Today
in my Anthropology class, it was my turn to present a chapter of the Origin of
Communication by Tomasello. My part of the chapter had to do with the
development of language in infants. Basically infants can communicate but until
they develop the mental facilities to understand that other people
have goals and intentions different from themselves that they can share, they
can’t put their thoughts and actions into a legible language. They can only
point, gesture, and pantomime. Tomasello also said that “If association or “mapping”
were all that is involved in acquiring a linguistic convention, the language
would be everywhere in the animal kingdom, and it would start at three months
of age in humans instead of nine. The reason is that arbitrary linguistic
conventions can be acquired only in the context of some kind of conceptual
common ground with mature speakers.”
This stood out to me because it made me
realize that we only have spoken word because as individual persons we all
agree that words mean what they do. Words themselves have no meaning, they are
only empty puffs of air, but because we associate them with a material object
and agree that the word means the object, we have language. That’s why there
are so many different languages because different “cultures” of people agreed
on a different set of sounds. It just amazed me because the thing that separates
us from the rest of the animal kingdom, our ability to work together as a group
to make the best of situations, depends completely upon the majority ruling of
meanings. If I decided that I wanted to call cats dogs, and created a following
and we petitioned and got the words switched, I could. It doesn’t stop the cats
from being cats or turn them into dogs; I just changed what the animal is
called. It just drove home the fact that words themselves are empty. It shocked
me. 
“Language
is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on Intersubjectively
available cues as to what to say and when.” (Quine)
I am not going to lie, reading this kind of creeped me out. It really shows that one of the only things that separates us from other animals is our language. So if we did not have that, would we be the same as tigers, or lions, or dogs? I have thought before about the fact that we think in words. Maybe not consciously, but having words to associate to objects or concepts allows us to think complexly. Without words, we would not be complex thinking animals. The only hold we have on dominating this world is our linguistic abilities.
ReplyDeleteIn my Women's studies class, we watched a video that said the only difference between us and monkeys is that we have a "highly developed brain and an opposable thumb." We seem to be completely different from other animals, but our brains have allowed us to associate meaning to objects, as you stated. I always wondered where certain words came from. Like why do we say pavement? Some words boggle my mind. Studying Latin, I learned most words stem back to origins of thousands of years ago. However, how did they create those words and sounds? I have no clue.
ReplyDeleteThrough the development of language, we have come such a long way. And most importantly, the ways in which we attach meanings to words and even objects is completely complex. Getting your own perspective on this Tomasello chapter is intriguing in that even when reading the book own my own I take away different ideas from the text as others might have. So even with clear definitions of text, our interpretation of it can vary based on personal understanding. This just goes to show how humans not only create meanings of language, but connect the meanings in order to form a greater understanding overall.
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