Enhanced look at Language

The world is round and it bears billions of people separated by the lines imposed by man and by
waters that run between them. The billions of people around the world have made countries
their own and have separated themselves from one another and let divisions be made. The separated countries have different languages that are part of those countries. for example in India the people speak hindi, well thats the official language, there is a lot more languages that go around for each and every state of india but for the United States of America the language is english and in Spain it is spanish. So evidently given the examples you see different countries have different languages. However if countries could all speak a language there is a sense of unity despite the diversity. We has the human race all come together to speak a single global language that when aliens come on earth they know yeah thats their language. if aliens come one earth now, they go back confused as hell, trying to decipher all the languages, for all we know, they wouldn't even know its different languages. Under the umbrella of a single unified language, we the human race can come together and set aside our differences, we can appreciate one another, communicate to another and defiantly travel to other places without having to worry about speaking an entirely new language. A unified languages brings about simplicity and irons out all the wrinkles on the road. If humans spoke on language we wouldn't need the apps on the app store designed to make translations easy and faster and away with all the extra language classes and definitely no more human translators to translate anything during business conferences. In such cases diverse language although it would look good on earths resume, tends to be a barrier that obstructs convenience. We would gain an identity as a global race and sense of togetherness in how we interact with one another. However with major possible drawback is that lost sense of nationalism, the language that a country speaks is its pride and joy. That language is life to that country, it is the way they talk and communicate with one another. The implementation of a unified language would mean that countries would loose that sense of nationalism, pride and joy. It would mean countries to loose their language and earth loosing a sense of diversity. However much of a headache translation is, sometimes learning new languages seem to be an exciting feat and to some learn more languages is a content life. Therefore unified languages would indeed take tolls on certain aspects of nationalism and pride for an individual nation but would seek to bering the world as a whole, a world where people can communicate without barriers, one where they can feel and understand each other.

“The Miracle Worker” was a movie about Hellen Keller a girl who is blind and deaf and her teacher’s experience in teaching her language to come to know the world around her better. Watching Hellen Keller in the movie "The Miracle Worker" urged me to volunteer at the Kerala Blind School Society. The experience was defiantly different than that of everyday. The blind really use their other senses such as touch, sound and smell as ways of knowing whats around them. Reading brail and trying to read and understand what was said was really hard but the blind where able to read them like how we read letters and they were able to read sentences together making their reading quite fluent. They were even climbing trees based on their sense of touch and it was massively impressive how much you could actually do with touch. Another great aspect of the day was blind cricket where we would have to hit the ball with a bat based on the sound the b

all makes while rolling. Giving it a shot, the realisation came upon me that it was indeed a really hard challenge. Assessing Hellen Keller after this experience brought about the thought of the difficulty of life in her perspective. Language as a way of knowing the world around us became truly essential, as we humans have named object around us, it is essential to know them to, to understand the relation between an object and its word. Hellen found this difficult because she was deaf and blind which makes her absent to two fifth of her senses. Learning language for Hellen was an understanding that there was a whole world of things that existed around her, that there was a whole world a possibilities that engulfed her and learning language was a way that she could have possibly communicated to her parents through the use of sign language. Blind people generally use sound to understand the object as a name and it using that sound that they understand they put two an two together to make sense of things. Hellen on the other hand who was deaf and blind had to use the medium of sign language to understand that the object meant something and that it had a name, that the object stand for a thing. She had to use the medium of language to put the idea of an object together with a name to make sense of things. However what Hellen also demonstrated was that language although a primary way for us fully capable humans to communicate, was not the only way to communicate and there were other ways of conveying ideas such as sign language. Language as a way of know differs for different types of people as back in the time of cave men and women, language was probably not a way of knowing like it is today. Language is an essential way to know the world around us but perhaps in not the only way to know things around us. 

Progressional Development of Language

The topic of language as a means of communication and conveying ideas, has led to the little faces that people send to one another in order to covey not only their message but their feelings. The Japanese little faces called "emoji" that means "picture character" is in ways an expansion of human language. The small fragrant things such as the feelings and expressions at the time when you are texting or messaging are not truly expressed in words and can be the hardest to say but perhaps expressing them in the form of little faces could convey the idea or the feeling far better. Expressing words inform of emojis are an expansion of the horizon for communication through the medium of language and this expansion is resulted in positive interactions with people to understanding one another far better. With the use of these little faces, one is able to say something and express the feeling she is feeling wether it be angry, happy, sad or sahappy and the receiver can respond accordingly taking into account the feelings. The conversation becomes more lively and realistic as there is an interaction that conveys both ideas and feelings, which has indeed made these "picture characters" very useful and fun to use.

