Article: understanding language
An interesting article I have just read talks about the common understandings across the world. It states that world wide, all humans understand to cry when sad and laugh when happy or something is funny. The only difference is the language used to describe the feelings, emotions and objects is what changes. There is a human nature to feel, be and exist in a certain way, but why does language change anything? what happens if we remove language, communicating would be made so much simpler as we fully understand the relevance to objects, emotion, time etc.
Joshua Hartshorne writes:
'Starting with pioneering work by Joseph Greenberg, scholars have cataloged over two thousand linguistic universals (facts true of all languages) and biases (facts true of most languages). For instance, in languages with fixed word order, the subject almost always comes before the object. If the verb describes a caused event, the entity that caused the event is the subject ("John broke the vase") not the object (for example, "The vase shbroke John" meaning "John broke the vase"). In languages like English where the verb agrees with one of its subjects or objects, it typically agrees with the subject (compare "the child eats the carrots" with "the children eat the carrots") and not with its object (this would look like "the child eats the carrot" vs. "the child eat the carrots"), though in some languages, like Hungarian, the ending of the verb changes to match both the subject and object.'
The idea is that the order, understanding and processing of language is exactly the same across all humans. We all understand the relevance of anything in the right order, it is just the sounds made when spoken which differs. It is possible to make a universal language based on this theory, allowing for the most common sounds for each words to be used for best understanding of the language, and easiest access of learning - much like what the 'Esperanto language' (previously mentioned) attempted. That said, there is still a vast difference between cultures, opinions, and many other factors which makes language a barrier. By removing language, do you remove this problem? Although people will not be able to communicate any where near as complex ideas as they can with language, the fundamental understanding of human behavior and emotion will allow people to understand one another.
