Language

Eighteen years ago, upon my arrival to Australia my belief in the quality of my English was shattered. My index finger spoke better than my tong (and it was much better understood). My ears, so accustomed to hear distinctive sounds of Croatian were desperately trying to make sense out of sounds produced by Australians. On top of that, I got a co-worker - a Scottish highlander. (I'm still unsure - was it English she spoke to me?) My tong blindly followed my ears despite all my attempts to impose distinctions my ears simply refused to hear.
After eighteen years of often hilarious or embarrassing misunderstandings I find myself in a bit less trouble. But a lingual or cultural clumsiness occasionally surfaces as it must have somewhere on this pages. (I'll have to ask somebody to edit them for me. All suggestions are welcome.)

Language is often described as a system of spoken or written symbols by which we, as members of a culture - communicate. It is often linked to our thought, however our thought and language (although strongly impacting each other) are two separate things. Our unarticulated thought that could be related to the sketchy images our brain sees appears to be a non-conscious "mechanism" that attends contradictions (tensions) within (parts of) "our description of the world and ourselves within it".

Our spoken language (closely related to our sense of rhythm and music) evolved through history and it's beginning could only be imagined based on hints of a language and a culture noticed in orang-utans and other species (the bee "dance" for example). It seems that the turning point was a construct of an entirely different type of psycho-physiological reactions that was loosely related to our direct reactions to the world that surrounds us and ourselves within it. This parallel "mechanism", manifested in us - humans as speech, enabled transition of knowledge without a need for direct experience. In other words, the "power" of symbolism came into existence and the human species emerged. (Our sense of space and time is also closely related to this turning point and it could be argued that a great deal of all of our languages is based on these concepts.)

It should be noted that deaf and mute persons also acquire the language of a culture they grew into, but sometimes with the speech component replaced by other psycho-physiological reactions.

Impaired sense of rhythm (tuning, empathy) might be at the core of dyslexia and hyperlexia as the article "Studying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read" in Washington Post indicates (registration required). Hyperlexia, however, indicates that the meaning, although impaired, could be grasped through visual forms only. It also indicates that literacy might have had a higher impact on our genetic makeup than previously thought.

It could be said that when we listen or read, we silently speak. Measurable tensions of our vocal chords reflect very well what we hear - not what was said. Sometimes, we hear an entirely different word and this is also well reflected in tensions of our vocal chords. This practically constant speech of ours (silent or aloud) that occurs even when we sleep, follows all the rules and vocabulary of a language we internalised by growing into a culture. It constantly refreshes and adds to the accumulated knowledge of our culture we internalised building a "parallel world of symbols" superimposed on our transient now.

As the culture evolves, so does the language. Each symbol is defined by its relation to or association with other symbols. As new knowledge is constantly obtained and accumulated, continuous adjustment is necessary. A set of similar symbols may get replaced by a single symbol or with rearranged relations between other symbols. A single symbol may get replaced by a whole set of symbols if a distinction between them is considered important. Maritime civilisations for example have a richer vocabulary of winds, ship parts, fishing...

The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir put it well: “The ‘real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”

Thus we have ever-evolving language that transmits accumulated knowledge of generations past and present. The invention of written symbols enabled transfer of knowledge over greater spans of time and space than the oral tradition was usually capable of although there is historical evidence of very strong oral traditions that lasted for thousands of years like Indian Vedas. But writing and later press, newspapers, radio, television, the internet,... also slowed down the evolution of our languages and our cultures. With this our own evolution is slowed down or even brought to a halt. Nowadays many people feel the pressure of partial if any understanding of how a computer works, for example. Many people feel the pressure of numerous contradictions within a culture (or science) or between cultures. The cumbersome weight of the accumulated knowledge has its consequences and it is hard to predict when and how it will break if long overdue reorganisations do not happen.