary actually does include a verb for "to thank", tlho', though this is indeed not what the Klingon Chancellor said. However, since this is a prequel, it's quite possible Hoshi doesn't have access to this information.) In one episode, the crew met some aliens whose word for "eating" was intrinsically linked to their word for "sex." They took one look at the mess hall and stormed off screaming in outrage. Once they're contacted to help solve the episode's conflict, they expect an appology for people eating in front of them because "[to] put food in your mouth... it's like mating!"
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Language Equals Thought / int_81765d93	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_81765d93	comment	Subverted in Final Fantasy Type-0 by the people of Concordia. They have a language, Soryusian, whose literal translations are very terse; the language is designed for minimal ambiguity in a combat situation, so that, for example, when Celestia points at Ace and says "Ratelo" (strike the target), her diepvern knows exactly what she wants it to do. However, the language is a secondary language, and only sees use in combat situations; otherwise, Concordians speak the same language as the rest of Orience.
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Language Equals Thought / int_82439e64	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_82439e64	comment	In The Office, Michael claims that the Jamaicans don't have a word "impossible." Jim promptly points out that they do. (Jamaicans speak English and/or the English-based Jamaican Patois, so their word for impossible is "impossible.")
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The Office (US)	hasFeature	Language Equals Thought / int_82439e64
Language Equals Thought / int_83022f98	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_83022f98	comment	The Chronicles of Riddick: "Balance is everything to an elemental. [...] We have 33 different words for it."
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Language Equals Thought / int_8722cd	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8722cd	comment	Outbound Flight: Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo tells Jorj Car'das that he's known among his people, the Chiss, for... unusual tactics. The Chiss are Martial Pacifists and isolationists; they never instigate a fight. Thrawn does instigate fights, against peoples that he thinks are a great enough future danger to the Chiss, and against peoples who might never threaten the Chiss but who are threatening the weaker cultures just outside of Chiss space. Thrawn seems mildly surprised when Car'das tells him that he's talking about making preemptive strikes, which is a new phrase to him, and tells the human that it's good to know that he's not the only one to consider the morality of striking first. (In Outbound Flight's sequel Survivor's Quest, we learn that, despite this, the Chiss military actually makes a veritable art form out of tricking the other guy into striking first, suggesting Thrawn simply wanted to cut a lot of BS out of the process.)
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Language Equals Thought / int_8869a227	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8869a227	comment	The people in The Invention of Lying have no word for the act of lying; the closest they get, throughout the film, is "saying something that isn't". Even the protagonist, who is the one who comes up with lying, can't think of a word for it. To be fair, no one had ever lied before, so them having a word for it would be like a medieval person having a word for the Internet.
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Language Equals Thought / int_88cef91b	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_88cef91b	comment	In Sluggy Freelance, the inhabitants of the Dimension of Lame normally have extremely wonderful days, but sometimes have to tolerate a rather nice day to appreciate how wonderful the other days are. As a result, "rather nice" is about the worst descriptor they can apply to a state of affairs, even when they are invaded by the Legions of Hell. After a while, one of them does come to the realisation that "This isn't even hardly nice!"
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Language Equals Thought / int_897271d7	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_897271d7	comment	In Alien in a Small Town, the alien Jan have natural sonar, and communicate by projecting sonic images of things to each other, with few actual words, as such. They can learn to understand human languages, but it's difficult, as the whole concept of words as symbols for things as the basis for all communication is very foreign to them. Paul (a Jan who has adopted that name for dealing with humans) becomes very good at it, but later finds that he can never entirely turn it off â€“ as any speaker of a foreign language discovers, he finds himself thinking in words rather than in his native images, and he has trouble communicating some concepts without words. This troubles him. His mother assures him that words have both their uses and limitations, but "in their finiteness," they are useful for sorting out one's thoughts.
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Language Equals Thought / int_8afdcc1b	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8afdcc1b	comment	In Cranes, the Gotham City nickname for meta-humans is "Deader-Thans". This is because Gotham City is the haunt of Batman, who is notorious for his vehement Fantastic Racism against meta-humans, to the point the city is considered one of the worst places to be in the entirety of America if you're a meta.
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Language Equals Thought / int_8e68cca9	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8e68cca9	comment	Discussed in Digger, when the statue of Ganesh has difficulty explaining to Digger the intricacies of a magical interference, because the language they're using just doesn't have the words for the kind of perceptions a god has. Digger compares this to one of her people (wombats) trying to discuss geology with a species that has "maybe five words for rock".
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Language Equals Thought / int_8ec33a88	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8ec33a88	comment	In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the soldiers on both sides of the Forever War are incubated in pods and are set on the battlefield from the moment they're born, under the mote of their respective Colony's Flame Clocks. As a result, they have no concept of familial relations or of physical intimacy, and so many of their exclamations evoke fire-based imagery (such as 'spark' and 'snuff'), instead of anything pertaining to the former (such as 'fuck' or 'bastard').
