OT: What would you do...?

[Arkcon]

To question #1, I dunno, human civilizations were very isolated when formal agriculture allowed the first villages to form. Example, technology found in villages in the Tigris valley was more advanced, than villages found in Turkey that were settled later. So its plausable (to me anyway) why languages are so different.

Question #2, well that's just the Hellen Keller story isn't it. Some glimmer of insight has to occur in the human mind after lots of pattern repetition.

As an aside on point #2, I remember a children's book, and the topic of intelligence of all humans was used to describe a bell curve. Thing was, the bell curve was skewed. Slightly more people fall under the "E=mc^2" heading than fall under the "2+2=5" heading. And I've always wondered if that was true, and why. Maybe the sample is biased, we don't count the really "stupid" because we label that "learning disability" and count it out. Or maybe there are more smart than dumb people. That is, pretty much the definition of human -- not the strongest, or fastest, but finding patterns and making inferences is what we all are designed to do, its what we all want to do, deep down inside.

Consider that the next time someone ticks you off because they did something dumb.

[geoschmo]

AT, you are under the misconception that language is required for understanding. It is not. You don't have to define something in terms of language to be able to understand it. The story of Helen Keller and every other person in that situation proves that.

The human mind is perfectly capable of observing, analyzing, processing, and remembering the environment around us without any concept of language. Each mind will process the information available to it in a different way. There might be similarities in the manner in which we percieve things which are caused by biological factors, but much of it would probably be totally unique to the individual. But what language is neccesary for is communication. Without some common frame of referance, language, we have no way of communicating our observations to each other.

Helen could touch and smell, and she could feel vibrations. She could tell the difference between her mother, her father and a dog. She didn't conceptualize them in those terms, but she had a concept of self identity. She was aware these other people were different from her, and different from each other. She knew what objects in her world were food, and which were water. She even had a rudimentary verbal communication. It was all unintelligable grunts from her families point of view, but there were subtle differences in tone and inflection that had meaning for Helen. The breakthrough for Helen was when her teacher was able to bridge the gap, to make her understand that the hand gestures she was making for Helen were representative of the physical objects. That is the basis of language, using words to represent something tangible, without having to see, or touch in Helens case, the object itself. That was when she started communicating in a meaningful way.

It doesn't mean she didn't have any concept of the world around her before that. She was just incapable of sharing that concept with anyone else.

[NullAshton]

I think Helen Keller wrote a book one day.

[Arkcon]

NullAshton said:
"I think Helen Keller wrote a book one day."

She accomplished much more than that. For a meagre synopsis, check out this {Wikipedia link}