Words don’t mean anything

This is actually an argument I get into with English-speakers, not Bulgarian-speakers. My Bulgarian-speaking students know that words don’t mean anything. Dog? What the hell is “dog”? What are you pointing at? Oh, you mean куче. That is obviously куче. If you think it’s “a dog,” that’s your problem.

Because the fact of the matter is that language is an agreed-upon code. “Dog” is just the series of sounds we English-speakers have agreed to use to refer to that thing. “Dog” isn’t the only word we use for this animal today, and it isn’t the word we used in the past. In the words of Arika Okrent, the word “means whatever it means because, well, that’s what English speakers generally use it to mean.”

The arbitrary nature of language is easy to understand in the abstract, but really hard for people (specially English-speaking people) to get their heads around. Perhaps because English is so good at borrowing the words of other languages we see the combined vocabulary of all human speech as potential English vocabulary. Shoes are shoes, but a moccasin (Powhatan makasin, a shoe) is a special kind of shoe. A kayak (Inuktitut qajaq, a skin-boat) and an igloo (Inuktitut igdlo, kinds of boats and houses. A joke or pun (Italian puntiglio, a trivial distinction) can be funny or drole (French drôle, or funny).  Music can be pretty, beautiful (French beauté, prettiness),  mellifluous (Greek meli-fluus, honey-flowing), or even jiving (Wolof , talk about someone behind their back.)

Because we borrow words to add shades of meaning or specificity (or punctiliousness) to our vocabulary, it’s easy for English-speakers to get bogged down in ever-more-finely-tuned definitions. No, it isn’t a dog, it’s a hound (Old English for “dog”) or a cur (Old Germanic for “dog”) or Akita Inu (Japanese for dog).

We get trapped when we believe that the the distinctions our vocabulary makes are in some way fundamental to the world. We believe that there is some fundamental “dog-ness” to  a dog, which may be specifically a kind of “hound-ness” if that dog “assists hunters by tracking or chasing the animal being hunted.” When we learn other languages, we grow angry that they don’t make this (to us) obvious distinction. The problem is that the map is not the territory. In English, we might in our ignorance call either a сова and a бухъл an owl. Likewise, Bulgarian people will see both hounds and regular dogs as, obviously, кучета.