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Our Words Define Us
How language misleads us, and we don’t even notice
Language begins as sound for almost all animals. Birds communicate through vocalizations, as do most mammals. Additional sounds can be employed, such as the slapping of a whale’s tail on the surface of the ocean or the chest-thumping of a male gorilla. We’re still in the very early stages of trying to understand communication in other species but already it’s clear that the range of concepts that can be expressed is significantly larger than most people imagined even a mere twenty years ago.
Our ability to use sounds to communicate is likely the most well-developed of all the species, though the caveat is we still understand almost nothing about the clicks of dolphins, the song of whales, and the astonishing colors-and-patterns signaling of cuttlefish.
Language gave us our earliest ability to cooperate among ourselves, and we see similar use of vocalizations among our closest primate cousins. We existed for tens of thousands of years on the basis of vocalization alone, passing on what meagre knowledge we’d amassed by means of simple tales handed down from adults to children (in addition, of course, to simply showing a technique so that others could learn by repetition).
Then, for reasons that are still unknown, we began to conceptualize abstractions. Early humans began painting…