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Language Equals Thought / int_8fda7950	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_8fda7950	comment	Known Space: A few stories mention that the (extinct) Tnuctipun didn't have a word for intelligent aliens; their close equivalent roughly translated to "food that talks". The Puppeteers are a race of aliens who evolved from skittish grazing herbivores, so being a Dirty Coward is practically their racial hat. Their word for "leader" is "Hindmost", implying that they believe that a great leader truly leads from the back. Also of note, they have No Sense of Humor, which makes sense seeing as when you're laughing at a joke, your situational awareness is impaired and your breathing pattern is disrupted, and in the words of a Puppeteer, no sane sapient would ever willingly disable a defense mechanism. Inverted by humanity's rulers in the time between Gil Hamilton's adventures and first contact with the Kzin; "war" and "weapons" may be forgotten words, but only because human culture and history have been thoroughly folded, spindled and mutilated to erase the concepts behind them. Hostility and conflict, even on a personal level, are viewed as borderline obscenities. This nearly gets the first human crew to meet the Kzin killed; only at the last moment does a crewman think to use the ship's drive (a laser so powerful it doubles as a communication link at interstellar distances) to carve up the Kzinti ship.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9004922f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_9004922f	comment	In Hogfather, Death has difficulty explaining to his granddaughter exactly what happened to the Discworld's version of Santa Claus, because there is no precisely accurate human word for it (essentially, the Hogfather ceased to exist due to lack of belief). He eventually settles on "Gone".
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Language Equals Thought / int_90199e38	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_90199e38	comment	Somewhither: Ilya notes that the language used in the Dark Tower includes a lot of specialized terms for specific kinds of maiming and torture.
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Language Equals Thought / int_909b004d	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_909b004d	comment	The Transformers (IDW): Megatron explains to Optimus Prime that his end goal is to create a world so thoroughly controlled and structured that the very idea of change or rebellion will be a thing of the past, that he will only remove his Arm Cannon and finally end his war when no one but himself recognizes why the act is significant.
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Language Equals Thought / int_90c73dda	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_90c73dda	comment	Played with in Animorphs. The Andalites use the same word, shorm, for Platonic Life-Partners/Heterosexual Life-Partners and for the lethally sharp bone blades on the end of their tails. It's not because they equate friends to weapons; rather, they regard a very good friend as one whom they would trust to put a tail-blade against their throat and not worry them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9151e048	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_9151e048	comment	In Heroes of Might and Magic Ashan, the demon language has the words for "Politics" and "War" interchangeable with each other. One scenario has you being a "candidate" in a demonic "election" which basically amounts to killing the other candidates to establish your supremacy.
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Language Equals Thought / int_92801ac	comment	In Three Worlds Collide, the alien Baby Eaters have more children than they can support and eat the excess. Their word for "to be moral" is the same as their word for "to eat babies". The Super Happy People from the same story think and communicate by exchanging DNA, so their words (or rather, their DNA codes) for "to have sex" and "to talk" are the same.
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Language Equals Thought / int_93b9b77c	comment	Every cult language in Nexus War. The language of the god of society and cooperation is easy to learn, the god of law's is extremely specific and long-winded, the god governing the physical laws of the universe has a language better suited for concepts than actions, and so forth.
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Language Equals Thought / int_95fa41d4	comment	Genocidal Organ is about the hunt for an American linguistics expert called John Paul, who has discovered a 'language of genocide' and is using it to start ethnic conflicts in Third World countries. Linguistic relativity being discredited is brought up in a Just Between You and Me discussion between the protagonist and John Paul. However, it's not an actual language so much as a grammar of genocide — subconscious speech patterns and topics that can activate pre-historic logic processes in the human brain responsible for culling members of a population when faced with food shortages, and which commonly appear before periods of civil unrest and ethnic conflict. John Paul has just reverse-engineered the linguistics to spread subliminal messages, so that the grammar causes genocides rather than merely foreshadowing them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9a7088bc	comment	Star Trek: The Original Series: In Harlan Ellison's original teleplay for "The City on the Edge of Forever", the Guardians of Forever had some difficulty explaining the danger posed by a renegade Enterprise crewman:
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Language Equals Thought / int_9bafe00f	comment	In Perelandra, Ransom discovers to his surprise that there is actually a word for "evil" in the unfallen language (in the first book, he had to make do with the euphemism "bent"). Apparently, it's a very advanced concept, and he'd just never run across the word on Mars.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9ce851a3	comment	Malcolm in the Middle: Invoked and averted in "Cynthia's Back" when an Inuit man tells Francis in an annoyed voice that he only has one word for snow. Malcolm claims that people from Amsterdam have no word for virginity.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9d34190a	comment	The Elder Scrolls: In the series' lore, Ta'agra (the language of the Khajiit) has no word for "rules". The closest equivalent translates to "foolish concepts". Naturally, this leads to much Culture Clash between them and the other races, especially when it comes to what constitutes "personal property" and "theft." The Argonian language, known as "Jel", has no past or future tense verbs. As such, Argonians tend to live "in the now," easily forgetting and forgiving past offenses while paying little mind to the future. (The possibly omniscient Hist, sentient trees native to the Argonian homeland who the Argonians worship, seem to do that for them, as seen with them foreseeing and preparing the Argonians for the Oblivion Crisis and turmoils of the 4th Era.) The Dragons in Skyrim make no distinction between "debating" and "fighting"—two dragons breathing fire at each other are just having a particularly heated argument. Furthermore, dragons' thoughts when voiced are able to alter reality, so when they Shout they are not merely casting a spell, but willing fire into existence with a word. Language equals Thought Equals Being, in other words. This is exploited with the "Dragonrend" thu'um: Dragons have words for the concepts of "mortal," "finite," and "temporary," but as immortal Aedric beings they will never truly grasp them like they do the words for fire, ice and so forth. "Dragonrend" uses those words to briefly force dragons to experience concepts utterly antithetical to their very nature, leaving them temporarily unable to Shout or fly. One quest in The Elder Scrolls Online reveals that there is no word in the Orcish language meaning "fragile". This reflects their warlike culture, which values strength. Similarly, apparently there is no word for "patience" in Old Orcish, with the closest word meaning "sedated".
