Wittgenstein posits a couple notions in his theory of language which I find somewhat confused:
He says that:
The meaning of any word or unit of language is in it’s use (seems fair)
That because uses of words (like “soul” for instance) vary from individual, meaning is never conveyed precisely. (also fair)
That the limits of language are the limits of one’s world and one’s communicative capability (the linguistic relativity hypothesis)
To me, this is akin to saying that if I do not have a word for “tomorrow” I cannot possibly envision the world beyond today. In a different way, if I do not have a word for negative emotions, I can experience no kind of displeasure, and vice versa.
But there is much thinking, meaning, and communication that occurs beyond the spoken word, and beyond language!
It’s called art.
There are many things that cannot be expressed through words, but that can still bypass language on the road to expression. For many who listen, though it contains no words, Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto “Emperor” evokes feelings of majesty and triumph. Wittgenstein hypothesizes that language limits our world, but I don’t think that he accounts for art, or nonverbal communication.
This is not what he’s saying, really; what you’re proposing is the hardline Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and that’s something very different from (and rather at odds with) Wittgenstein’s theories.
For a start, there are many things we don’t have a word for that we could have a word for, and we could easily imagine a word for, or a language in which there is such a word. “The second-oldest child of four”, for example, or “a cousin of my brother-in-law” (some south-east Asian languages easily describe very complex family relations). While it’s true that language can lead our thoughts or understanding in some ways, it’s certainly not true that we need a concept to already exist in language before we can understand it. What W is saying is that language is no more precise or fuzzy than the mode of life that gives birth to it. It’s tied into the fabric of the society’s way of doing things, expectations, needs.
He’s certainly not saying that without a word for negative emotions we don’t experience the emotions, he explicitly acknowledges that we experience deeply personal things that must remain personal, such as pain. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that he regarded such experiences as far more important than the calculus of mathematics, logic, grammar and so on. What he’s saying is that the words we use to explain such experiences aren’t in any way linked to the experiences - we’re not painting a picture, as earlier Wittgenstein claimed. We just use the words that we’ve seen other people use when they seemed to be going through the same sort of thing. The beetle in a box analogy.
I’m sure he’d agree. Although whether art is communication (in the sense of language) is debatable, and he was principally concerned with unravelling the tangles of language.
Interestingly enough, it was nonverbal communication that pushed him from his Tractatus stance into his PI phase; he realised that a rude gesture (variously described as Italian or British) contained meaning, but didn’t fit the calculus of language. The meaning of the gesture came from the social understanding of its use, not from a pyramid of logical deduction and atomic relations.