A szavakon innen és túl
Language above and below its Own Words

Summary/Abstract: Every language has an ancient word for ‘word’, but names for other grammatical categories like ‘sentence’ are much later and usually metaphoric. The speech community knows as little about its language as people know about their blood circulation. Language use does not correlate with society, except in the realm of vocabulary, but even there the language is not homomorphous with the civilization it conveys. Hungarian, for example, has no masculine/feminine distinction, but gender (or sex) is not less important in this society than elsewhere. Nor does language imply a particular way of thinking: the best counterexample is Christianity, which does not have a language, but is a way of thinking, a message that is not dependent on the language in which it is conveyed.

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