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Language Equals Thought / int_9d47a2a2	comment	In the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones, it is claimed that "[t]here is no word for 'thank you' in Dothraki." They do seem to understand the concept though, they just don't mess around with words and prefer more direct methods. Drogo struggles a bit trying to get it across and ends up with "any horse in the camp is yours". Dothraki culture seems to believe that thanks and gratitude are things to be shown, not merely said. When Drogo is given Dany as a wife, it is expected that he will eventually repay Viserys in whatever manner he believes fitting. Though Viserys's attitude and increasing dickbaggery eventually result in Drogo repaying him in... unexpected ways. They very much have the concept of gratitude, they just believe it should be expressed physically rather than verbally. So the difference in language does signal a difference in thought, but the difference is in how gratitude is shown, not in whether it exists. The Dothraki, being a raiding culture, have no concept of trading at all, lacking the words "trade", "buy", "sell", and so on. Eventually the merchants just used the gift-giving concept that the Dothraki do understand, explaining it as giving the Dothraki a gift in return for a specific gift that the merchants have indicated they'd like ahead of time. It is stated in the TV series that the Dothraki also have ten different words for "horse". To be fair, English has way more than that.
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Language Equals Thought / int_9f2fe1ec	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_9f2fe1ec	comment	The cats in Pugmire supposedly have seven different words for "betrayal." Pan Dachshound considers that just one more reason never to trust the buggers.
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Language Equals Thought / int_a03824e8	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_a03824e8	comment	The DCU: JLA (1997): Subverted in one issue of Grant Morrison's run. Mad scientists T.O. Morrow and Dr. Ivo decide to find out which one of them is the better scientist by creating an android super-hero named Tomorrow Woman to invade the League and then destroy it. Morrow (in charge of the brain while Ivo was in charge of the body) deliberately leaves the word "freedom" out of her vocabulary. Despite this, when the time for her to destroy the JLA, she defies her very programming, making a Heroic Sacrifice to save the other members of the JLA. When Superman asks her remains why she did that in the last seconds of her activation, she says "word not present in vocabulary". Showing his true character as a scientist (if a mad one) T.O. Morrow was so thrilled by his creation's transcendence of her programming that he didn't mind being arrested (though it's also likely that he's just happy that he "won" the dispute). Green Lantern: In Alan Moore's "In Blackest Night", GL Katma Tui traveled through a starless expanse of space called the Obsidian Wastes to seek out a native on a planet in that region as a recruit for the Green Lantern Corps. The alien she discovered, Rot Lop Fan, is of a species that, due to there being no light in this sector of space, evolved without eyes. As a result, when Katma attempted to communicate with Fan her ring couldn't translate any words pertaining to vision, light or color, such as 'green', 'lantern', 'ray' or 'sight', which made explaining the nature of the Green Lantern Corps impossible. She got around this by getting Fan to turn the ring into a bell construct that produces an F-sharp sound (the sound that Fan found them most soothing) and describing the constructs as being made of sound, not light. Thus Rot Lop Fan became the universe's only "F-Sharp Bell".
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Language Equals Thought / int_a0d0b050	comment	The plot of The Languages of Pao centers around a project to completely change the culture of a planet by replacing their native language with created languages specifically designed to shape their thought patterns. It is worth noting that the project ultimately fails miserably with a switch to a language that's a blend of all the created languages, likely making it a deconstruction.
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Language Equals Thought / int_a2a386c9	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_a2a386c9	comment	Tylansian in Orion's Arm uses the same words for "truth teller" and "complaining child" while the word for "liar" also means "successful man". It has often been stated as a cause for their ruling class' Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and Tylansia's general stagnation (and ludicrous propaganda films that are strangely popular in the civilized galaxy).
