Is language a reflection of value?  Does the way we put words together indicate our moral posture?  So does linguist Daniel Everett contend in a book he published a couple of years ago.  The way we assemble our words, the way that we construct our grammar, the way that we develop connections between signifiers (in the view of famous linguist Ferdinand Saussure, another word for “word”) says volumes, Everett claims, about the way we frame and assign values in our world.

     In addition, as many have suggested, language reflects the culture out of which it has come.  For instance, the reason that the Eskimo languages have so many words for snow is the environment the speakers occupy a good part of year.  Or the reason that Christian missionaries who work in certain parts of South America in which a pig is revered as the holiest of all animals have taken to describing Jesus as the “pig” (not the traditional lamb) of the world is simply to fit the context of the mother tongue of the area.

     What can we then say?  What we say reflects how we feel, be it emotionally or morally, yet we construct what we say on the basis of the culture and the cultural assumptions with which we are most familiar.  So language reflects value, but as to what is value, well, there’s another question, one we cannot resolve on the basis of language alone.  Language will only do what we tell it to do, and even then it does not always do that.  If we wish to know real value, we need to determine where we stop and morality begins, for as long as we remain the constructors of value, we remain captives of our tongues, saying much but solving little.

     Morality must exceed how we represent it.