http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LanguageEqualsThought

Ordos introduction, Emperor: Battle for Dune "In the language of the Ordos, there are no words for the concepts of 'trust' or 'honour'. There are more than three hundred for the concept of 'profit'."

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The SapirWhorf hypothesis 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, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 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.

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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 Mary Suetopia 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" (they don't, by the waynote English may actually have more words for frozen water . Or, they sort-of do. 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 use of the phrase "totally wasted" not to mean "really drunk", but rather "thin and starving", or the more literal "wasting his life." Meanwhile, Americans would count "totally pissed" in the words for "really angry" rather than in the words for "really drunk", like the British do.)

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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 subversion 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 SapirWhorf hypothesis 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.

Examples:

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Parodied in a poster by the sports club DSC Arminia Bielefeld: "Eskimos have 90 words for snow. Bielefelders have 130 words for losing at football. We continue to play regardless."

Anime and Manga

The Chimera Ant King Meryem from Hunter × 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.

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: "Although, 'born' is not quite the right word. It would be more accurate to say $@#$*(&?... damn, the language cannot keep up. Let us say 'appeared'. That's not quite accurate, but I can't express it any better than that."

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.

Comic Books

This trope is lampshaded in Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe, after it's mentioned that the Romans decimated (i.e., killed every tenth person — though in actual Roman times this was reserved for executing deserters, but Rule of Funny reigns in this case) Athens: Greek Woman: How many languages even have a word for "killed every 10th person?"

Subverted in JLA, 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.)

Morrison also uses this a number of times in The Invisibles. 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.

In Alan Moore's classic Green Lantern story "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'. She got around this by retooling Rot's ring to respond to sound instead of color, and naming him "F-Sharp Bell".

In the Warren Ellis comic Ocean, some scientists find alien life forms in suspended animation under the frozen ocean of Europa (one of Jupiter's moons). One of the scientists is trying to figure out their language before an automatic program wakes them up...and when he does, he finds that they have thousands of words for "murder."

In 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.

In 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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Stand-Up Comedy

In Gary Gulman's special It's About Time, he states that "Eskimos have 100 words for snow, and Jews have 100 words for loser.

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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Avenue Q lampshades this trope in their song "Schadenfreude": Nicky : Oh, Schadenfreude, huh? What's that, some kinda

Gary : Yup! It's German for "happiness at the misfortune of others!"

Nicky : "Happiness at the misfortune of others"? That is German! : Oh, Schadenfreude, huh? What's that, some kinda Nazi word : Yup! It's German for "happiness at the misfortune of others!": "Happiness at the misfortune of others"? That is German!

"Eldorado" from Candide: They have no words for fear and greed,

For lies and war, revenge and rage.

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Western Animation