Hooray words!

November 5, 2006 in books, geekiness, images, links, other blogs, science, thought

Babel’s Dawn has a post from last week about Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word, which I read over the summer and absolutely loved.

[...] Ostler’s book (which makes for great reading on its own terms) provides much material for thought in connection with this blog. He introduces what he calls language dynamics,

“how language, in all its evolving variety, organizes not just the human mind but also the large groups of human minds that constitute themselves into societies, which communicate and interact, as well as think and act.” (p. 559)

This is a particularly important idea on a blog that urges a fundamental relationship between joint attention and speech. Our basic model is not Rodin’s thinker manipulating logical symbols in his head, but the interaction of speakers, listeners, and their topics.

[...] Ostler’s critical thesis is that “a language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community” (p. 556). I think I want to add that to the list of this blog’s central ideas, along with the notion that the function of language is to enable joint attention, and that verbal interchanges pilot attention.

I certainly agree that in the study of the origin of language, the social aspect of language simply cannot be ignored. In that vein, I think that Ostler’s book gives some really compelling evidence for the position that language fundamentally isn’t so much about one person commanding another as it is about one person being able to somehow share what’s going on in their head. It’s a way of sharing mental states so that individual intelligent organisms can form an intelligent, social whole. Languages allow groups to not only coordinate their physical activities but also to coordinate the way they look at the world, so that they can share a conceptual vocabulary without all having the same physical brain.