Or would our communication be intelligent? Without words we could use sounds and motions to classify things. This may require even more intellect than when using words. Separating sounds and motions, and we think we have it hard. How do we even think?
But what if there was no way to classify things at all? Without a form of classifying things, there would be no communication. Without communication, there would be no sound.
Well there would be sound but only to the extent of a dish dropping.
Would there even be such things as dishes? Without communication how would we even know what a dish is? Or how to make one? How would we even know that it is needed to hold our food?
How would we even know what food is? How would we even know that we need to eat? How would we know if we don't eat we will die?
How would we know that food can prevent death? How would we know what death is? I wouldn't even be able to call it death because we wouldn't be able to communicate or even have words.
If one were to die, how would we know how to make another? With out another the existing ones would die off. If the existing ones die off, eventually there will be no more people. If there are no more people, then there will be nothing. Or at least not to our knowledge because we won't even have knowledge. We won't even exist to have knowledge.
But... how was there anything in the first place? How did we learn to make another? How did we discover death? How did we learn that we need to eat to stray from death? How did we produce dishes? How did the sound of things, such as dishes, dropping expand into different sounds? How did the sounds in turn, develop into communication? How did we come up with communication? How did we classify this? How did we develop words to classify? How did we connect our communication and classifications together to create words, language, an alphabet... letters? What are letters?
Language is so vital to our lives. We most likely would not exist without it. You may take this as just a ramble or non-sense but is it really? Think about how it all links together. Think about each chain effect. Think for yourself. Just remember, how are you able to read this and think about it?
Your blog post is interesting and raises valid points. However, when you write at the beginning, " What if there were no letters. If there were no letters, there would be no alphabet. If there was no alphabet, there would be no words. If there were no words, there would be no sentences. If there were no sentences, there would be -from our present perspective- no intelligent form of communication." Which seemingly makes sense you take the smallest part of written language letters than progress to alphabet than words and so on, so it would seem logical that without letters there would be no words and therefore no language, but this would only apply to language in its written form be that as it may history tells us that language in its written form came well after language in its verbal form thus the communication that you imply would be impossible without letters was possible without letters, alphabet, etc. Nonetheless, your post raises many questions which I feel are deserving of further consideration and thought.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Mike. "What if there was no language?" and "What if there was no writing?" are two different questions.
DeleteIt's surreal to think about a world without words. While people would obviously still experience things like death and hunger without having words to define these concepts, it's odd to think of living like prehistoric civilizations that didn't have language. Either way though, I think communication is a part of survival, and even if humans didn't have words, we'd have communication. I don't think humans would be as advanced today if we didn't have language though. If we needed to survive through nonverbal communication, I feel as if we'd be just like animals, constantly relying on instinct and nonverbal communication.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting hypothetical, Emily. Many linguists (most famously a guy named Noam Chomsky) believe that we humans are biologically wired for language (it's in or DNA).And just today we watch Mark Pagel talk about how language transformed humanity. I think that, without language, humans would continue to do the primitive things that all animals do: eat, sleep, make babies, try to stay alive, etc. But language allows us to do most of the uniquely human things that make us …human: to share ideas, to bind space and time.
ReplyDeleteI challenge you to investigate what science says about this question. I mentioned Noam Chomsky and Mark Pagel earlier. Also check out Linguists Stephen Pinker and Daniel Everett.