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Language Equals Thought / int_a62983b	comment	The Dispossessed is partially set in an anarchist society that has no concept of property, which is even specifically coded into the language they use. Instead of saying "my toothbrush", they almost always say "the toothbrush I use", and their possessive is only used for clarity. (Note that most anarchists and communists in real life don't oppose personal possessions like toothbrushes, and in practice the Odonian society in The Dispossessed has certain items that are always or almost always used by the same individual). Additionally, their language also uses the same word for 'work' and 'play'. This is eventually subverted, however, as the language evolved with time: there's a word "kleggich", roughly translating to "drudgery", that is used for work that is necessary but so unpleasant it cannot be mistaken for play. Likewise, Pravic has words for things that do not exist in their society (crime, priests, thieves) because it would be hard to teach history and philosophy otherwise, but this does not mean that the inhabitants truly understand those things.
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Language Equals Thought / int_a806ea97	comment	Garrett, P.I.: In Sweet Silver Blues, Morley translates a phrase as either "Dawn of Night's Mercy" or "Dawn of Night's Madness". Garrett is perplexed by the disparate translations, until he's told that the phrase was Dark Elfin, in which "mercy" and "madness" are the same word.
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Language Equals Thought / int_a825da3e	comment	Magic: The Gathering has some fun in this regard with the flavor text in its cards. Some examples: Cyclopes are more or less universally portrayed as vicious, bloodthirsty and barely sapient brutes. Goblins are almost always aggressive, borderline self-destructive and none-too-bright little buggers.
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Language Equals Thought / int_a9e19ff0	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_a9e19ff0	comment	In Book of the New Sun, the Ascians were only permitted to speak memorized phrases from Approved Texts. Anything else was not correct thought. Played out full throttle in the story told by Loyal to the Group of 17. Subverted, as Severian notes that Loyal to the Group of 17 is able to use the phrases to communicate meanings different from their original intention.
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Language Equals Thought / int_aa639666	comment	In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom tries to translate the villain Weston's speech into Old Solar and has to take an entire sentence for almost every word of Weston's. Eventually he just gives up and has to inform Oyarsa that there is no way to translate Weston's diatribe.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ac67074d	comment	Teen Titans: In the Whole Episode Flashback Everyone Meets Everyone episode, "Go!", Starfire, who hails from a warrior planet, is chewed out by the others for attacking them when they try to help her. Note that in this case "being nice" was being used to mean "doing something for no gain to myself, possibly causing harm to myself, in order for another to gain." This is later played for laughs in the same episode when another group of war-like aliens show up to claim her as a trophy, she describes them as "not nice".
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Language Equals Thought / int_aedc983a	comment	In the novelization of Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger, it's mentioned that the Kilrathi have no word for "surrender". When Colonel Blair successfully ends the war, the Kilrathi leader pro tem struggles with both the idea of surrendering and figuring out how to ask for it. The idea of surrendering is shown to be foreign to the Kilrathi throughout the game and the novel: prisoners are forcibly captured, for example, not accepted, as the Kilrathi kill anyone they come across. And during the opening scene, Angel remains defiant in captivity and accordingly treated better (insomuch as it matters) than her compatriots who cower and beg for mercy.
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Language Equals Thought / int_af10a8a7	comment	Legacy of the Force: In Revelation, Baltan Carid states that the Mandalorian language has no word for "hero" — not because they have no concept of heroism, but because they take it for granted. The closest they come is the insult "hut'uun", which means "one who is not a hero". The article does claim "hero" means "prepared to die for your family and friends, or what you hold dear," which has historically been most cultures' idea of "dignified behavior", not "hero" (which tends to involve, as mentioned in the formula of many military honors, "above and beyond"). Mando'a as set down by the Republic Commando Series also does not have gendered pronouns or make any difference between "friend" and "sibling." If you've seen enough battles with a Mando, you might as well be his brother. The culture also has a proverb that translates to "family is more than blood".
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Language Equals Thought / int_af566418	comment	Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: Galapagus states many times in his premier episode that his people do not have words for "prison", "war", "Lying" etc., because they are a peaceful race who do not engage in violent or deceitful acts. It helps showcase how much his experiences change him when he not only lies to his captor, Aggregor, but also engages in violence to free himself and his fellow prisoners. He also does it as a means of attracting Ben's attention to ask him for help by pretending to be a monster going on a rampage.
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Language Equals Thought / int_afad78e4	comment	The Deed of Paksenarrion: The second book notes that Elvish has a quirk where reversing the order of letters in a word gives its inversion or negation. For example, the Elvish word for elves is sinyi ("Singers"), whereas their word for the dark elves is iynis ("Un-Singers").
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Language Equals Thought / int_b30ae4db	comment	It is stated in the TV series that the Dothraki also have ten different words for "horse". To be fair, English has way more than that.
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Language Equals Thought / int_b316d416	comment	In Anthem, the collectivist society has removed the first-person singular pronoun "I" from language and made "ego" into a forbidden word.
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Language Equals Thought / int_b31b332f	comment	In the Transformers fanfic Indefinite Objects, Maggie discovers that the Transformers lack puns in their language. While talking about this with Glenn, she explains that the Autobots might have a completely logical language-which means that they can only distinguish a value between what is true and what is false, and don't have standards for things like beauty and freedom. This leads them to theorize they may not be thinking beings, but little more than spy drones with Chinese rooms in them, feeding them the correct information to ape sentience.
