About Humans: We communicate via sophisticated languages

11. We communicate via sophisticated languages.

Humans develop complex and sophisticated languages (including mathematical languages, and programming languages, and other types) and these languages form important parts of our cultures.

Among other uses, we employ language to record our observations, and to share them with others, and to compare notes with others.

Human languages allow us to reference, not just material objects, but abstract concepts.

Note that while all humans have the capacity for language, details of a specific language generally vary by culture.

Note that, in the first quotation listed below, commonly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, a distinction is made between various uses of language:

description of things;
talk about people;
description and discussion of events;
discussion of abstract ideas.

One can appreciate all of these distinct uses, without feeling any need to favor one more than another.

Words from Others on this Topic

Great minds discuss ideas, average ones discuss events [or things], and small minds discuss people.

Henry Thomas Buckle, 1901, from Charles Stewart autobiography

…language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.

Tom Robbins, 2014, from the book Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

At the moment, the most powerful marker, the feature that distinguishes our species most decisively from closely related species, appears to be symbolic language. Many animals can communicate with each other and share information in rudimentary ways. But humans are the only creatures who can communicate using symbolic language: a system of arbitrary symbols that can be linked by formal grammars to create a nearly limitless variety of precise utterances. Symbolic language greatly enhanced the precision of human communication and the range of ideas that humans can exchange. Symbolic language allowed people for the first time to talk about entities that were not immediately present (including experiences and events in the past and future) as well as entities whose existence was not certain (such as souls, demons, and dreams).

David Christian, 2008, from the book This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity

Our capacity, through language, to manipulate the mental world and so deal imaginatively with the world of experience has been a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in giving humans the overwhelming advantage over other species in terms of cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution.

Edwin G. Pulleyblank, 1989, from the book Studies in Language Origins

Next: 12. We make things for one another