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Corridors of Thought

Published October 11, 2026 · 12 min read

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, c. 1512

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TLDR: As a man thinketh, so is he, but a man can only think as far as his language can allow. The languages we know light up the corridors of our mind. Some are bright, some are dim, and some we have never walked into. A missing word leaves a corridor dark, and most of us never walk into the dark ones. Our feelings have a ceiling too, and so do our friendships, and both rise with every new word, every new language and every sentence we dare to say.

Part I: How Language Changes the Speaker

We were at a family gathering when my nephew came to tell me how he felt. He is thirteen, and he speaks English almost every hour of his day. He started in English, stopped partway, and searched for a word that would convey what he meant. When no word came, he let English go and said it in Amharic, the language he uses least. I understood him at once, before I had time to think about what the words meant.

I no longer remember his exact words, but I remember the feeling that they carried. They also left me with one question, about why a thirteen-year-old chose the language he uses least to say what he feels most. English fills nearly all of his day, but Amharic is the language that our family speaks to one another. Many people with several languages feel emotion more strongly in the language of their home and family, even when they speak another language better.1 English was the language he knew best, but Amharic was closer to his feeling, because it was the language he shares with me.

I knew what he was doing because I make the same switch myself, and each time I make it, I change along with the language. When I speak English, I describe things more and my voice is calm and soothing. When I speak Swahili, my voice goes higher and I feel more joyful. When I speak Amharic, my tone drops and my accent sounds almost like a child’s, as if three different people live inside me.

Many people with several languages say the same thing, that they feel like a different person in each language. In a study from the 1960s, Japanese women in the United States finished the same sentences in Japanese and in English. One woman got the start “When my wishes conflict with my family’s…” and wrote “it is a time of great unhappiness” in Japanese. In English, she finished the same sentence with “I do what I want”. In 2006, Spanish-English bilinguals took the same personality test in both languages and came out more outgoing in English.2 Each language carries its culture’s habits and manners, and a speaker steps into them when he switches languages.

Of those three voices, English is the one that I think in. It is the voice in my head when I work through a problem, so English sets the ceiling of my reasoning. My nephew lives mostly in English too, but when he needed to speak from the heart, he went to Amharic. The language a man thinks in is not always the one that touches his heart. We rarely think in our other languages, but we still turn to them when we need to say what we feel.

Amharic is also the language in which I sound the youngest. Maybe Amharic takes us both back to the same place, where our ages do not matter and we feel things before we explain them.

Part II: How Language Limits Thought

If feeling can come before explanation, then explanation has limits of its own, and those limits begin with language. Most people read the old line “As a man thinketh, so is he” as a slogan about self-improvement. In that reading, if you change how you think, you change who you are. But a man can only think as far as his language and his knowledge allow. Who we are follows how we think, and how we think follows the words we have, so language sets the ceiling of the self.

I picture the mind as a building full of corridors, and the corridors of your understanding are lit by the languages you know. Each language lights some corridors and leaves others dark, and most people stay in the corridors that their first language lit for them. I speak English, Swahili and Amharic fluently, and they light most of my corridors. I also speak some Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya, so I can see into a few more corridors but cannot walk all the way through them.

Portuguese has the word saudade, which means a longing for someone or something that you love and that may never come back. English has no single word for this feeling, so it needs a whole sentence to describe it. When a language has no word for a thing, its speakers describe it slowly, or they do not think about it at all. My nephew met this gap when English gave him no word for his feeling and Amharic did. He had the feeling before he had the word, and this shows that a missing word makes a thought harder, not impossible.

Harder is often enough to stop a person, so a missing word still limits what he can think about, and what he can even ask. The Pirahã people of the Amazon have no words for exact numbers, only words that mean roughly a small amount, a larger amount and many. In studies, they matched small groups of objects correctly, but they lost count of larger groups when the objects were hidden.3 They are as intelligent as anyone else, and their difficulty stays with exact numbers, the one corridor that their language never lit.

To ask a question, a person needs words, and this is easier to see when we split knowledge into four kinds. The first three are things we know we know, things we know we do not know, and things we do not know we do not know. Without a word for something, you cannot even notice that you do not know it, so it stays hidden in the third kind. The fourth is things we know but cannot say, and it is what my nephew held in English until Amharic gave him the words. Thought can outrun words, but sharing cannot, because a picture in your head stays there until you find the words for it. Every language can grow past that limit when its speakers find or borrow the words that they need.

If language and knowledge shape a person, they might also shape today’s AI systems, which learn from enormous amounts of human writing. In My Thoughts On AI, I described AI as a machine that predicts the next most likely word. To predict our next word well, it must learn how we sound and how we argue, along with the words themselves. If words shape who we become, then a machine built from our words may carry a shape of us. Could something like a personality form in it, in the same way that one forms in a person?

