December 23. Two days after the Winter Solstice so we'll have more sunlight today than we had yesterday, but less than we'll have tomorrow. I look between the slats of the blinds covering my window, and see green leaves and red berries of a holly bush. Sunlight clear and sharp. 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Beaufort Wind Scale 0. When I went outside a moment ago, I shivered; a Moscovite would have tossed off his overcoat, I'm sure, and gamboled and frolicked in such balmy weather.
When I say the word "winter," I mean something quite different than what a Russian means when he says "winter." At 34.035388 latitude and-84.665166 longitude (http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html), my winter doesn't have the frozen lakes the Russian's has, though we each mean the same tilt of the globe in relation to the solar plane. If I brought a Russian friend -- say Ivan Ivanovich -- into my home and pointed at a chair and said, "Chair," and he pointed to the chair and said, "Chair" in Russian (you'll have to use your imagination, Cyrillic being unavailable in this blog), then Ivan and I mean the same thing in an empirically verifiable way. However, if a Palestinian and a Jew were to point to the same plot of turf, and both say, "Homeland," they would mean vastly different things.
So, at what point does a language leave off being a language and become more than a language? Can words in and of themselves be extra-lingual? If pointing at a chair identifies the label "Chair," what does the label "Chair" point at? If the word "Homeland" means the same thing in two different languages, yet the speakers still come to blows over the meaning, what hope is there for mutual understanding? If a chemist says, "H2O," and a man crawling through the desert says, "Water," who has a better understanding of reality?
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