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Language Equals Thought / int_b4ebd24c	comment	Doctor's Orders mentions that the Orion Pirates use the same word for "stealing" as "getting paid".
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Language Equals Thought / int_b618b457	comment	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Parodied the Guide's discussion about the Shaltanac race of Broop Kidron XIII, whose only equivalent to the expression "the other man's grass is always greener" is "the other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauve-y shade of pinky russet". The Guide concludes that "the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it". Played with in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, with lorry driver Rob McKenna. He refers to the 50-words-for-snow idea, and ups it with meticulously describing over 200 types of rain — and, aside from the multiple Inuit/Eskimo/guys who live north language issue, does it for the same reasons.
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Language Equals Thought / int_b659836d	comment	One quest in The Elder Scrolls Online reveals that there is no word in the Orcish language meaning "fragile". This reflects their warlike culture, which values strength. Similarly, apparently there is no word for "patience" in Old Orcish, with the closest word meaning "sedated".
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Language Equals Thought / int_b87c1da0	comment	In the Island in the Sea of Time (Series), Swindapa Kurlelo is a brilliant mathematician and astronomer, but because of the way her people's language works (including the tendency for numeral words to also express ideas), her attempts to share her knowledge with English-speakers often results in her coming off as a Cloud Cuckoolander.
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Language Equals Thought / int_bc017ee1	comment	Reality Is Fluid at one point has a Saurian ensign on the USS Bajor's bridge crew struggling to explain to her mammalian crewmates what color something is when you can see ultraviolet light. Federation Standard having been created by species with humanlike visual spectra, it has literally no equivalent words for the Undine ships' colors as she perceives them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_bcadd7cb	comment	Warhammer 40,000: Orks have no word for "equal", everyone is either a "boss" to be feared or a "grot" to be bullied. Similarly, their concept for "best friend" is synonymous with "favorite enemy". This tells you just about all you need to know about the Orkish psyche. The Tau have a dozen different subtle distinctions of the phrase "first among equals". Their social ideal, the "Greater Good", is a form of heavily caste-based patriotic utilitarianism with a strong belief that a harmonious society requires everyone to be properly matched to a role that they can best fulfill. The Dark Eldar of Commorragh speak their own distinct dialect of the wider Eldar language, which is known for emphasising harsh consonants and using comparatively aggressive inflections of common concepts. They have several ways of describing pain which are considered unnecessarily specific by most other Eldar.
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Language Equals Thought / int_bff01809	comment	Warhammer: The Dwarfen language of Khazalid has several examples of this: It has no word for "forgiveness", but many for subtle variations of recompense, revenge, and retribution. This explains a lot about why they're going extinct. It has multiple words for gold (azgal, bryn, churk, galaz, konk, krunz, gorlm gnolgen, etc), not only to distinguish the physical characteristics, but also the historical and present circumstances for each manifestation of gold and its commercial properties, such as spending gold, loaned gold, gold that is found by accident, ancestral gold, freshly mined gold, gold used in unlucky deals, and so on. Khazalid also subverts this in another way: it has no words for abstract concepts...but it's not that Dwarfs don't understand abstract concepts, it's that all abstract concepts are expressed via bywords. For instance, the literal meaning of the word for "Everlasting" is "similar to a mountain", the literal meaning of the word for "untrustworthy" is "similar to an elf", and the word for "shoddy" is "built by a human". Since their purpose is to fight the enemies of the Lizardmen, almost every word in the Saurus language relates to battle and strategies and so forth.
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Language Equals Thought / int_c0ac42f	comment	Awake in the Night Land: In the setting, a human killing another human is considered so unthinkable that there isn't even a specific word for it; in the story "The Last of all Suns", when a character from the setting refers to the concept, he falls back on a word which specifically means "killing a nonhuman monster".
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Language Equals Thought / int_c261551b	comment	Tales from Jabba's Palace: C-3PO explains that because Hutts are able to consume most any substance with no ill effect there are no Huttese words for "poison". "Fierfek", the Huttese word most other races assume to mean poison, is actually slang for "hex".
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Language Equals Thought / int_c35714d6	comment	In Blackadder Goes Forth, Blackadder claims that the Germans have no word for "fluffy" as an evidence of Teutonic brutality. This is probably Rule of Funny: Germans actually have more than six words for "fluffy". They're flaumig, flauschig, fluffig, plÃ¼schig, puschelig, kuschelweich and depending on context schaumig or flockig. In fact, the English word "fluffy" comes from the German word "fluffig".
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Language Equals Thought / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who: Inverted in "A Good Man Goes to War", where it is revealed that the Doctor has influenced many worlds indirectly throughout his travels. River Song claims that many languages, including Earth-based languages like English, have the word 'Doctor', meaning 'wise man' or 'healer', while some other worlds use the word 'Doctor' to mean 'warrior' or 'conqueror'. For the people of the Gamma Forest, it means 'mighty warrior'. "We got that from you!" she proclaims at one point. In the same episode The Reveal is that the people of the Gamma Forest have no word for "pond", because the only water in their forest is the river. And the closest word for 'melody' is 'song'. Most Daleks cannot state their names (they have none), they just say "I am a Dalek". Their word for "friend" is their word for "enemy". Anything emotional (such as saying "I love you") causes them to say "Exterminate!" and fire their weapon. They know the word 'mercy', but treat using it as the epitome of helplessness, hence their typical ruthlessness.
