![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/84\/2013\/11\/language-blobs.jpg\" "\\"language")
<\/a><\/p>\nI read Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s\u00a0Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking<\/em><\/a> a few months ago, and, although I wouldn\u2019t recommend it as enthusiastically as\u00a0G\u00f6del Escher Bach<\/em><\/a>, there was one section I was delighted to read. \u00a0It felt like Hofstadter had crystallized a very important part of my thinking process and set it down on paper.<\/p>\n We would like to offer a simple visual metaphor for thinking about the words of a language and the concepts they represent. We begin by suggesting that you imagine a two-dimensional space or a three-dimensional one, as you prefer; next, we are going to start filling that space up, in our imagination, with small patches of color, using a different color for each different language we are interested in\u2026<\/p>\n How is a conceptual space filled up with sets of blobs of different colors? For instance, how do the repertoires of concepts possessed by French and English speakers who share essentially the same culture compare?<\/p>\n \u2026Some of the different-colored blobs representing different languages\u2019 coverages of a given extremely frequent concept will tend to have pretty much the same shape, but in the case of other blobs, there will be discrepancies, some minor and some major. We\u2019ve already seen a pretty major one, involving time<\/em> corresponding to heur<\/em>, temps<\/em>, and fois<\/em> and temps<\/em> corresponding to both time<\/em> and weather<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n Thus, the center of this conceptual space is inhabited by red and green blobs that often coincide quite well, and, when they don\u2019t coincide, then there are all sorts of overlapping blobs, each with its own curious shape\u2026 Let\u2019s take any shell of this conceptual space. Since languages differ enormously, we can easily find a red blog that no single green blog covers precisely. However, a small set<\/em> of green blobs will collectively do a pretty good job covering all the territory of the red blob (although they will inevitably also cover areas outside the red blob)\u2026<\/p>\n In summary, when language A has a word that strikes its speakers as representing a natural and monolithic concept, and language B has no corresponding word, then language B is poorer and language A is richer, because speakers of language B are forced to cobble different words together in order to cover the zone of conceptual space that language A covers with just one word. Conversely, when language B has a set of words that cut up a zone of conceptual space that is covered by just one word in language A, and when the distinctions offered by language B seem natural to speakers of both languages, then it\u2019s language B that is richer and language A that is poorer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just reading this section of Hofstadter\u2019s book was like the experience of finding out that another language has had\u00a0one<\/em> blob for my collection of patchworked blobs all this time. \u00a0For me, this visual metaphor lights up an important region in my conceptual space.<\/p>\n This happens less to me on the level of words, and more often when reading books and suddenly finding a peg for an idea or an emotion that hadn\u2019t felt as unified before my one big blue blog appears as a superset of my little red approximations. \u00a0So, when I see\u00a0Sunday in the Park with George<\/em>, I might realize that \u201cFinishing the Hat\u201d is a metonym for a whole set of experiences where I wind up doing something fairly abstract or creative and end up feeling both energized and lonely\u00a0\u00e0 la:<\/p>\n