Geekery part III: Semantics to Vocabulary

I've finally decided to divide this into three posts so you may skim or ignore as you like.

I think that vocabulary must affect our thinking, too. In English, the words gratitude, gratification, and gratuitous have very different meanings, but they all come from the same Latin root. The Romans, then, when they exercised their social niceties with the "Thank you" phrase "Tibi gratias ago," had more associations with the ideas we might call pleasure, prosperity, and goodwill than with ideas we would call thanksgiving or gratitude.

Words are a shorthand way for us to think of and express the complex and formless concepts in our heads, so they often take on cultural connotations as well. When we begin to manipulate ideas in our heads, we are more likely to use ideas or sets of ideas connected to the words in our language than to come up with something completely new, even if we are not "thinking in words."

The Latin word anima denotes the seat of human sentience and feeling. We have no single English word that directly translates. Anima is a combination of our ideas of heart, mind, and soul, which are separate in our language and in turn have cultural connotations that are not present in the Latin anima. As English thinkers, we concern ourselves separately with minds, hearts, and souls, not animae.

Tibi multas gratias, and thank you to any and all besides Mr. Kunkle who have read this far. You are awesomer in the eyes of Thoth for having done so.