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Language Equals Thought / int_c68c0000	comment	Star Wars (Marvel 1977): In the first arc after the retelling of the original movie, the narration mentions that violence is such an everyday occurrence on the Wookiee homeworld that their language has fifteen separate words for it.
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Language Equals Thought / int_c7fe36fb	comment	House Ordos in Dune II and its sequel Emperor: Battle for Dune are the source of the current page quote.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ca5cb239	comment	Tamora Pierce played with this a few times — for example, in her Winding Circle Daja's Book, when they had interactions with Traders again, it comes up that the Trader language has "a dozen words for 'thank-you,' each with its own drop of dislike." Acknowledging a debt is not pleasant.
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Language Equals Thought / int_cae652c	comment	The Chimera Ant King Meryem from Hunter Ã— Hunter, after becoming a Well-Intentioned Extremist, tells Netero that his new goal is to make all humanity so equal that the word "equality" will no longer have any meaning.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ccae327f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_ccae327f	comment	Spoony parodies this in an April Fools' comic book review when the comic in question asserts the Wookies' violent nature by stating that Wookies have fifteen different words for violence. He proceeds to then list nearly thirty separate words in the English language in some way related to it.note Assault, Attack, Battery, Beating, Bloodshed, Brawling, Brutality, Cruelty, Destruction, Fighting, Frenzy, Genocide, Homicide, Massacre, Mayhem, Mugging, Murder, Onslaught, Rage, Rampage, Riots, Rumble, Savagery, Slaughter, Struggle, Terrorism, Viciousness and Roughhousing
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Language Equals Thought / int_cd7bf8e3	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_cd7bf8e3	comment	Babel-17 is built wholly around this trope. The smallest (and least spoilish) example is a race of aliens whose language is based almost entirely around temperature gradients but have no word for "house" — because of this, they build incomprehensible starships that look like a mass of strung-together boiled eggs. And of course, the titular language enables extremely fast thinking and enhanced spatial awareness. More relevant to this trope, that language has no words for "I" or "you" and thus twists the outlooks of those who speak it.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ced20bb9	comment	Alderamin on the Sky: The Sinack mountain tribes on the northern border of the Katvjarna Empire cast their independence revolt as a "holy war". This raises the eyebrows of the Badass Bookworm main character Ikta Solork, since the concept of a holy war doesn't actually exist in the Sinack language or culture: they view war purely as a means of survival, neither holy nor unholy. While Yatori Igsem suggests that the proximal cause of the local Imperial general seizing the Sinacks' elemental spirit partners might qualify it as a "holy war", Ikta instead believes, correctly, that a third party is using the Sinack for a Proxy War and introduced the concept to them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_d07446b9	comment	We get a downplayed example and a much straighter example in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. Ledo comes from an entire nation of Child Soldiers, who are shown to be missing two common words. First, it's shown that while they do have the word "gratitude", they don't have "thank you". The logic being the only person you would need to thank would be your CO and they already know you're grateful to them so stop wasting your breath. The other missing concept is "family", which they simply do not have anymore; parents are shunted back to the front lines once the child is out of the womb.
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Language Equals Thought / int_d2cd3b5e	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_d2cd3b5e	comment	In Nomine has the Angelic language of Celestial, which cannot be used to tell a lie. (It's uncertain how this is accomplished.) When Lucifer and his followers Fell, they created a bastardised version capable of lies. Incidentally, this means that Demons understand Celestial, but very few Angels understand Demonic.
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Language Equals Thought / int_d5505073	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_d5505073	comment	In the Uplift series, it's said that speaking Anglic is what allows neo-dolphins to think rationally. And the transcendent species designed the Galactic languages to stifle creativity and ensure their former clients couldn't threaten them.
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Language Equals Thought / int_d55ffc53	comment	In 7th Sea, the nation of Eisen (totally-not-pre-Imperial Germany) has been put through the wringer lately, with the totally-not-the-Thirty Years' War and all, which has accordingly made its people grim and fatalistic — but, as the tagline of the Eisen supplement points out, "there is no word in Eisen for surrender".
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Language Equals Thought / int_d68480c7	comment	In Amistad, the translator is having trouble explaining the phrase "I should not have done that", because the tribe allegedly doesn't have a word equivalent to the English modal verb "should". CinquÃ©'s explanation: "You either do something or you don't". So it ends up being translated as something like "I will fix this; I will do something", giving the Africans false hope.
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Language Equals Thought / int_df870b3f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_df870b3f	comment	Arrival: This concept is brought up offhandedly at the beginning while trying to translate the aliens' Starfish Language and understand how they think. Learning their language, which puts a heavy emphasis on time, allows humans to experience Mental Time Travel.
