Could you imagine how would it be like if we did not have languages?

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I’m pretty sure you can find a lot of research papers about the effects of languages on the Internet. Just try googling it. However, this question has come to my mind years ago when I read a book which now I don’t remember the name (it’s from a day publisher). But instead of telling you the content of the book (which I also barely remember), I would like to demonstrate the experience of losing languages to you so you can see what would happen.

Imagine that while you’re reading this post, you suddenly lost all of the abilities about languages. Hmm, maybe that’s too difficult. Let’s start over with reading then. You suddenly lost the ability of reading, so these texts would be like random characters for you and you have no idea what they mean. You might have thought “Why can’t I read these text?”. You were shocked and want to text someone about this trouble. Just before you started typing, you realized that you couldn’t compose a word because you have no clue what these characters are. You could not even draw a word in your head. And If you think this totally sucks, suddenly, you lost all of the abilities of languages. Now, this is the real deal. Can you see? You could not think “What happened?” or “What am I going to do now?” or even an F-word because you didn’t know any of those sentences, words or characters. Actually, you could not think of anything that is based on languages, which is the fundamental of almost anything in your brain. So in conclusion, you could not think!

At this point, someone may object to the above conclusion. There must be something we can think of without languages, right!? Yes, There are. You can still think of feelings like hot, cold, hungry, angry and so on. And you also can imagine things as pictures in your head. But can you see what’s missing here? There is no longer rational thinking. And that would bring humanity into a dark age, an age that humans are just another kind of monkeys.

So, this brings us two important questions. First, how could we create a language at the first place? It must have been incredibly difficult back in the day that humans had no languages at all. Can you imagine the difficulty of creating a word from nothing? Second, Are we stuck in our own languages? As the success of modern languages, are we stopping developing more effective languages? And if you ask “Is there any other language that is more effective than the current ones?”. Honestly, I don’t know. But have you ever experience a phenomenon where your intuition is more accurate and faster than your thought? Or sometimes that you feel like the language itself is slowing you down from thinking. I think the answer to the first question will open up the door for creating the new and more effective language. But creating a better language may be even harder than creating a language from nothing.

Before I finish this post, I have a little advice for you who are finishing reading this. If getting rid of the language eliminates the rational thinking, so what is the opposite side of that process? The answer is learning new languages. In other words, you will have better rational thinking from learning other different languages. And I didn’t mean just the spoken languages. Nobody is going to stop you from learning a sign language, body language, or even a programming language (I really recommend the last one).

So, that’s it. What do you think?