Hakann: This would help Earth humans talk and think better

My dearest brothers and sisters,

This is Hakann speaking. I greet you in peace and love.

In your head, "getting groceries" is one concept, right?

Yet from another perspective, that one concept includes multiple sub-concepts. For example, getting groceries means deciding what you need to get from the store. It means going to the grocery store. It means collecting the items that you need. Et cetera.

And those concepts have sub-concepts themselves. For example, "collecting the items you need" involves, among other things, walking to the right aisle and then putting the item in your shopping cart.

Those concepts have sub-concepts themselves. Walking involves using certain muscles in your body, while keeping balance and making sure that you avoid walking into objects and other people.

It's easy to talk in terms of "getting groceries." However, if you had to write out "getting groceries" in terms of the most fundamental and basic concepts you had, it would become an unwieldy nightmare. Instead of saying "getting groceries", you would have to say something like: think about what you need to get from the store, possibly by walking up to the fridge and looking into it. Then determine where a piece of paper is. Walk up to the piece of paper, using these muscles. Get the piece of paper. Determine where a pen is. Walk up to the pen, using these muscles. Pick up the pen using your hand and arm muscles. Then write down what you need to get from the store on the piece of paper with the pen, using these arm and hand muscles. Et cetera.

So as you can see, it's very useful to have single concepts that include multiple sub-concepts. Sure, technically you don't need the concept "getting groceries", because technically you can write it out in terms of sub-concepts only. But as we saw, it's certainly useful to have the term "getting groceries." If you didn't have it, thinking and communication would become a lot harder. You would have to spend more brainpower and more words to communicate what exactly you're going to do if you didn't have the term "getting groceries."

With that in mind, the people of Earth could think and communicate better if you would create useful new words that included several sub-concepts. In the same way that "getting groceries" is a term that's technically not necessary but quite useful, you can define new words that may not be technically necessary, yet are useful when thinking and communicating. You can think of this as having bigger chunks or bigger pieces you can reason with at once. You can think of this as having bigger lego pieces to play with, so that you can more easily build bigger structures.

To be clear, I am not saying that you should redefine existing words. I am not a fan of that. I am also not saying that you should be inventing words that sound like they mean one thing, while actually meaning something completely different, in order to for example get a political advantage or mislead people. I am suggesting to invent useful new words, ideally whose meaning is what you would think it is by just hearing the word.

Several other languages have single words for single concepts that English lacks. For example, German has schadenfreude, which means feeling joy at another person's misfortune. German also has zeitgeist, which means the beliefs and ideas of an era. These are examples of useful words, because without these single words you would have to use several words to describe this one thing.

And of course, there are lots of other useful words that English could borrow from German or from other languages.

English speakers often make fun of the German language for having single words for just about everything, but that's actually incredibly useful. It means German speakers can think and communicate better. It would help if English speakers did that too.

Note that in George Orwell's book 1984, the tyrannical government literally destroys words in order to limit the ways in which the population can think. Indeed, if you lack certain words, then thinking and communicating becomes harder. Conversely if you introduce certain useful words, then thinking and communicating becomes easier.

Another example of a word that would be useful to introduce would be a single word for "this has been improved but it's still not good enough."

Et cetera. If you sit down, you can probably think of several other concepts that would be useful to cover with one word.

If you have programming experience, the following comparison might be useful. If you're programming, it's useful to define your own methods, which you can then call repeatedly. That way, you don't have to write the same code multiple times, which has multiple advantages. Well, it's similarly useful to define new words that cover a certain single concept that you will want to talk about multiple times.

I understand that it's a challenge that the other people you're talking with need to actually understand the new word you're using. Well, with friends and family you can just tell them that you invented a new word and explain its meaning to the other person. It also helps to pick names for your new words that strongly point to their actual meaning. For example, zeitgeist just consists of the word "zeit", time, and "geist", spirit. So a German speaker can easily intuit that zeitgeist means something like "spirit of the times." The English equivalent would be creating the new word "timespirit" and defining it as being the beliefs and ideas of an era. Similarly, schadenfreude consists of the German words for harm and joy, so the English equivalent of schadenfreude would be inventing the word "harmjoy". In German it's a bit clearer when you say schadenfreude that the freude (joy) is about the schaden (harm), but you get the idea, which is that it's good to pick words that suggest their meaning. And in some cases, it's useful to just mash up two words to create a new word, if that new mashed-up word indeed points to its meaning.

I hope to have instilled in you the idea that it can improve your thinking and communication to define new words, or borrow words from other languages. I am curious to see if some of you will start creating and introducing your own words.

If you know useful words that Earth humans could start using, whether they are words from other languages or words that you invented yourself, feel free to share them in the comment section.

Your star brother,

Hakann