Thoughts on Language

Without language humans would be extremely different. Intellectually we might be on about the same level as dogs. I'm sure we'd still experience emotions such as love, fear, anxiety, calm, joy, sadness, pleasure (all of which I honestly believe dogs experience too). But beyond that our brains would be useful mostly just for motor control and memory. Without words to associate concepts we would be in a world devoid of higher thought.

Imagine living a day in which you used no words, neither spoken nor in your thoughts. You would see, hear, taste. You would store things in your memory and you would recall things from memory. But your train of thought would be directed and structured only by your emotions, current happenings and your sensual memories - visual, audio, olfactory...  I suppose you might imagine scenes and scenarios which would play out in your mind as images. But your mind would not be dealing with concepts - things such as as time, speed, planning, creating, emotional pain, betrayal, building, disassembling, waste, god, good, evil. Any of these concepts might occur to you, but for lack of a word to associate with it you couldn't share the concept with others and it would likely disappear soon after it came to mind.

 
Without language, how would you confide to a friend of your plans to move to a different town and discuss your concerns about settling in to a new place? How would you share with friends a recollection of a humorous experience you had had?  How would you express your thoughts on the universe, God or government?

Could it be that some languages serve better than others in the expression and processing of emotions, in the communication of complex concepts, in dealing with logistics or in negotiating agreements? I think yes, absolutely.

Could we hone our languages into better tools - ones that would facilitate our thinking, our creative abilities? What if we were to experiment with our languages, let them freely evolve, let those societies who have the most versatile and useful languages use them to their advantage and then in their successes propagate their languages on to others? 

Or is this what we've already been doing for the last 20 thousand years?

image sourced from:  http://www.unl.edu/piesl/home