This is an old program of the philosophers. Can you, even in principle, find the language at the back of reality? Can you eliminate all ambiguities when you refer to ordinary objects? Are we all talking about more or less the same things? How could we talk about exactly the same things?
The picture gets a little muddled when you think of the choices and distinctions each language makes. Some of them will contradict each other.
Suppose Language 1 has 150 words for snow, but only one for love, while Language 2 has 150 words for love, but only two for snow. Would the uber language preserve the distinctions for each word? Maybe you're losing something by learning all this detail.
You can do the same thing with the intensional meanings of words (connotations). I think one of the original Sapir-Whorf examples traces the meaning of a word for corn in Language A to words in Language B that mean "enemy food". Would the uber language remove connotations? It would probably lose the word from Language B.
But this gets into an even deeper point, which is that when you use a language, words aren't isolated. They frame a certain outlook on the world that hangs together. There were probably a bunch of words in Language B that talk about foreign or "enemy" things. Can you really say those words and mean them without taking on their perspective?
There are many more examples. We have this kind of thing in English too. We have "kill" and "murder". We have the Anglo-Saxon words and the Norman words.
And finally and most importantly, what perspective on the world does the super-language take? Objective? Involved but fair? Polemical? Propagandizing?
The picture gets a little muddled when you think of the choices and distinctions each language makes. Some of them will contradict each other.
Suppose Language 1 has 150 words for snow, but only one for love, while Language 2 has 150 words for love, but only two for snow. Would the uber language preserve the distinctions for each word? Maybe you're losing something by learning all this detail.
You can do the same thing with the intensional meanings of words (connotations). I think one of the original Sapir-Whorf examples traces the meaning of a word for corn in Language A to words in Language B that mean "enemy food". Would the uber language remove connotations? It would probably lose the word from Language B.
But this gets into an even deeper point, which is that when you use a language, words aren't isolated. They frame a certain outlook on the world that hangs together. There were probably a bunch of words in Language B that talk about foreign or "enemy" things. Can you really say those words and mean them without taking on their perspective?
There are many more examples. We have this kind of thing in English too. We have "kill" and "murder". We have the Anglo-Saxon words and the Norman words.
And finally and most importantly, what perspective on the world does the super-language take? Objective? Involved but fair? Polemical? Propagandizing?