Language is a tool to communicate for foremost purpose. — Corvus
Yes, since through language, early humans were able to evolve and survive better by communicating more effectively.
But… I’ve been thinking, and there lies the problem.
When I think, I always use language to do so (I believe this may be overlapping with another recent post about internal dialogue, which astounded me when I first considered the possibility that not all people have internal dialogue) I cannot seem to think of anything at all without it materializing as words and sentences in my mind. Now I am trying to do it, and all I can hear is, “Now I am trying to do it.” But more than that, when I am trying to understand something, or work something out, I do so only by thinking in language. Therefore, it seems to be the only way I can successfully understand the world. Even if I see an orange, for example, when I look at it, I think, “orange.” Of course, this can develop, and I can think of a whole load of complex things about the orange if I want to, and also, the orange doesn't have to be there. But whatever I think about, the words pop into my brain first to enable me to think about it. Therefore, the thoughts seem to have more power than the orange itself, since they can be more complex than it, and they seem to take over. (Oh, wait! Can thoughts of an orange be more powerful than the orange itself? I guess that is another whole debate)
Not only that, having been thinking about this recently, and trying it out, I’ve realized that, when I try to suppress the inner dialogue— which I cannot 100% successfully do—I begin to ‘see’ the thing I am thinking about. I see it vaguely, perhaps because I am distracted by the whole language thing, but I see it like when I can picture something in my head, like my previous house, or my old school, or something like that. Am I totally weird or something? I hope this happens to other people too.
Anyway, so this led me to thinking, what if the foremost purpose of language is for people to make sense of the world by thinking things, and communication is a secondary benefit? What if, in caveman/women times (sorry, anthropologists would be tutting and shaking their heads at me now, but you know what I mean) in order to make sense of their world, people had their own inner dialogues, their own unique languages, and then began to communicate by amalgamating all the languages into a common one, in that particular tribe or group of people anyway?
And then I wonder, is that basically what we have done by adopting English, since English is an amalgamation of a whole lot of different languages?
I really hope I haven’t broken any rules in this post by the way
:/ Please excuse me if I have, as I am new to this site.
Am I allowed to say all this without referring to a philosopher? I guess that rationalists would say that language is innate. This seems to support the possibility that people may be capable of developing their own internal ‘languages’, enabling them to interpret the world, until they become able to amalgamate them with the most commonly used languages around them.
Or… this could all be a total lot of nonsense. But… it’s a thought… which has probably been thought and said before at some point, I’m sure.
If, however, this whole idea is true, it would make the concept of one language being better than another a nonsense, since there would be far too many to make a decision. In addition, there seems to be far too much mixing of languages to pull one out and name it superior. Those who would say that English is superior may have problems with the French, for example, who could pipe up and say, "Wait! But your language cannot be the best, since our language is mixed into yours."
Although, I guess you may be able to say that one language, such as English, is the best mixer of languages. But then you'd get those languages that are mixed into French piping up and saying, "Wait..." And it goes on...
PS Sorry about the massive long post! My brain seems to have been working overtime!