3 ms·

okay, if you had zero words in your vocabulary. how would you interpret what a tree is, or anything to do with your day job, would you even have a job without w

okay, if you had zero words in your vocabulary. how would you interpret what a tree is, or anything to do with your day job, would you even have a job without words? without language? would you have a home without written language to order the supplies all of which have very specific names and measurements? all of humanity's achievements is because of language. I mean you can look at the speed of innovations. things were slow as hell until the 1400s, when the printing press was invented, the industrial revolution would've never kicked off without the ability to push thoughts and language into more hands. Education is all about language, hard to learn in grunts and pointing. There's more that goes into actual memories than language, though language is how we understand it interpret them... we have senses, feelings, and other contexts associated with a memory but without a word for sadness or anger, how do we know what we're even feeling? Language is one of the things that truly separates us from animals and before written language our hunter gatherer ancestors were little more than animals wearing fur skins.

erik_seaberg 3y ago
Big projects and education require copying ideas from one brain to another. Language is a good medium for doing that, much better than improvised gestures. But words and ideas must be different things, or nothing read could ever be misunderstood, and no one would ever be at a loss for words. When I imagine a tree, I get the image and the feel and the scent, the qualia. Hearing the word “pine” for the first time did not make me smell anything. I had to learn to associate those syllables with my memories of pine trees, and they only work between me and other people who have done that.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
I agree with your first three paragraphs about the importance of language. But otherwise agree with erik_seaberg. > but without a word for sadness or anger, how do we know what we're even feeling? "I'm feeling kind of a mix between the way I felt that time that thing happened and that time I did that other stuff. I don't like it." Without words at all, this would be a flash of memory of the two events which I would realize are related (emotionally) to the event happening to me now. For anger, particularly, the emotion (maybe better said to be a mood state) usually comes with a lot of drives. Whether we have a word for what we're feeling, we know what actions we want to take because of the feeling. Or at least I do. Circumlocutions are born out of ideas without words to express them. E.g. (literally 5 seconds to watch the relevant part): https://youtu.be/UEKWXFESU68?t=150 https://youtu.be/UEKWXFESU68?t=150 > Language is one of the things that truly separates us from animals and before written language our hunter gatherer ancestors were little more than animals wearing fur skins. Animals have a crap load of language-like elements, with taught dialects and the like. These are seen in social bees, prairie dog communities, and numerous other animals. We humans have very complex languages that facilitate a ton of nuance and novel information types. But don't sell animals, or our ancestors, short. Human civilization appears to pre-date written language by a number of centuries, with passed-down spoken language lasting for millennia (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/indigenous-aboriginal-ice-age-stories-true/671681/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/indigeno... ). https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/11/the-linguistic-genius-of-prairie-dogs/ https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/11/the-linguistic-ge... > “They’re able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun… In one 10th of a second, they say ‘Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'”

erik_seaberg 3y ago

Big projects and education require copying ideas from one brain to another. Language is a good medium for doing that, much better than improvised gestures. But words and ideas must be different things, or nothing read could ever be misunderstood, and no one would ever be at a loss for words. When I imagine a tree, I get the image and the feel and the scent, the qualia. Hearing the word “pine” for the first time did not make me smell anything. I had to learn to associate those syllables with my memories of pine trees, and they only work between me and other people who have done that.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

I agree with your first three paragraphs about the importance of language. But otherwise agree with erik_seaberg. > but without a word for sadness or anger, how do we know what we're even feeling? "I'm feeling kind of a mix between the way I felt that time that thing happened and that time I did that other stuff. I don't like it." Without words at all, this would be a flash of memory of the two events which I would realize are related (emotionally) to the event happening to me now. For anger, particularly, the emotion (maybe better said to be a mood state) usually comes with a lot of drives. Whether we have a word for what we're feeling, we know what actions we want to take because of the feeling. Or at least I do. Circumlocutions are born out of ideas without words to express them. E.g. (literally 5 seconds to watch the relevant part): https://youtu.be/UEKWXFESU68?t=150 https://youtu.be/UEKWXFESU68?t=150 > Language is one of the things that truly separates us from animals and before written language our hunter gatherer ancestors were little more than animals wearing fur skins. Animals have a crap load of language-like elements, with taught dialects and the like. These are seen in social bees, prairie dog communities, and numerous other animals. We humans have very complex languages that facilitate a ton of nuance and novel information types. But don't sell animals, or our ancestors, short. Human civilization appears to pre-date written language by a number of centuries, with passed-down spoken language lasting for millennia (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/indigenous-aboriginal-ice-age-stories-true/671681/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/indigeno... ). https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/11/the-linguistic-genius-of-prairie-dogs/ https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/11/the-linguistic-ge... > “They’re able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun… In one 10th of a second, they say ‘Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'”