Part III: How Words Carry Feeling

Even a thought that a person puts into words must still pass through the listener’s ear before anyone understands it. Many American listeners rate a British accent as more intelligent than an American one, even when both speakers say exactly the same words.4 This means that a person is often judged by how his language sounds before anyone weighs what he says.

The sound of a word carries feeling as well as judgment, because words carry more than meaning. A word brings its sound and its history with it, so the same idea feels different to me in English, Swahili and Amharic. This is true even when a dictionary says that the three words mean the same thing. When people see a round shape and a spiky shape, almost everyone calls the round one bouba and the spiky one kiki.5 Neither word is real, so the feeling comes from the sound alone.

A person with fewer words has fewer ways to name a feeling, so feeling has a ceiling too. We see this ceiling each time we ask someone how they are and they answer fine or good. Most of these people are not hiding anything, but they have no more exact word to use. They are where my nephew was in English, but they have no Amharic to turn to. People who can name a feeling exactly, with words like frustrated or disappointed where others say bad, cope with stress better.6 They also connect with people more easily, because they can say what they actually feel.

The same ceiling sits over how we connect with other people, and communication is now a lost art. A long and deep conversation brings two people closer, but much of our contact now is hey, hi and small talk. I do the same thing, and most of my own texts start with a bare aye. The best connections happen when people speak openly and at length. Intimacy lives in how words are arranged and in the feelings they bring up, not only in what they mean.

Old letters did this well, spending a page on one small thing in a way that was a pleasure to read. Lovers wrote out their longing instead of leaving vague words for the other to decode. Napoleon wrote one such letter in 1796, as he took command of the French army for the war in Italy, to Joséphine, his wife of three weeks. He told her, “I cannot drink a cup of tea without cursing the martial ambition that separates me from the soul of my life.”7 That line feels more intimate than I love you, because it shows the feeling where I love you only names it.

Writing like this, full of longing, is one possible reason that people call some languages the languages of love. The Romance languages take their name from Rome, because they grew out of Latin. In the Middle Ages, writers told stories of knights and love in these everyday languages instead of in Latin. People called these stories romances, and over time the word came to mean love. French, the language Napoleon wrote that letter in, is one of these languages, and I am learning it now. Its reputation may come from the stories its culture told. A culture whose stories are full of longing gives its people more words for longing, and those words can shape how they love.

Closing: How New Words Raise the Limit

People wrote those stories, so people can also grow a language’s words for longing. If language sets the ceiling, then that ceiling can rise, both for one person and for a whole language. English fills its gaps by borrowing words like schadenfreude from German and déjà vu from French. Each borrowed word lights a new corridor for every English speaker after that. Learning French is how I raise my own ceiling as I write this. Every word, every language, every sentence widens who you can become.

I am writing this essay in English, my thinking language, but the moment that started it happened in Amharic. My nephew’s exact words are gone now, but I still have the feeling that he gave me. He could not carry it through English, so he carried it through Amharic, the language he uses least, straight to my heart. He still had plenty to feel, but he had run out of English, and the corridor he needed was already lit in Amharic. After he said what he felt, I saw him differently, as someone who still had Amharic to turn to when English ran out.

Footnotes

  1. Aneta Pavlenko, Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jean-Marc Dewaele, Emotions in Multiple Languages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Both books draw on the Bilingualism and Emotions Questionnaire the two researchers ran together. ↩

  2. Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, “An Analysis of the Interaction of Language, Topic, and Listener,” American Anthropologist 66 (1964); Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Samuel D. Gosling, Verónica Benet-Martínez, Jeffrey P. Potter and James W. Pennebaker, “Do Bilinguals Have Two Personalities? A Special Case of Cultural Frame Switching,” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006). ↩

  3. Peter Gordon, “Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” Science 306 (2004); Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko and Edward Gibson, “Number as a Cognitive Technology: Evidence from Pirahã Language and Cognition,” Cognition 108 (2008). ↩

  4. Mark A. Stewart, Ellen Bouchard Ryan and Howard Giles, “Accent and Social Class Effects on Status and Solidarity Evaluations,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 11, no. 1 (1985). ↩

  5. V. S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, “Synaesthesia: A Window Into Perception, Thought and Language,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 12 (2001). ↩

  6. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). ↩

  7. Napoleon I. 1934. Letters of Napoleon. Selected, translated, and edited by J. M. Thompson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Letter to Joséphine, Nice, 10 Germinal, Year IV (30 March 1796). ↩