A Matter of Language

by

Marcel Martin

Philologists, semanticists, linguists, grammarians, and others interested in language have long speculated upon the inter-relations of man's thought and his language and the degree to which each is dependent upon the other. It is a question not unlike that of the chicken and the egg, does man-or a nation of menthink the way he does because his language it what it is, or is his language what it is because of the way he thinks? Is French the precise, concise, unambigious language it is reputed to be, is it the language of diplomacy and protocol because of the ordered and logical minds of those who speak it, or, on the other hand, has France produced its Descartes, Pascals, and Voltaires, because its language offered these men the means to think as they have thought?

I do not know that these questions will ever be satisfactorily resolved and it is not my purpose to attempt to resolve them here. Certain it is, however, that any man's ability to think is conditioned by and is dependent upon the tools with which

his language provides him. In general, man's thought simply cannot progress beyond his ability to verbalize, or symbolize, his thought. Some few highly trained and disciplined philosophers and mathematicians may, indeed, progress laboriously to some new concept but they cannot go far without finding or inventing new words or symbols upon which to hang their thought before pushing still farther ahead.

Inasmuch as man acts according to the way he thinks, not only is man's thought but man's behavior conditioned and influenced by the words he uses, that is, by the words he has or does not have. Herein, in my opinion, is to be found the basis of much of the homosexual's trouble and many of his difficulties, for the homosexual has no vocabulary with which to express what he feels and no vocabulary by which to live and act as God and nature have decreed that he must live and act. Having no vocabulary of his own he tries to use the vocabulary of the heterosexual majority with whom he lives,

5