The Importance of Language

                        The Importance of Language

What does language mean to you? You might think that language is not that important to you. It is a development that has been taken for granted. As you read into the ideas of how language evolved and gain an understanding as to how far it has helped us to progress and how humanity mastered the use of language, your views will change. If language did not exist, we could not get complex ideas across. Cars, phones, electricity are all complex ideas that have developed as a result of language. Without it, these would not be possible. Phones have enabled humans to speak to others over distances. Language has made it possible to get an idea across in the dark. How would life be today without these discoveries and abilities?  

Life without these things that we see as necessities would make life more difficult in today’s world.  Humanity would have been forced to live a simple life similar to that of our early beings. We would not have the progression of medical discoveries to help us live longer lives, we would not have had discoveries to help us live comfortably and we definitely would not have been able to gain an understanding of the universe around us.  These developments would not exist because they came from ideas that would have been impossible to get across to lead to a successful end result.  Millions of years ago we did not have language. We had a communication system more like animals. There are many ideas about how language was developed and how we were able to understand it. We should be grateful that we have language in order to talk about these Ideas.  

There are two ideas that pop up when you talk about how human language came to be. One of these ideas are presented in the essay “From Hand to Mouth” by Michael C. Corballis, he believes that language was invented by humans just like the many developments humans have made over millions of years (47). A completely different idea is presented in “Language and Thought” by Susanne K. Langer, she believes that language was not invented but grew with us as we advanced and developed a need for expression (51). These two ideas are very different from one another but I tend to agree with both authors.

The reason for this is that language was always possible in humans. We have always had the ability to speak words. The concept of language has always surrounded us. Humans could make noise and grunt. We would use these to warn our families of danger. We would jump around when we were excited. After a while our minds grew and we found new actions and noises to communicate better. Eventually the idea of language came into thought. Humans wanted to get ideas out of their head and express them to their family and friends. Through the need for expression and the ability to make noises, we discovered that we could relate these noises to certain things and make the noise mean something. Connecting a sound to a meaning makes a word.  In the essay “Horton Heared a Who!” by Steven Pinker a Professor at Harvard University and an expert in linguistics, defines a word as “a memorized link between a sound and a meaning” (53). After the creation of words, we were able to express our own ideas. This is important to the human race because it helps us to continue to advance and sets us apart from many other species.