Now Say it in Arabic

Linguistic Structure Against Human Experience

“You may know what you said, but never what the other person heard.“ A small Lacanian insight that I have found to ring reliably true.

The range of human thought and feeling is limitless and lawless, and yet we employ a tool like language, limited and law-bound, in an attempt to capture it. Communication is strangled by it and yet almost impossible without it. When we become conscious of our inner life in relation to another (a thought, a feeling, a worry, a desire, a hesitation), we attempt to wrap it and transform into a sort of parcel, using the only packaging we have: words. But when it arrives, it is delivered into a mind already stocked with its own meanings and associations attached to the words we have chosen. The contents are handled, interpreted, reinterpreted, and so what is received is never quite what was dispatched. Language is a flawed courier.

Wittgenstein drew the boundary of the world at the limits of what can be said. We tend to think of the world as the larger thing, vast, indifferent, and pre-existing, and language as the smaller thing we use to point at it, imperfectly and after the fact. Wittgenstein inverts this intuition. For him, the world is not a totality that language strains to describe; it is, in a precise philosophical sense, constituted by what can be described. A fascinating idea, though one I’ll bracket here, as the central thread of this essay leads somewhere else. At the very least, we can conclude that language shapes thought and allows an ‘other’ to inhabit, briefly, partially, our same structure of sense. It is what makes psychotherapy, for example, possible. And so here, it makes sense to ask the question: are some languages better couriers of thought than others?

I want to make the claim that Arabic is. The lexical structure of the Arabic language has been able to preserve psychological meanings that English can only gesture toward. Insight, in Arabic, is not down to the application of poets or philosophers, but built into its grammar, so that the ordinary speaker, reaching for an ordinary word, finds themselves in possession of a theory of mind they never had to consciously construct.

The mechanism is the triliteral root (the masdar). Arabic builds almost its entire vocabulary from a system of conceptual three-consonant skeletons into which different patterns of vowels and affixes are breathed to generate families of meaning. This matters in communication because it means that Arabic does not allow its speakers the luxury of treating related things as unrelated. The conceptual bonds are structural, not decorative.

Consider the Arabic word for relationship, ʿalāqa (عِلَاقَة). The triliteral root is ʿa-l-q (ع-ل-ق) which has a primary meaning of to cling, to stick, to bear weight, to be suspended from. In Arabic, to be in relation with someone is to have them weigh upon your interior, alter your state. The Arabic word for relationship carries inside it a theory of what relationship does: it hangs to you. It has mass. The conceptual meaning even mirrors the idea of attachment. English, on the other hand, permits relation without gravity. In English, I can speak of my relationship to a colleague, to a city, to a phase of my life, with the same flattened neutrality, as if all connection were the same kind of connection. Arabic does not extend this courtesy. Its grammar insists that to be related is to be weighted, attached, suspended, or altered. Whoever and whatever you are in relation to, you are also, in some sense, carrying.

Or consider what the Arabic language does with ‘heart’. The word for heart is qalb (قلب), from the root q-l-b (ق-ل-ب), meaning to turn, to flip, to reverse. The heart in Arabic is not a pump or a seat of feeling in the way English tends to imagine it, it is the part of you that turns. It is defined by its movement, its variability, by its capacity to be overturned. It is something essentially kinetic. It’s really quite intuitive. Certainty can often turn to doubt, love can turn to aversion, clarity can turn to confusion. The same root gives you inqilāb (انقلاب), an overturn or revolution. It allows for a conception of the self that is dynamic rather than static.

A philosophically fascinating case is the root w-j-d (و-ج-د) which has a primary meaning of to find. From it comes wujūd (وُجُود) meaning existence, or being. Wujūd is the term Arabic philosophers used to translate what the Greek called τὸ ὄν (to on). And from the same root comes wajd (وَجْد) deep emotion, or intense longing; and wijdān (وِجْدَان), the inner emotional life. Existence and finding share a root. They are grammatically fused. To exist, in this language, is to be findable. To find is to touch something’s existence. And the emotion, wajd, is the inner event of that encounter, the tremor that runs through you when your searching meets a world.

Heidegger spent decades in German trying to articulate something like this: that existence is not a neutral property but a relational one, that to be is always to be available to disclosure, that consciousness and world were not two sealed chambers but a single event of mutual finding. He coined words, tortured syntax, multiplied hyphens. Arabic had already done it in the structure of its vocabulary. A medieval Arab speaker asking where something was, using the ordinary verb wajada, was already enacting a metaphysics. Finding is the form that existence takes when a conscious being moves through it.

You could of course have a deflationary response to this: all languages embed theories in their words; English does it too; consider how understand implies a spatial metaphor of standing beneath something, how grasp turns comprehension into seizure. True enough. But the trilateral root system gives Arabic a peculiar intensity in this respect, because the relatedness of words is so transparent, so unmistakable, so present to the speaker as they speak and, perhaps more importantly, the listener while they listen. A child learning Arabic learns not just words but meaning clusters. The conceptual architecture is pedagogically inseparable from the vocabulary.

English may have its own embedded wisdom. Every language does. But English has also undergone centuries of philosophical pressure toward abstraction, toward the stripping of connotation from technical terms, toward the ideal of a neutral language in which things are named without being framed. It is why so much of its meaning is subjective in communication. “I love you” can mean anything from a passing warmth to a binding declaration, from a habit of speech to an attempt at total self-exposure. Its apparent clarity concealing a wide spectrum of emotional and existential distance between speaker and listener. Arabic resisted this, or more accurately, its root system made it quite impossible.

This is not to say that its speakers are wiser, nor that the language is superior, but that to capture exactly what you mean with words is much more precisely done in Arabic. A theory of mind folded into the vowelless bones of the root.

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