GlobalShift

Language Sheds Light On Human Nature

To understand language is to understand human nature. All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to dolphins and apes, but it seems that only we have developed language proper. Why and how we are able to develop language remains a mystery that, once solved, may unlock the secrets of the human brain and how a 3 pound lump of cells creates the person reading this. You and I and all of our uniqueness.
 
Language is not the same thing as communication; a red light on a traffic signal communicates a message but it’s not language. This level of basic communication seems to be where even our primate cousins reside. Of course, we can’t know this for sure, and I’ve described the possibility of monkeys having syntax (which is necessary for language), but there’s no strong reason to suppose otherwise. Here, you might wonder why your pet seems to understand you at times. Indeed, the part of the limbic system and cerebral cortex in your pet’s brain is evolved enough that your pet can have emotional attachments and understanding (dogs a little more than cats).
 
Language is a powerful force in shaping human identity. It directs our communication of abstract things and gives rise to a society’s creativity and cultures. Not so long ago, a major philosophical movement was dedicated to understanding how we communicate truths and ideas, and what that says about humanity itself. The rock star of the movement was Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom I highly regard – partly because he was a little nuts). The basic idea behind linguistic or analytic philosophy was that humans both create and obey rules when we use words for conveying experiences. These rules might reveal how the “subjective” mind tries to express the “objective” world. Understanding that relationship could allow philosophers a clearer picture about the true nature of reality – even if the “truth” of reality simply lies in our how we perceive it.
 
The attempts to analyse language led many to assign words to certain categories hoping to deconstruct our expressions to something resembling math equations. Originally the categories attempted to define how we use words, a sort of improvement upon logic, but people decided this kind of thing was too narrow and didn’t reflect how people used words in the real world. Today, there are still categories but they’re much more expansive. Most of the categories now reflect phonetic divisions (using “ed” at the end of a word indicates past tense, using a “y” or “ish” indicates approximations, etc.). The interesting thing about these studies is that they were a major contributor to the creation of computers.
 
Our language has a special quality called recursion. Recursion is the ability for something to continually refer back to itself. “I had a bad day because I ate too much ice cream and I got sick and I had a headache and the headache lasted a long time”. Limited numbers of words can be used to create limitless expressions. The same way a computer can use 0’s and 1’s to express unending calculations. Also similar to 1’s and 0’s, our brain processes information with an “on-off” firing pattern of neurons. This has led many researchers to use computers to try and model the brain’s activity. (studying the brain has itself, also led to many of the improvements of computer technology we enjoy today because of how efficient it is in processing information)
 
Language itself is more than just assigning a meaning to certain words, because the way our words are strung together can signify a meaning that goes beyond that of the individual words themselves. About 50 years ago a mentally-handicapped boy had a gun pointed at a police officer and the officer told the boy to “give me the gun.” The boy’s friend shouted “Let him have it!”, which prompted the handicapped boy to shoot the officer. Did the friend mean “give the gun to the officer”, or “shoot the officer”? The meaning of any sentence is determined by the meanings of the component words and the way they’re arranged (syntax). Given it’s a necessity for successful language, many have speculated that there’s something in our genetic wiring that allows us to develop syntax, also called universal grammar. Take the sentence “The voringian binkglorged the knappabor.” Would you rather be the voringian or the knappabor? We all have some idea as to what’s happening there based on the arrangement of the words.
 
The possibility of universal grammar and the biology behind language is the subject of much research. In academia, it’s very much where the action is and it’s worth looking more deeply into the nature of language, so that we might better understand what it is that makes us human. This is exactly the subject of the next several articles.