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They may have had other reasons for being highly regarded, or feared. Non recursive language does not allow you to give commands more complicated than "you do
by pharke 7y ago
They may have had other reasons for being highly regarded, or feared.
Non recursive language does not allow you to give commands more complicated than "you do this", for instance saying "tell X to do this thing at this time in this location" is impossible without recursion. You might be able to get as far as "tell x to do this" since you are essentially just saying "repeat these words to X" but you have no way of providing context such as the time or circumstances when X should be told or when X should be told to perform the action. All organization and command would have to be done spur of the moment. There would be no possibility of planning in advance or communicating abstract concepts and thoughts to others.
Even a small group of people with this ability facing another group without it would have an overwhelming advantage, they could deceive, plot revenge, strategize, distract, and confound their opponents with their seemingly magical ability to know what members of their own group were to do and say before they did it. They could conceptualize solutions to problems that the others could not even begin to imagine. They could invent new objects in their mind and then execute those plans or tell others about them. They could create new words and concepts in language through combination and juxtaposition. They would quite literally be super-human, every one of them a Napoleon and an Einstein and a Da Vinci and a Shakespeare at once.
- ltbarcly3 7y agoBeing able to conceptualize does not depend on language, many of us don't think in language at all.
- simiones 7y agoThere is no proof of that. Even if you experience speaking and thinking as separate sensations, it may still be that they are actually "implemented" by the same structures in the brain. There is in fact a theory that language is a tool for thought first, and for communication only secondarily.
- blevo 7y agoOne may not think in a common language used to communicate (e.g. English) but the way one thinks could be considered a language regardless, only specific to one's own mind. Take for instance Google's translation AI. It developed its own intermediary language[1] which facilitated translation between languages and enabled it to even translate languages it had not specifically been trained on.[2] [1]e.g. It had a "word" for dog that wasn't part of any existing language. [2]e.g. it could translate Spanish -> French even though it was only trained on Spanish -> English and English -> French
- ltbarcly3 7y agoThis is a very sneaky argument that misses the point I think, you are effectively defining any sharing of information as a language, then using that definition.
- pharke 7y agoI'm not talking about language here. The discussion is about _recursion_ which has vast implications for both language and thought.