I would like to propose a hypothetical situation: instead of writing, what if I were to develop a language that could only be signified through the expressions and physical sub-pixel positions of Yoshi, the fictional green dinosaur and main character in Nintendo’s Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, originally released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995. Without being too reductive, the phonetic structure of the language would essentially be determined by a number of various patterns that Yoshi can perform, such as egg-positioning, short hops, and whether or not Baby Mario is riding him. Yet despite this, what I think is important to note here is that the structure of the language that I have created is based on what Yoshi does, which means that the nature of the way that the language presents itself (through Yoshi) is extremely pragmatic because it can only exist within the confines of each level of Yoshi’s Island and, more importantly, within the confines of Yoshi. In this sense, Yoshi is truly an avatar for the language that is created by us. This means that we understand what Yoshi is in terms of language, but we can also understand Yoshi in terms of his own gestures. I argue that this is precisely the way that we should perceive language in the sense that it is an avatar of us, which means that we can successfully become disinterested in the language itself. We can distinguish that Yoshi’s gestures and positions create words and essentially meaning, but we can also distinguish that Yoshi’s gestures are simply gestures. A similar phenomenon happens in Sartre’s first novel when his protagonist realizes that he can distinguish a table as a complete object, but also as individual slabs of wood that are separate from their function as a table. In the novel, this causes a type of profound existential dread for the protagonist, which is why the title of the novel is Nausea. Yet, I’d argue that, at least with language, this type of deconstructive viewpoint has positive outcomes in terms of actually tracking why we utilize language in the first place. If we were to separate ourselves from the meaning that is built into language, what would be left of the space in which language inhabits?

19 July 2025