THINK ABOUT IT: LANGUAGE

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THINK ABOUT IT: LANGUAGE



Salutations dear reader,

 

The man above is Jean Paul Sartre, a French philosopher who lived in the 20th Century. He was popular for his train of thought or his philosophy, popularly known as EXISTENTIALISM but for today’s episode, he is important for another reason.

Part of Sartre’s train of thought is the belief that everything is WEIRDER than we think. At first, I couldn’t understand this but after more and more thinking, I realized that almost everything we do is weird. Like REAL WEIRD but we don’t acknowledge or appreciate the weirdness of our lives.

So I chose to create a special segment on my blog about things that sound or feel normal but are actually weird as hell as long you think hard enough about them. I call it “THINK ABOUT IT” and this is the first “THINK ABOUT IT” post and today we are thinking about LANGUAGE.

You might think language is normal, we use language every day and we didn’t struggle to master our native tongues when we were younger but language is complex as hell and to be honest, complex language is the human beings main weapon.

Almost every living thing has a language of sorts. Ants have chemical pheromones and touch language. Bees have their waggle dance form of communication that uses the position of the sun to locate nectar rich flowers. Lions have their roars, elephants have some sort of seismic language and electric eels have a sort of electric signaling. Almost every organism has a form of language but none of those languages have the depth of human language.

Just to demonstrate how complex human language is, right now you are staring at a series of weird shapes that you call the alphabet that are arranged to form words. Right now you are looking at weird shapes and it makes sense to you. That’s amazing.

Speaking is also weird, we make noises and for some reason these noises make sense. If this isn’t weird I don’t know what is. But what makes language weirder is its impact on human beings. Language is like the foundation of all human society and culture. These weird shapes and noises we make is the reason humans are the most powerful creatures on Earth.

Language has a variety of uses from giving warnings to passing down skills but for humans’ language has two major uses. One use is making literature. Literature are important than we think. Literature explains our human condition in understandable way. Literature ignite emotions and literature is a human only characteristic.

Another more important use of language is transferring myths and culture. By myths, I mean everything in the imaginary reality. From capitalism to the Greek gods to the communism to money. Language has helped spread man’s greatest power. The power to have a culture or set of myths. These myths are what makes us invincible. Myths like capitalism make us work in large communities that makes us accomplish more as a species.

In short, language is crazy complex and fascinating and of course weirder than we usually take it for. If scribbles and noises can make us land on the moon, then language is amazing and we should take time to appreciate it. To put this in scale, for humans to meet an organism that they can really understand, those organisms need to have a complex language like us. The odds of that are 1 in 117 billion and we aren’t even sure we will understand their languages. These odds are even lower than the odds of us discovering life in another solar system, which range from 1 in 8 to 1 in 2

If you read this far, thank you it is appreciated. Please comment, tell your friends and contact the author on what you want to see in this blog.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 15, 2022 at 1:52 PM

    I enjoyed and learnt👌👌......and I do agree language is weird😋 . I can't wait to read the next weird thing😊.And good job👊

    ReplyDelete

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