Language in thoughtless Inaction:

Language  in thoughtless Inaction:

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.
S.I. Hayakawa’s  classic book “ Language in thought and action” just reinforced that belief.  It
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.

A few days back  TIME magazine published an interesting  article  two  well meaning ladies who live
in  Mexico.  It  was reported , “ The survival of an endangered language may depend on two people --
and all they want to do is ignore each other. Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velazquez, the last speakers of a language called Ayapaneco, live less than half a mile away from each other in 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.”

The Guardian notes that, “It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.”

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.”

The animal that comes closest to producing anything that even vaguely resembles human speech is not another primate, but rather a bird.

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 tragedy  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.

For example  Jaylalitha and  Karunanidhi ?  Or  Mulaym Singh and Mayawati ? 
 And aren’t we really happy that  many others do  talk in Tamil and Hindi ?