Speaking about God in universal words, thinking about God outside English

Abstract

The chapter argues that vocabulary that is not intelligible to many �ordinary speakers� and not translatable into most languages of the world imprisons its users in a conceptual space defined by culture-specific English words and prevents genuine cross-cultural dialogue about God and religion. It seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to speak about God without relying on such complex and culturally shaped concepts and to think about God and religion afresh, in a new conceptual language based on the lexical and grammatical common core of all languages. As a result of a programme of cross-linguistic investigations, researchers believe that we now have a very good idea of what the shared lexical and grammatical core of all languages looks like and believe that different language-specific versions of this common core can function as minimal languages and be used for furthering understanding across cultures without bias.