The road we're walking
I have been spending my time trying to understand many languages with the eagerness of someone who firmly believes that deep within the language lie many of the answers to the fundamental questions of Philosophy. The question to be asked depends largely upon the one questioning him or herself, but the answer seems to come not from language itself but from its purpose: to bond with others.
If we consider how evolution has given animals the ability to communicate through chemistry (hormones and so forth) or noises (elephants using low frequency sounds) and even singing (whales, which have baffled scientist with their long hours of singing), we were giving a more specific power: words. It's not in vain that ancient cultures gave words so much power, and ingrained in our brains this still lives: neurolinguistics, which is the science that uses words to program the mind, is nothing but the evolution of the chanting of the first shamans in the African plains. They used words to scare away the evil spirits of illness and disease, to protect hunters in their long journeys, to invoke the powers of the gods living high above and deep in the belly of Mother Earth.
However, we are inclined to believe that all this "primitive" behavior was nothing but nonsense and we trust more in the discovering of science; we can blame this on the ancient Greek philosophers who forgot about this and turn words into a matter of reason and not a matter of the soul. Nonetheless, we now know for sure that words can be dangerous and they affect our lives deeply, which is the base of many self-help books found on the shelves of many libraries around the world.
We walk the road our language lays for us, how far we get depends mostly on the words we use. Even if we don't know the language, if we don't hear but listen, we can understand that all languages have one basic purpose and one common root: our own humanity. Myth as we learn in school is nothing but the reflection of the world created around us, we still do believe inside a myth, not to be understood as a lie, but to be considered as a reflection of the reality we build with our own language.
If we consider how evolution has given animals the ability to communicate through chemistry (hormones and so forth) or noises (elephants using low frequency sounds) and even singing (whales, which have baffled scientist with their long hours of singing), we were giving a more specific power: words. It's not in vain that ancient cultures gave words so much power, and ingrained in our brains this still lives: neurolinguistics, which is the science that uses words to program the mind, is nothing but the evolution of the chanting of the first shamans in the African plains. They used words to scare away the evil spirits of illness and disease, to protect hunters in their long journeys, to invoke the powers of the gods living high above and deep in the belly of Mother Earth.
However, we are inclined to believe that all this "primitive" behavior was nothing but nonsense and we trust more in the discovering of science; we can blame this on the ancient Greek philosophers who forgot about this and turn words into a matter of reason and not a matter of the soul. Nonetheless, we now know for sure that words can be dangerous and they affect our lives deeply, which is the base of many self-help books found on the shelves of many libraries around the world.
We walk the road our language lays for us, how far we get depends mostly on the words we use. Even if we don't know the language, if we don't hear but listen, we can understand that all languages have one basic purpose and one common root: our own humanity. Myth as we learn in school is nothing but the reflection of the world created around us, we still do believe inside a myth, not to be understood as a lie, but to be considered as a reflection of the reality we build with our own language.
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