Eversince I had attended a month long NLP course @ the feet of venerable NLP Guru , Jesuit Priest and Indo American ( IMV he is more Indian than many who are born, bred and brought up here) Dr. Richard Mchugh, I was interested in language constructs. My good friend and trainer Daniel Pacheco who is also into NLP ( he studied under maverick Richard Bandler) used to say that anythhng people say has 3 meanings. Stated, understood and hidden. And I would hasten to add most often we miss all 3 of them.
is a small book , written some 70 years ago. That wonderful book offers invaluable insight into how language affects human thought and conditions behaviour, and addresses the question of how
language should be sued to achieve cooperation and understanding than confrontation.
Ayapa, Mexico. But no matter how precious the cultural implications of keeping their language alive are, they are not going to speak to each other.”
Btw, Ayapaneco is one of many dozens of indigenous languages remaining in Mexico, many are on the verge of extinction. Regardless, linguists are still attempting to preserve the language despite the lack of communication between the last two fluent speakers, who no longer converse with
anyone regularly in their native tongue. When Segovia, 75, and Velazquez, 65, both die, their language will pass away with them.
Still, Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist, sums up their relationship succinctly: “They don’t have a lot in common.”
Senator Hayakawa’s main point is that, we need to pay focus on how we use the language, since it is language humans use in order to think, and since language has such an extraordinary power to influence others and ourselves.
Then when what happens when we cease to use a language. Do we stop thinking ? or how do we influence others ?
It is said that “By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts. These unique abilities of communicating through a native language clearly separate humans
from all animals.”
For instance, a famous African gray parrot in England named Toto can pronounce words so clearly that he sounds rather human. Like humans, birds can produce fluent, complex sounds. Infact I do remember during my childhood, my cousin had a myna, which could utter a few words.
One of the big ‘success’ stories in looking at the human-like qualities of non-human primates is a male bonobo chimpanzee known as Kanzi. Kanzi was born 28 October 1980, and began his long
journey to learn to ‘speak’ as a result of the training provided for his mother, Matata, via a ‘talking’ keyboard. Matata never did master the keyboard, but Kanzi did. Through many years of intense training and close social contact with humans, this remarkable animal attained the language abilities of an average two-year-old human. By age ten, he had a vocabulary (via the keyboard)
of some two hundred words. In fact, Kanzi was able to go beyond the mere parroting or ‘aping’ of humans; he actually could communicate his wants and needs, express feelings, and use tools.
One of the examples of Kanzi’s behavior is In an outing in the Georgia woods, Kanzi touched the symbols for “marshmallows” and “fire.” Susan Savage-Rumbaugh said in an interview that, “Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and
toasted the marshmallows on a stick.”
The biggest trajedy is while those animals make a sincere attempt in mastering the single most differentiating factor between them and humans ( language), we humans cease to communicate.
And aren’t we really happy that many others do talk in Tamil and Hindi ?
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