LANGUAGE; A UNIQUE HUMAN GIFT

 

Answer this question truthfully. Which cognitive faculty would you have hated to lose? I bet most of us will pick the sense of sight or the hearing sense. But if you are fortunate to pick the faculty of language, I would say “you are a wise cracker”. If you do not have a sight hearing faculty, perhaps you are born with it; you can still have a wonderful rich social life. You can have friends, get educated and importantly have a family of yours. But, language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it.

Ladnews-files-2015-04-Yanomami-children-150417-jpgnguage is a unique human gift central to our experience of being human. We might indeed speak different languages, think differently and even paint the world differently, and that does not make a language less unique than the other. Though language requires different things of their speakers; for example (hypothetically), “Jack read Gorge Eliot’s latest book”. Let’s focus on just the verb “read”. To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case we have to pronounce it as “red” and not “reed”. In Indonesian you need not (in fact you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender and so if it was Peter Jill who did the reading, you’d use a different form of verb you would also have to include the verb information about completion of the book being read.

This is just how unique and principled language could be. One of the common trends is that speakers of language must attend to encode strictly different aspect of the world just so they can use their language properly. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Whether we speak different language does not mean we don’t have a philosophical way of thinking things out.

:Rosemary

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