Communication from the ice age to other dimensions
Our language shapes how we think. It is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the world. We call it “linguistic relativity”. And, it is not just the spoken language through which we communicate. We don’t even realise it, but on daily basis, we use many languages. We don’t speak just with our mouth. We don’t listen just with our ears. And I don’t mean just our nonverbal language. Or body language, as we call it. There are many more ways, through which we communicate. Spoken language is just one of them. And it is not always the best of them. The world of our communication is very colorful. It is much more amazing, than the majority of us ever imagined. What are these other languages? How and what exactly they influence in us? Let’s take it step by step.
Spoken word
For the majority of us, the spoken language is the primary means of communication. Therefore, it has the biggest influence on us. As said above — it has direct impact on how we think. Cultures, which languages don’t have exact number words, which can’t compare the pile on the left with the pile on the right, can’t create more complex algebra. Therefore they can never built more complicated technical system. Their language determines (in a good or in a bad way) their way of life.
The speech reflects the way of life of the given ethnicity. Its thinking. When we learn this other language, in the differences, we see pieces of other life experience. We learn words and phrases which are better for expressing certain reality. We peek into the soul of other nation. Into another past.
We don’t have to go anywhere far. Let’s take Finnish. Language, which lacks the word “please”. A word, which is for most of us, so crucial in interpersonal communication. Regardless of our native tongue. The absence of it, together with the absence of the words “he” and “she”, is explained by the fact that the Finns, in their harsh way of life, didn’t have much time for small talks or any other forms of soft communication. But Finns are not bad people, as one could assume. At first contact, they can be quieter and a bit detach. But when you know them more, you will find out that underneath, they are like everyone else. And, when they really want to be nice, they say “could you”. Together with a softness in their voice. It is my experience that the younger generation is more sensitive to the absence of the word. So, when they speak, they supplement it sometimes with the English word “please”. It is just this little detail, this absence of 3 words, which is showing us the magnitude of one nations different historical experience.
Truly different language comes with truly different ethnicity. In other words, it comes with people who live (or lived) different way of life from me and you. We can imagine people who live (or lived) in much different relationship with nature. Usually, in much tighter relationship. We call them Indians, indigenous peoples, tribes. One of the most interesting languages I came across is the language of the Yamana (or Yahgnan) tribe.
A tribe, which, for 7,000 years, along with several others, inhabited the southernmost tip of “Tierra del Fuego”. Yes, unfortunately inhabited. The Yamana tribe has died out. Fortunately, at the beginning of the 20th century, their language was captured in the several time lost and once again discovered vocabulary of missionary E. Lucas Bridges. He lived with Yamanas between 1869 and 1898. During this period, he learned to speak fluent Yamana and and he wrote a phonetic vocabulary of their language. Even those people and their way of life is gone, the richness of their speech is showing us how they thought, how they lived. Their vocabulary captures 32,000 words. For comparison — English has now roughly 130,000 active terms.
Most Yamana words concentrate on social relationships, moving on canoes and around food. Only for family relationships the Yaman language had over 50 expressions. Their words are exceptional in the way, that the vast majority of them captures more complicated or complex events. Few examples:
- kaiyerri i: To come to the surface and cause a rush of water or a ripple on it as a seal, a fish, or a bird rising up from below.
- dop-a: To accompany or go with a spearman to help him as a woman by paddling or simply to accompany him in order to get a share of what he gets.
- kagiy-a: To go, come or get from the East to a place far West and cast anchor.
- das-a: To go or come to any place where a woman is for an improper purpose.
- ium-a: To tear and scatter, bite off and eat away as dogs do the hair of animals when tearing them.
- dga-rdgu: To take up a lot in the hands and throw away, as one does a lot of loose things when wishing to make boys scramble for them.
Just from those few words, ideas about lives and thoughts of these people come to mind. Even they are long gone, it’s like we understand them. One could write stories, just from swiping through their vocabulary.
By-cognitive approach
The problem with so different languages (with cultural differences) is that we can not define a precise translation of many words without greater insight or knowledge of a particular culture. The meaning of words is shaped by common experience. That’s way the “by-cognitive approach” is so important. It means, holding 2 concept of one thing in mind, at the same time.
