- I am telling you, a good life depends on the liver.

- Oh, definitely. We are all creators…

- Yeah, you have to…

- … of our destiny.

- What?

- We are all creators of our destiny…

- Wait…

Have you ever been in a situation when you were not able to understand another person even though apparently you both used the same language? What is the origin of this miscommunication? What are the consequences? Well, effects can be subtle and of miner importance, you might still have a chance to clarify what you intended to convey but what if another person perceived your message as totally obvious and clear and used it to make some decision or take certain action? Both people using English yet still sometimes missing what the other person wants to express — why? And can we prevent it?

Let’s first tackle the core question: ‘Why’. Language emerges together with community, its way of functioning and expression. Even though fundamentally humans share same archetypal patterns of functioning we developed over 6500 languages over the world having their own grammar and vocabulary. As an example let’s take number of tenses, in English 12, French 8, German 6, Estonian… 2. Wait — what? Yes, Estonian even though uses 149 different types of verb, has actually only 2 tenses — past and present. When Estonians want to express that something will happen in the future, they need to add a context. Estonian is also a genderless language, doesn’t have gender pronouns. Both, a man and a woman are referred as ‘Ta’. Pretty interesting when you think about how differently Estonian mind and thinking process look like inside compared to a mind of an English man. Language and grammar, the way we construct sentences represent our thought processes. It gets interesting when you learn a foreign language as you transfer your native way of speaking onto a newly learnt language.

There were several attempts to unify the way people communicate in the world, e.g. development of an auxiliary language — Esperanto (“one who hopes”) by Polish — Jewish ophthalmologist, L. L. Zamenhof, estimated to be used currently by around 100 000 people. The motivation behind the creation? Well, in 1870s Polish language was banned in public places in area taken then by Russian empire and Zamenhof thought that it simply takes too much time and effort to learn new languages and in order to foster harmony between people from different countries we should have an auxiliary language in order to: “be united in a common brotherhood”.

We even don’t have one unified sign language across the world, also not even “English Sign Language” that would enable deaf people from different countries to communicate with each other. They are even independent from spoken languages and have their own origins. American Sign Language and British Sign Language are for example both used to express English words and letters but are entirely different from each other. Ha! That is something interesting.

Do I even need to mention synonyms when talking about tricky communication and us little humans trying to connect dots in our heads? I think it is obvious. “Liver” does not equal “liver”. OBVIOUSLY. Do I mean here a human being who is alive and… creates his destiny or just a piece of that human — a human organ? We connect the dots using the resources at hand, our preferences, perceptions and beliefs. We are simply biased, have our lenses.

But even this would still be fine, if we were more aware of our tendency to make assumptions and thus as a consequence make more effort to reassure we understood another person correctly. People are wired for connection and social bonds but sometimes it seems like our tools are just not updated, like software where we ignored the necessary updates. We develop more sophisticated ways of communication due to complexity that increases with time (or chaos and entropy?) but still didn’t develop the proper reading mechanism that would be “misinterpretations proof”.

We don’t speak the same language even if we speak the same language and we are sometimes not equipped with the right mechanism to translate it.

Does StepStone face this problem as well? Let’s not try to answer rhetorical questions here, the real question that requires answer is how to handle it, bring people closer and reassure common understanding of the path we follow together. In next posts we will talk exactly about that: what bugs our reading and interpretation software currently has and what updates it needs in order to speak Common Language.

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