Language Is A Treasure Trove Of Tools Waiting To Be Explored

Can we use it to accomplish more than we think?

a chimpanzee has a meaningful videoconference chat sitting in an elegant, minimalistic office with big windows looking out from the top of a high building, realistic photography — by DALL·E

Inventions

We could easily argue that language is the most impressive human invention. It is inaccurate and pretentious to call it an invention: we created it as much as we created the mouths we use to speak them. That said, I find it hard to disassociate our capacity to articulate complex thoughts from that of weaving sentences together. Both humans and chimpanzees have mouths we both use for eating and communicating; however, language is the critical divergence: while we can wonder about the origin of the universe, they mostly content themselves shouting, ‘fire’, ‘water’ or ‘lion’. Our emotions are probably much more similar than our descriptions of them. Both humans and apes love, mourn and hate, but we wonder about the meaning of it, and we couldn’t do so without language.

Therefore, we might get slightly ahead of ourselves and claim ownership. We all know we would be selling the rights to human language to every other semi-intelligent species if we could. Indeed, if I had to worship anything in this world, it would be the capacity of language. Nothing has ever got me as close to understanding life or has allowed me to accept that there are things I don’t need to or can’t understand.