Language: The Magic and Bane of Human Relationships

(or why TCP/IP is better than English)

Nothing really exists apart from language. Language creates the world - Witgenstien

Think about it. That large rectangular piece of wood barring entrance to this place was created by the word "door". Without language, it would have remained some part of a forest! How come we have Portuguese words for things like shoes, tables and things? These things were "brought into our world" by language! I will not go as far as Witgenstien, but language does indeed play a more crucial and central role in human affairs than often given credit for.

Human Language

Consider the basic human ability of abstraction. It is now quite fashionable, thanks to object oriented technology. It is fundamentally the ability to generalise a set of individual entities (or indeed events) into a class. It appears quite harmless in this regard.

Abstraction

But, consider the word "bird". For purposes of this example, lets limit ourselves to just one meaning of that word - the flying kind! It is an abstraction of a winged animal that flies, has feathers, a tail, a beak etc. Now, if you are an alien, and want to find out how big a bird is, the answer you would get would depend on the particular part of the world you happen to have visited. Indeed, even the particular part of a country! Or maybe even the particular person you met!! For me a bird is somewhat the size of my open palm. For you, it maybe as big as a crow. To someone from a part of Africa where birds like the albatross are common, it would be quite a bit larger.

A door for an Eskimo would also be quite different in meaning and purpose than to us. Incidentally, they are supposed to have some huge number of words for "snow". Well, we have many words for "rain" don't we?

Does all this matter? Well, what if the question was to ascertain if a bird could get into this room that had a small window - it could be a life and death matter! But, we survive! How? How do two people, who don't even agree on something as simple as what a bird is, manage to have daily conversations without much problem? This, is the magic of human language.

To take an analogy, from the world of IT, in order to "inter-operate" properly, we would first have to set up a committee of zoology experts to hammer out a standard meaning for the word "bird", publish it as an RFC in order to democratise its adoption, wait for any objections and repeat the cycle until we made everyone happy!

This is not to say that human abstraction is perfect. Ever so often, especially with foreigners (or those from other cultures) we experience that mismatch that comes from having two different ontological structures. One of my favourite examples is "rain". To a typical Britisher, there is absolutely no problem of walking in the rain without an umbrella. S/he is referring to "British rain"! (which we may call by some name closer to "drizzle").