Language is more than just words. Words are mere combinations of letters which, when articulated together, form a sound that is recognizable and has meaning attached to it. That last step is the only crucial part to communication; as long as your audience can attach the same meaning to your sounds that you intend to project, you are being "heard." This is an ongoing, wordless process in the animal kingdom. A bird will sing a different song to indicate danger than it would to attract a mate. Plants will give off a specific scent to attract pollinating insects. This is a type of language far different from what modern humans are used to. Often, as with plants, there is not even a sound being emitted, but rather a signal that has associative significance. "Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent or wordless dance always already going on-this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits"(Abram 53).
Early Homo sapiens used art and oral storytelling as forms of expression, thus drawing solely from sensorial experience in order to convey meaning. They would interact with the earth by placing the stories in their respective geographic locations. When humans adopted writing, they began to interact directly with symbols on paper; these symbols represented sounds which had meaning attached to them. Objects, actions, and emotions were given names, and the most knowledgeable members of society established a template for expressing the environment. This built a foundation upon which humans could more effectively convey their thoughts to each other, but compromised their ability to primordially interact with the natural earth. As we categorize our environment by assigning a name to everything, we systematically learn to relate our world to this "template" which is disjointed from nature. Written language can bring people closer together, but it also causes people to forget the natural languages of their surrounding living environment.
The majority of communication is nonverbal. This fact seems hard to believe until you actually observe people interacting with each other. To understand what somebody is trying to say, you must listen to their words and inflection but also watch their body language and facial expressions. Often times my roommate and I communicate without using any words, just obnoxious sounds and motions. If somebody else was listening in, they would diagnose us as insane. Jake and I, however, find the communication completely comprehensible. When two people have a mutual understanding of how to interpret a message, the rules of language are unnecessary.
It would seem as if a primitive method of communication (such as between Jake and I) is only possible when two people have known each other for long enough to be able to accurately read each other's expressions by drawing upon memory. Amy Tan, in "Mother Tongue," described how, while she understood her mother's limited English, others believed "her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect"(Tan 517). I believe that the challenge of comprehending an unfamiliar dialect is rooted in prejudice. When people have a firm belief in a "correct" way to speak, they do not make an attempt to resonate at somebody else's frequency. People cannot hear Mrs. Tan because they don't try to listen. There is no "correct" way to express your thoughts. Even if we believe this notion, we are often prejudiced in that we get distracted by the blunders of somebody's articulation. While we should be listening, we instead focus on the strangeness of a person's way of speaking, and we stop making an effort to learn how to decode their unorthodox dialect. The preference for the formality of written language thus hinders communication.
Written language can also get in the way when it comes to the primary purpose of any species: mating. Although smooth-talking doesn't hurt, sexual attraction is a physiological phenomenon that doesn't involve impressing your partner with mastery of a formal language. It really comes down to the way the two people affect each other sensuously. A couple months ago I witnessed two ducks courting: they were swimming along in the Millrace and the male began to bob his head up and down. The female soon bobbed her head in unison with him, and then they swam off together. It made me think of human flirting patterns, and the way we employ "pick-up lines." Whatever happened to simple eye contact, smiling, and body language? Why does a lack of speaking have to be considered an "awkward silence"? I believe we have been conditioned to favor language rather than to genuinely express our feelings. Attraction is an immediate experience which usually doesn't require any vocal interaction at all.
The other day I was walking through campus with my friend. We were making gibberish noises that had a song-like inflection, but we weren't practicing any written language. As we walked by a raven, it squawked at my friend, as if in response to the sounds he was making. I was almost positive that the crow had heard my friend; it was looking right at him! My mind began to wander to inter-species relations and the notion that the way we communicate within the human race is not rooted within the earth. The essence that created life on earth and humans with sensory abilities did not have a purpose to work through people to create the Greek Alphabet. It was man's blind pursuit of progress that brought us to the curious state in which we find ourselves asking many questions without answers. Animals don't band together to create a standard by which they will interact with one-another; they use associative learning which attaches specific sensorial experiences to specific emotions. This is how they instinctively know to pursue or flee from a sound, smell, or sight. Written language works in a different way; not every word reflects upon our senses.
A word has no significance until we give it significance. To do this, the word must represent something that can be identified. Prejudiced words identify hate that is often unattached to the denotation of the word. The person on the receiving end of a hateful word like "nigger" or "faggot" will most likely feel offended because these words are historically violent. When a word is widely understood to be violent, institutions tend to prohibit utterance of the word. This policy proves to be unsuccessful: "As long as they remain bigoted, bigots will simply find other words... The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your vocabulary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say"(Rauch 504). Censorship is futile because language has the ability to adapt to its environment. New words are constantly being created in an attempt to explain every aspect of our lives; it is unfortunate that prejudiced words like "faggot" don't really identify anything but a verbal attack. Prejudice is a word that represents an idea. An idea like "prejudice" or "freedom" is not readily identifiable, and cannot be defined without referring to human interaction. We are ignorant to the fact that the words we create are only reflective of the human realm, and will never effectively describe the meaning of life.
There is no doubt in my mind that written language reduces violence and improves interactions between humans. I'm sure that everybody prefers verbal violence over physical violence. Without the ability to intricately express ourselves in a manner that everybody can understand, we might not be able to respectfully get through our disagreements. Also, we must thank language for its fruit of technology and government; without a proper way to describe our environment, we wouldn't have developed the terminology to invent science and law. But if we can step back from the thought that humans and our accomplishments are special, and come to see our bodies as a set of vital natural processes such as respiration and digestion, we can understand our existence as one of many inter-connected organisms of this planet. With the words we have created, we objectify our world in terms of how everything relates to our lives, and therefore lose the ability to see the earth as one living entity. We view trees as "timber," cows as "beef", plants as "crops" and wind as "energy." The average person can no longer appreciate the whisper of the wind, the chirping of birds, or the crashing of waves. The natural world has a language of its own, composed of a myriad of sensorial stimuli. Humans used to be in tune with this language, listening and responding to the voice of the land they lived on. Through written language, we now perceive ourselves as a superior species, worthy of organizing our planet for our benefit. This selfish attitude has brought Homo sapiens economic progress at the expense of a deteriorating planet. "Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses"(Abram 32). Once we learn to appreciate life, we can understand that the languages we have built cannot replace the language of the earth.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House, Inc., 1996.
Rauch, Jonathan. "In Defense of Prejudice." Reading Life. Ed. Inge Fink, Gabrielle Gautreaux. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2005. 499-508.
Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Reading Life. Ed. Inge Fink, Gabrielle Gautreaux. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2005. 515-519.
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