Language vs. Thought

A question that came up in class one day was what comes first, a thought or a language? Can you have a thought without knowing a language? I definitely believe that yes, you can have a thought without knowing a languge. A child thinks before they can speak a language, although they also have understanding of a language before they can speak it. However, I think that you can have thoughts in the form of pictures rather than with words, you percieve things from the moment you are born, and from that time on, you must therefore have thoughts of the things you percieve. Though it may be difficult to convey your thought without a language, I don't think you need the language to have the thought. Certainly though, a language makes it easier to convey your thoughts to other people even though language can easily be misunderstood.
A thought must have come first because someone had to think up the very first language, even if it was pictures drawn on a cave, it was still a language. And from there, the languages grew and became the words that I am using right now. Language is a very useful tool though it is still easily misunderstood and there are many different forms of language and the definition of a language is not a sure thing, it is still a useful tool which resulted from a thought.


Now I'm not even sure if this made any scence to anyone other than me..But I hope so!

Selective Mutism

I had never heard of this before, and I found it very interesting! This clip is about selective mutism, where a child can speak at home perfectly fine but will not under any circumstances speak in public. Language can be a very confusing matter!

Selective Mutism

Language

If your language is confused, your intellect, if not tour whole character, will most certainly correspond.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1863-1944

I must agree with this quote, as I believe that language can, at times, be a barrier for learning. Language is very easily misunderstood which therefore causes issues. When people are speaking a certain language and can understand each other of course it is a great was to accumulate knowledge, however, there are many problems with gaining knowledge through the language. As we know, not everyone all over the world speaks the same language which means that we cannot all understand what each other are saying. When this occurs, people can try to interpret what the other is saying and confuse their words and then pass on false knowledge. This continues to get passed on and therefore people are not gaining any true justified knowledge, even though they may believe it is true. When groups cannot understand one another because of a language barrier, their whole groups become confused and their characters can change because of this "knowledge" they accumulated. Also, when people talk and act like they have knowledge it can get in the way of people observing nature, and everything around them, and people stop learning things naturally, rather they simply wait for someone to teach them new "knowledge". Language can also cause many other problems and therefore is a barrier to learning true knowledge at times, however that it not to say that it is not sometimes a great way to accumulate knowledge. All things considered, I would certainly have to agree with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

The Five Love Languages

Who knew there were so many languages in the world??