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Language Equals Thought / int_e09b75d1	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_e09b75d1	comment	In Star Trek: Klingon Empire, the IKS Gorkon find a planet with such an intense warrior culture that the universal translator cannot convert "peace" into a concept that makes sense to them. Klingons being Klingons, they consider this a fairly strong point in favor of the Children of San-Tarah.
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Language Equals Thought / int_e6267766	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_e6267766	comment	Star Wars Legends: According to Michael Stackpole's I, Jedi, the Caamasi race (universally Actual Pacifist) are so beloved by the galaxy at large as traders, diplomats and healers that several other planets have adopted the name "Caamasi" as a loan word meaning "friend from afar" or "stranger you can trust." New Jedi Order has a bioengineered creature used by the Yuuzhan Vong invaders that seems to be a Shout-Out to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the tizoworm, a little wriggly thing one places in one's ear that translates for one. However, bred as it was by Yuuzhan Vong, it doesn't really have a word for "peace". Outbound Flight: Commander Mitth'raw'nuruodo tells Jorj Car'das that he's known among his people, the Chiss, for... unusual tactics. The Chiss are Martial Pacifists and isolationists; they never instigate a fight. Thrawn does instigate fights, against peoples that he thinks are a great enough future danger to the Chiss, and against peoples who might never threaten the Chiss but who are threatening the weaker cultures just outside of Chiss space. Thrawn seems mildly surprised when Car'das tells him that he's talking about making preemptive strikes, which is a new phrase to him, and tells the human that it's good to know that he's not the only one to consider the morality of striking first. (In Outbound Flight's sequel Survivor's Quest, we learn that, despite this, the Chiss military actually makes a veritable art form out of tricking the other guy into striking first, suggesting Thrawn simply wanted to cut a lot of BS out of the process.) Legacy of the Force: In Revelation, Baltan Carid states that the Mandalorian language has no word for "hero" — not because they have no concept of heroism, but because they take it for granted. The closest they come is the insult "hut'uun", which means "one who is not a hero". The article does claim "hero" means "prepared to die for your family and friends, or what you hold dear," which has historically been most cultures' idea of "dignified behavior", not "hero" (which tends to involve, as mentioned in the formula of many military honors, "above and beyond"). Mando'a as set down by the Republic Commando Series also does not have gendered pronouns or make any difference between "friend" and "sibling." If you've seen enough battles with a Mando, you might as well be his brother. The culture also has a proverb that translates to "family is more than blood". The Jedi Path is treated as an in-universe Jedi Academy textbook, and characters have scribbled notes in its margins. In the part about lightsaber combat, Darth Sidious highlights the word used in sparring for "surrender" and brags that the Sith need no such words. Tales from Jabba's Palace: C-3PO explains that because Hutts are able to consume most any substance with no ill effect there are no Huttese words for "poison". "Fierfek", the Huttese word most other races assume to mean poison, is actually slang for "hex".
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Language Equals Thought / int_e694aadb	comment	In the Ciaphas Cain book The Traitor's Hand, the residents of the Tidally Locked Planet Adumbria (who all live on the terminator line) have thirty-seven different dialect words for varying shades of twilight. The popular history of the Chaos incursion Cain's regiment dealt with is titled "Sablistnote Almost complete darkness with one last glimmer of light still visible in Skitterfall."note The light level at the planet's capital, also the name of the capital itself To Adumbrians this is a witty play on words, but it just annoys off-planet readers.
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Language Equals Thought / int_e764d136	comment	Played with in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, with lorry driver Rob McKenna. He refers to the 50-words-for-snow idea, and ups it with meticulously describing over 200 types of rain — and, aside from the multiple Inuit/Eskimo/guys who live north language issue, does it for the same reasons.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ea85bebc	comment	Always Coming Home actually averts the common mistakes. When some Kesh people grow fascinated with the Dayao idea of "armies", they have no trouble about having no words: they simply adopt the foreign ones. Likewise, it is entirely possible to say that a person is wealthy in the modern sense of possessing much instead of giving much, it just won't be seen as a positive trait; more like being a compulsive hoarder. However, the Kesh grammar allows for no means to express the idea of owning a living being; any attempt to say it will come across as a Russian Reversal-style comedy.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ebffc81f	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_ebffc81f	comment	The magical High Speech in Mage: The Awakening is said to be the only language which can accurately describe magic and magical processes. Using High Speech while casting a spell makes it more powerful since it aids the mage in conceptualizing the magic in a way which his human mind is not fully capable of. The fact High Speech is primarily taught as a language to describe magic also makes it quite difficult to come up with ways of using it to communicate mundanely; the way a word in the High Speech would describe something (and the grammatical structure that would tie such words together) is too far removed from how a mage generally understands such things. This is part of the reason that sleepers cannot so much as hear the High Speech, let alone understand it; you could say the same thing in High Speech to a sleeper over and over, and they would only hear random gibberish. In addition, some scholars theorize that the fall of Atlantis "broke" High Speech, making it nearly impossible to directly communicate with - only a handful of particularly erudite students of the language can actually have a conversation in it.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ec9155b1	comment	Small Gods: Vorbis (a powerful Omnian Quisitor), while visiting the Ephebian Tyrant to persuade them to surrender, notes that "slave" is an Ephebian word, and Omnians have no word for slave. The Tyrant replies: "I imagine fish have no word for water." Another character is a fisherman from a tiny tribe that has no word for "war", because they have no one to fight. When the gods appear and tell everyone (in their own languages) to stop waging war, his god has to explain, "Remember when Pacha Moj hit his uncle with big rock? Like that, only more worse." The fisherman complies, but can't understand why so many people would want to hit Pacha Moj's uncle with a rock.
