REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #023 - THE GREAT SEMANTIC ENCLOSURE - UNDERSTANDING THE HISTORICAL LANGUAGE SHIFT FROM CONNECTION TO COMMERCE

My parents were both into languages. I remember fairly often as a child when they couldn’t think of an English word to say what they wanted to say, so they’d use a Maori or French or Japanese word. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, i supposed that maybe some concepts just weren’t part of English culture. As it turns out, the form of English used to colonise much of the world, the language of commerce, fails to clearly describe many aspects of reality clearly. This isn't an accident of history; it’s the result of a deliberate "re-engineering" of the English language that happened between 1620 and 1700.