Today we'll look at words that have distinctive meanings in English that make foreign words hard to translate: mainly soul and mind. Next week we'll explore two pairs of words that seem unique to English in their present uses—right and wrong and fair and reasonable. The class of December 4 is open. One suggestion was to jump away from our topic and think about how languages develop by looking at the ongoing process by which pidgin codes turn, very quickly, into full-featured languages, or creoles. We can either decide that question now or wait until next week.
Words to explore: serendipitous, pell-mell, skirt, shirk
It was around 1526 that there is literary evidence that the Old English word warm took on the meaning of emotionally loving or generous, at least in the literature-based evidence found by OED lexicographers (senses 12.a.,b., and c.). One way to think about this development is to consider changes in meaning as the conversion of a metaphor into an accepted meaning: here's what the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have to say about this example:
For example, the metaphor Affection Is Warmth (as in, "He's a warm person. " or "She's a block of ice. ") arises from the common experience of a child being held affectionately by a parent; here, affection occurs together with warmth. In Johnson's terms, they are conflated. There is neuronal activation occurring simultaneously in two separate parts of the brain: those devoted to emotions and those devoted to temperature. As the saying goes in neuroscience, "Neurons that fire together wire together. " Appropriate neural connections between the brain regions are recruited. These connections physically constitute the Affection Is Warmth metaphor. Metaphor is a neural phenomenon. What we have referred to as metaphorical mappings appear to be realized physically as neural maps. They constitute the neural mechanism that naturally, and inevitably, recruits sensory-motor inference for use in abstract thought. Primary metaphors arise spontaneously and automatically without our being aware of them. There are hundreds of such primary conceptual metaphors, most of them learned unconsciously and automatically in childhood simply by functioning in the everyday world with a human body and brain. There are primary metaphors for time, causation, events, morality, emotions, and other domains that are central to human thought. Such metaphors also provide a superstructure for our systems of complex metaphorical thought and language.
Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 256-257
People as warm sources of comfort and affection are, in the Lakoff and Johnson approach, outcomes of a powerful neural node formed in infancy, when our baffling distress was soothed by the warmth of our parents' bodies as they fed or soothed us. Like the meaning "hot-tempered or angry," the application to people's feelings of love or gratitude seems not to have appeared until the sixteenth century in the OED.
While this example comes from touch, other word-changes derive from other senses. Even though we can be in the dark at high noon, and awake in a dark bedroom and see the light, those expressions come from the structure of our neural lives; vision is the primary medium of information for human beings—we have lots of brain devoted to vision, while dogs have lots of brain devoted to smell. Our metaphors grow out of our bodies and sometimes become words. (For those with the literary fortitude, I've added a subpage containing Wallace Stevens' less physical, more philosophical thoughts and feelings about the question.)
Anna Wierzbicka, a Polish-Australian linguist, has devoted her career to the exploration of how key words, or their absence, can help define our understandings of what sets cultures apart from each other. In the Lakoff-Johnson vocabulary, what powerful neural nodes formed by our experiences led to the conversion of metaphoric extensions into a particular, culturally defined word-hoard. We'll look at her accounts of two classes of words—those connected with what a culture emphasizes about what a person is and what a person knows; and a group of words (and behaviors) related to culturally defined vocabularies related to social interactions.