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Language Equals Thought / int_ec9965ca	comment	The Culture apparently invokes this intentionally with 'Marain', their official language, which in-universe was created from whole cloth around the time of the Culture's foundation. Some of the Narrators take time in their 'Translation Notes' to lambast such 'barbaric' concepts as gender-specific pronouns, for example. This is a plot point in The Player of Games; Marain is contrasted against Azadian, which Gurgeh learns in order to understand his opponents better. Before his last match, his drone deliberately engages him in conversation in Marain in order to help him think with more of a Culture perspective again, which proves to be the key to the game.
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Language Equals Thought / int_f01358c3	comment	The Time Machine (2002): Mara, an Eloi woman living in the year 802,701, is confused by the concept of "steal" and does not know the word, despite being conversant in English.
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Language Equals Thought / int_f326adbf	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_f326adbf	comment	Elfquest: The wolfriders do not require words for things they can take for granted. It was a very hard five hundred years for Cutter to learn the word for "peace (of mind)".
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Language Equals Thought / int_f655ed11	comment	Frasier: Played for Laughs in "The Innkeepers", as Frasier and Niles try to think up a good name for their new restaurant:
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Language Equals Thought / int_f74b5f80	comment	Babylon 5: In the penultimate episode, Delenn describes how when she was learning English, she had difficulty with the word "goodbye"note For values of "goodbye" more equal to "goodbye forever," or perhaps the most exacting form of "sayonara" because there is no corresponding word in any Minbari language: In a previous episode, Lorien brought up this very trope, but used it in a "Chicken or the Egg" scenario.
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Language Equals Thought / int_fe5f7909	type	Language Equals Thought
Language Equals Thought / int_fe5f7909	comment	In Guards! Guards!, we're told that noble dragons don't have a word for "friend", the closest concept being "an enemy who isn't dead yet".
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Language Equals Thought / int_ff9ab17f	comment	Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Loud as a Whisper", the Enterprise crew meet a famed diplomat Riva. Worf comments that Riva had negotiated treaties among the Klingon people; "Before Riva, there was no word in Klingon for 'peacemaker'." When celebrating Worf's birthday, the Enterprise bridge crew sings "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in Klingon. Then Riker points out that they had trouble translating it, since there's no Klingon word for "jolly." In reality, "jolly good fellow" is a colloquial expression meaning "very good fellow" rather than "fellow who is good and jolly." In "Peak Performance", the Zakdorn tactician Kolrami is asked what the Zakdorn word for "mismatch" is. His immediate response is "Challenge!"
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Language Equals Thought	processingCategory2	Language Tropes
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Limyaael's Fantasy Rants (Blog) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
All-New, All-Different Avengers (Comic Book) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Star Wars (Marvel 1977) (Comic Book) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Cartoon History of the Universe (Comic Book) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Basalt City Chronicles (Fanfic) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Light of Abyss (Fanfic) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Arrival / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Broken Arrow (1996) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Rise of the Planet of the Apes / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Small Soldiers / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Invention of Lying / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Dune (Franchise) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
A Memory Called Empire / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Always Coming Home / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Anthem / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Babel-17 / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Between Planets / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Chaos Timeline / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Codex Alera / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Confederation of Valor / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Doctor's Orders / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Dragaera / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Dune / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Gulliver's Travels / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
HalfLife	seeAlso	Language Equals Thought
Half Life (2006) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
I, Jedi / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
In Conquest Born / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Jingo / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Kherishdar / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Kris Longknife / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
New Jedi Order / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Nightfall (1990) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Nineteen Eighty-Four / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Out of the Silent Planet / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Rats, Bats and Vats / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Red Mars Trilogy / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Small Gods / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Devil's Dictionary / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Dispossessed / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Fairy Rebel / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Lords of Creation / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Mountain in the Sea / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Player of Games / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Stormlight Archive / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Three Worlds Collide / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Witches Abroad / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Cyclops / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Political Stereotype	seeAlso	Language Equals Thought
Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Manga) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Eskimo (Music) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Watch (2021) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Genius: The Transgression (Tabletop Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Pugmire (Tabletop Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Emperor: Battle for Dune (Video Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Metal Gear (Video Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Video Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Elder Scrolls Online (Video Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Tyrian (Video Game) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Anime Man (Web Video) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Slightly Damned (Webcomic) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Overused Sci-Fi Settings (Website) / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Alien Racers / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
Pantheon / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought
The Little Mermaid / int_7c77081d	type	Language Equals Thought

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