Famous anthropologist and writer Jeremy Narby, spoke about this principle very nicely. It was during the group presentation “Science meets tradition” which took place on the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, on November 2018. Mr. Nearby grew up in Switzerland and Canada and studied at Canterbury and Stanford. It means on the West. Immediately after completing his studies, he went to the Peruvian Amazon, where he lived for many years with the tribe Ashaninka. So he has direct experience with life in two completely different civilizations. As an example, he spoke about the term “yuxin”. This term refers to spiritual or living power that penetrates through all living things. Where in plants, animals and humans, the manifestation occurs in the form of certain beings.
The term “yuxin” can be very easily translated as “invisible”. So, Europeans and Americans, from the view point of their culture, can easily attribute the word “spirit” or “soul” to this term. However, the translation is not so simple. The meaning of the word is variable. It changes according to circumstances. Beings living in plants, animals and humans can sometimes be visible. The term is also changing geographically. Beings that inhabit people are somewhere more referred as souls, but elsewhere as enchanted. Yuxin is also a completely separate dimension. A completely different world into which you can enter when consuming certain psychedelics. Ayahuasca, for example.
Recognising the true meaning of the word Yuxin suddenly opens up a great world that could be easily swept off the table with a bad translation of the word. World and facts that have only come into our mental space in the last decades and especially years. We don’t have to agree with so different worldview. However, it is crucial for our understanding of the Amazon forest civilizations.
”It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle
Learning of other languages goes hand in hand with the recognition of other cultures and our tolerance to them. It leads to the openness of mind and heart and to the knowledge that conflicts between cultures and people stem from not-knowing and ignorance. That is why knowledge of another language makes us, in all respects, better and richer people. It opens us up and improves our positive qualities. Empathy, understanding, it strengthens our ability to decide and solve crisis, make us less conflicting.
Time and space
Languages mostly show their difference in how they work with space and time. Because we all live in the time that flows, we say that our time is linear. This is reflected in all our languages. Time flows from one point to another. However, our languages differ in the way they describe this flow. In the Euro-American world, it is said that time floes from left to right. The past is on the left, the future is on the right. In the Arab world, time flows from right to left. In China, the time is referred to go from top to the bottom. This has to do with writing direction.
Again, we are encountering bigger differences with indigenous people. For the Yupno tribe from Papua-New Guinea, the time flows up the hill. Against the the river flow. Members of the tribe are referring to the past or future according to their position towards the hill. Interestingly, when being indoors, the past is always towards the door. Regardless of the the house position towards the hill. For Aborigines, the time goes from east to west.
The use of language for the non-linear flow of time in human existence has been excellently demonstrated in the Sci-Fy movie Arrival (based on the “Story of Your Life: Ted Chiang”). Learning this language has enabled the main woman character of the story, to see the future. Unfortunately, none of our languages can do that. :)
However, there is another way of handling with time in our languages. For example, sign language can do that. There are situations when it can expresses more phenomena at a time. It is so-called simultaneity. Signs or words are not placed behind each other. But the whole complexity of some reality or action is expressed at one time. Important note: There is an international signing system. However, the primary language of a deaf person of every nation is naturally its national sign language. The spoken language comes second.
In the way the situation is signed, we can see how fast the car is going. If it accelerates or brakes. In what direction it is going. Besides signing with hands, facial expression is indispensable part of the information. It delivers the emotions associated with the situation. It is a great deal of information being transmitted simultaneously. At one time. Therefore interpreting from sign language into spoken word takes always longer than saying the same thing in sign language.
There are more specifications of sign language. An interesting difference from spoken languages is the need for anchoring in time and space. It means that if I want to talk about a group of people, maybe about friends and what they have been talking about, at first I have to place them in an imaginary space. Then I only point on the people in this imaginary space. I am not saying “Petr told Paul”. I am just pointing from the point of Petr to the point of Paul.
Or when I am talking story in time. For example about something what happen before or after the Christ. I create a timeline in space and show a point to define Christ. Then I just point before or after Christ, depending on when the event happened. Regarding the space. It is interesting, that the languages of indigenous peoples are working with it similar as sign language. It is important for them to perceive, and in the communication to tell, from where to where a person moves.
For me, a very interesting personal experience with sign language was to see the signs for DNA and RNA. I knew that DNA is “Deoxyribonucleic acid” and that it has the shape of double helix. I knew that RNA is “Ribonucleic acid” and that it’s part of DNA.
Images
For the message transmission, images are often much more effective than speech. Imagine that your friends would describe each holiday photo instead of showing them. The boredom would be much more intense and longer. Or let’s take online shopping. If the goods in e-shop would be just described and not shown. How much time would we need just to get know the offer. Written Pinterest or Instagram would be a nice joke, but never mainstream. Visual communication was and is crucial for us.
