Words

I have been thinking of the concept of language and what and how it came about. Almost wrote and completed a piece on love last week; got busy with listening to good music and never finished it. As I write this I am listening to Sting - an amazing artist; guess it helps when one has been a teacher. Construction of sentences to accurately convey a precise meaning of an state of mind and to ensure that everyone understands it is not simple. 

Back to the original topic - words; spoken and written. Let’s start with a simple trip in history. Consider for some time that you are back to the start of civilisation… creatures we now call humans have just about started to differentiate them selfs from the other apes. This is a time when the written word does not exist. How then does that creature communicate an idea to another from the same species? One can imagine quite a few fights due to bad communication. Anyhow these creatures survive and ideas are being exchanged by communicating in primeval sounds and actions. Fast forward a few thousand years and these creatures have started to make small communities. Fast forward a few thousand more and we come to a point when ideas are being exchanged in the form of pictures and pictographs. The leap from pictographs to cuneiform writing is probably the biggest technological leap. All of a sudden one can write and convey messages and emotions . Poetry, stories and history is now all written down.  Without that leap I wonder where we would be. 

Now to the questions - each language we use in the current times is limited by the number of words it has . Pickup a dictionary (any language) and you understand what I mean . All the words in that dictionary can and will be used to convey all of the history and all of the ideas that have been or are to come. Is there anything that cannot be expressed or explained using that limited set of words ? And more importantly when we construct sentences are we being influenced by an inherent bias ? And similarly when we read or listen to these words are they being coloured by bias ? 

The bias exists; one doesn’t realise it. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. If a non native comes on a holiday to my hometown; he or she is going to feel that the citizens of my city are rude. It’s the way we speak in any language. It’s a quirk - it’s almost like we speak in a manner where we feel the other one is an imbecile. This is not limited to speech , this transcends into notice boards and the like. One can search on the internet for Pune notice boards to see how crazy this is. Another example is when people are asked how are you or how you have been - the answers range from not too bad to awesome. Imagine how bad could it be ? Or is the person feeling an impending sense of doom to say not too bad ? The other end of the spectrum awesome is over the top. Our emotions and our surroundings have a big impact on the words we speak and for sure colour the meanings of the words when we read. 

Words are a powerful medium to express ideas, when used precisely; Not too many and very few to convey the idea. When used without precision they are open to multiple interpretations and can result in crusades. Our emotions are betrayed by the words we use without us realising and similarly our emotional state of being can colour the meaning of the words we read or hear.  I hope to get as precise with my word usage as Sting. 

C