We knew that all the alphabets of modern languages develop from counting marks and pictographic representations of real objects about 5,000 years ago. But only the recent research of Genevieve von Petzinger, launched in 2007, demonstrates the existence of a prehistoric graphical communication system, which was the true beginning of written communication.This system consists of 32 abstract shapes. These often appear accompanied with representations of people and animals. Where the abstract features outnumber the real portrayals about 2 times.
This prehistoric system appears in Europe 45,000 years ago. During the last ice age. But the system could not emerge out of a vacuum. It had to have time to develop. Which means, that it’s origins are even older. This graphic communication which linked abstract shapes together with representations of people and animals existed across a 30,000-year time span across Europe. 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire period. Some being purely local, limited to a single territory. Like a dialect.
With regard to this topic, I can’t forget the comics. How, at first, it was struggling to be recognised as a full literary form. And now it’s struggling to be recognised as a language. The thing is, comics does not fully fulfil the linguistic definitions of a language. The reasons why, probably in the case of comics we should change the perspective, is described in a book by Hannah Miodrag “Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form”. Especially if we recognise that all art is a language. Universal language of humanity through time, communicating from simple messages to complex emotions.
I wonder, for what way communication or language would today’s humanity reach, if it needed to communicate universally. With all the people at once. I see such a universal language in the form of comics. The IKEA Manual seems to be the best example. Even without the text everyone understands it. Other examples are memes, picture manuals and many more.
I see comics as a transition between writing and visual capture of a sign language. In one image, stripe, or page, we can capture much more informations than we would be able to squeeze in with writing. Technologies brought even bigger integration of images into our communication. Icons and pictograms are unquestionable and versatile visual language, which will probably stay here for a long time. Graphic form existed in the beginning of written communication, in its course, and is still there. Now in a much richer and more sophisticated version.
The right language for the right moment
Whether we are able to accept or express some information at all, is determined by what communication system is used.
Describing reality
The strength and weakness of word expression is that it describes the experience. Collective to a certain group of people. The more our personal experiences differ from our common experience, the harder it’s for us to express ourselves. An examples of such an extreme personal experience is enlightenment. We can only approximate it by analogies.
Excessive complexity
If we work with very complex information, or with a great deal of information, so we don’t understand it. We will use more appropriate means of communication. We will use languages that make these complexities accessible to a level where we can even think and communicate about them. By converting information into another language, we will find hidden logic.
A specific example are mathematical or physical equations. These are languages that have their own characters and laws of sentences structure. In some cases, we simply can’t do without them. It doesn’t matter whether you are Arab, Mexican or Japanese. You can stand together in front of the board, not knowing the language of your colleague and (if you understand it) spend hours, days, weeks to solve very complex problems in your common language of mathematical equations. Of course that other common language is handy for communication not only about mathematics. Equations are therefore a language for a particular purpose.
Just like maps or data visualisations. Both is absolutely crucial in some situations. There is a wonderful example of connecting maps and visualisation data in the work of Doctors Without Borders. In particular, this connection proved to be the only possible language when dealing with the authorities, during the Ebla epidemic in Congo 2018. As long as the communication was only verbal, no one wanted to do anything. But the moment the visualisation of the progress on the map was introduced into the discussion, everything was understood, and things started to happen. It was only necessary to choose an adequate language.
Emotions
We can describe our emotions. But before we do that, our body language, the expression of our face, will do that for us. We learn the emotional languages. Primary in our family. We learn to love, to express it. We learn to perceive, to internally experience. Whether the emotions are direct or mediated. Like a music. Than we bring this language into our new relationship. Where we use it for communication with our partner. Together we create a new language that we pass on to our children.
Logic
Esher’s infinite staircases seem to be a just a play of perspective. However, displayed logic can be, under certain circumstances, correct. For example when playing rock–paper–scissors. If we start with a stone. We agree that paper beats stone. Then the scissors beats paper and another stone beats scissors.
With the simple logic that one element is more than the other, we could come to a direct conclusion, that the stone ending the game is 3 levels higher, than the stone starting the game. Because, it beat the scissors which beat paper which beat the stone. Therefore it has to be stronger. However it’s not. It’s circular hierarchy, which can ascent and descent forever. This logic then corresponds with the perspective displayed in Esher’s infinite staircases.
It’s about creating a reality, which is the reference point for assessing the given facts. The creation of such systems is defined by a calibration symmetry (Gauge Symmetry).
The best way
There are cases, where the only one possible, fully complex and full honest expression is the use of other language, then the spoken word or its writing. An example is the picture below. It is an representation of 3D object in 4D space. More specifically, it is the representation of the planet Earth through Hopf fibration (not vibration).
It was created in 70s as an intercourse between mathematics, differential mathematics and particle theory. It was created after a conversation, where a mathematician James Harris Simons and theoretical physicist Yang Chen-Ning where searching for a way, how to understand to each other. It’s a very complex picture that you need to watch it for a while. If you aren’t a top physicist or mathematician, you don’t have a chance to understand the equations on which the picture is based. But after watching the picture for a while, you will understand the logic of the space you are looking at. It will be only a little bit difficult to explain to others what you have just seen.
Whole section “The right language for the right moment” inspired by the podcast: “Joe Rogan Experience #1203 — Eric Weinstein”.
Be kind, curious and doubtful
My sister works as a sign language interpreter and she married a deaf man. This brought into my life an insight into the deaf community. For me, this was one of the crucial experiences in viewing, how languages shapes the way we think. The culture of the deaf is different. It is different because the deaf communicate in a different way, they have a different access to information, their language and life experience is shaping them differently. It’s a nation in every nation. Even my sister is married to her husband for 10 years, I am still noticing our mutual differences.
One recent situation for all. My sister sometimes interprets the session of a psychologist with deaf client. From time to time, one of them completes a test, which is afterwards evaluated by the psychologist. Here is the catch. Because the deaf have different life experience, their answers can mean something totally different. Examples:
- Do you feel like someone is watching you all the time?
Deaf will answer YES / Yes of course. At the moment the deaf starts signing, the hearing people start to look at them. They are simply curious.
- Do you feel lonely?
There is a big chance that deaf person will answer YES / Deaf people generally have a greater difficulty finding a partner. Due the communication barrier and the size of their community. Deaf women more than deaf man. It is related to the greater social sense of women in general. A hearing woman accepts a deaf man rather than a hearing man accepts a deaf woman.
A psychologist who has no insight into the life of the deaf community and does not know the specifics of their communication, then very simply evaluates the test inappropriately or inconsistently with reality. Unfortunately, this applies to a large number of psychologists. They don’t know that they don’t know. He doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. A sad fact is that tests are not only for adults but also for children. We don’t have to go far into the Amazon jungle to find out that different cultures live next to us and that we have a problem to understand even here at home.
“Language is a systematic means of communication.”
The fact is that we all are, in some way, a minority. It only depends on how we look at society. Whenever the society realises that part of it is somehow disadvantaged, and eliminates that disadvantage, then everyone benefits. It’s called the “curb-cut effect”.
The moment we create curb cut ramps for wheelchair users, the old people with shopping trolleys, shops suppliers and mothers with stroller will benefit from it. We will appreciate the TV subtitles in a noisy bar, when we want to watch the game, and so on. There are plenty of these handy modifications around us. They are making our life easier and we would never thought they were made specially for some minority. To realise and reflect this cultural and communication difference is a step, which can benefit the whole society.
There are about 5–7,000 languages spoken around the world. It depends how we define dialects. We’re losing 1 language a week. We are loosing an unique way of viewing and understanding the world. There is an old African proverb. “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” When a language dies, the loss is much bigger. On the other hand, there are new languages being created and developed.
I am pleased by the news on how linguistic relativity is having influence in programming languages. They are simpler, more efficient. But I’m more pleased to learn about the last living grandmother of an Indian tribe, who has been working for 10 years on her nation’s vocabulary. And I believe that both will benefit us once in the future.
Communication can be messy and complicated. We learn in all our live and sometimes it gives us wrinkles. But when it works, human interaction can be one of the most beautiful things in our lives. Situation, where the other person is not lecturing you about something, but it’s kindly explaining his/her view or presenting his/her knowledge. Or really listening to what you want to say. Situation where two people are not fighting over who is right or who is the smartest one. Then we can experience real physical pleasure.
It takes the other person to experience this. It takes time to learn this kind of interaction. It takes time to cultivate your personality and learn principles of such communication. Once we experience such a discussion, it will remain with us. You know then, what a supreme communication is, how it looks like. We should try to talk to each other this way. It is what we need. What we always needed.
Tomáš Q Procházka: I am communication and Graphic Designer. You can see me reading something about Developmental Psychology or listening to History Podcasts all the time. It’s because I love to learn and to find connections everywhere.