As seen in the video, the small little faces have changed from being an new page to a completed book. The whole set of emojis has brought about a change in the brains of mankind formulating a sense of recognition, understanding and is a proof of the diversity of language. The human brain is starting to recognise the little faces more easily causing us to understand them better and add it to our daily vocabulary

There is a progress in terms of education and the gaining knowledge. In relation to the context of language there has been of development in the way we sent text which has gone from just texts to emojis and now to bigger version of emojis known as stickers. Language is therefore a development and is an open discussion, which kind of explains why there are new generation messed up words that enter the dictionary every now and then like "selfie" and "twerk" which are now actually officially words on the the dictionary and "selfie" was the word of the year in the year 2013. But the progress of refining language could only result in an positive out come, as the more words we have knowledge of the more words we can use to describe something or perhaps find different ways to explain something on an english essay which is always crucial. Language therefore is indulging in a constant process of progression where it develops and enhances itself for the people of the generations to perfectly express themselves and their feelings and  therefore languages has to constantly adapt the needs of the people. Language is never seen to however indulge in a process of regression, the reason being language is a widely needed tool in order to express one self and taking away words to communicate would require us to resort to sign language which is rather backward, time consuming and require a lot of time and effort to get used to not to mention that it is highly inconvenient; but if there is ever a positive to that at least the deaf can feel at home. All jokes aside the benefit of language is gained only when it progresses and amends to the needs of the people interns of conveying ideas and expressing feelings.

Language is a universal way of conveying and expressing ideas and feelings. Although a lot of people  might have different languages, people still use a medium to convey ideas and feelings. We as human beings are social animals and the urge to convey thoughts, ideas and express our feelings tends to be a universal desire, therefore making language more universal method. Language however as discussed before is a progressively changing aspect that amends to our needs of expression. Language   doesn't drastically change over time, unless Germany won the war and we would all be speaking german the next day, but that aside language has build a strong foundation and any new word would be something that is culturally new or is a new aspect of life. Taking for example the new word that has entered the dictionary in the year 2013; the word "harlem shake" was a dance that dominated the internet and brought about a new cultural aspect to our global world. The way to express this dace was by calling it "harlem shake" and was a way of conveying the thought of the dance to another person. In such way language has developed to help convey certain ideas to other people; analogously what the development of language revels to us is that there a development in cultural and global aspects of mankind that we require new words to describe them in order to covey that thought to someone else. What development in language comments on the human race is their development, evolution and global growth. This would intern language to further develop to amend to our needs of expressing our selfs.

Theories of Language Development

There are some famous theories that discusses the development of language in little children. Some different perspectives of the same development of languages seems to contradict each other and this is truly interesting as the one unified thing such as languages is seemed to be developed by people in different ways. For instance B.F. Skinner believes that language is developed through positive reinforcement of language, that is when a baby babbles 'mama', the mother smiles therefore re-enforcing the child's learning. But on the other hand Noam Chomsky disagreed suggesting that children are born with an innate language acquisition device congenital understanding of deep structure of language which is its grammar. The idea of positive affirmation and re-enforcement the development of language defiantly stands true as children understand simple things such as smile and therefore get a lot of the simple language. Whereas children are unlikely to be born with such innate language acquisition device, as such thing would perhaps be to complex for the baby. Children however start to pick up most of the grammar that they learn and the words that they lear by listening. That is the key to a child's development in language. An example of this would be my cousin who as he grew never spoke a word but at the age of two or three, he was sitting with my dad and said "Look at how beautiful the roses are", now that suggests that he was always listens and putting two and two together in his mind and understanding the little wonders around him. He never spoke until that stage and most of us thought he couldn't speak but when he did speak, he spoke a whole sentence which threw us all off. Well both Skinner's theory of positive reinforcement seems to stand false as he never spoke till then but on the other hand Chomsky theory of inherit understanding of the grammar could possibly seem true at that point. But the idea of children understanding and learning through listening is also important and significant. This explains why children generally
learn to speak the mother tongue fairly well but might have problems reading and writing. This is because parents might speak the mother tongue at home which makes the kids understand and comprehend by listening and seeing. Kids are able to assume, guess and put things together to understand the language and if it is correct then parents positively re-enforce the idea. So therefore perhaps both of the theories come together to understand the development of language in children but essentially the idea of listen and understanding is also a major aspect of the development of language in children.

The idea of thought before speech or speech before thought has essentially become a great topic for debate, however it only seems logical to think before you speak. Language in thought is essential to speak. There would be no understanding if there was no language in thought. Everyone thinks in a certain language be it english, arabic, french or Canadian english. If you take away that language the thought seems impossible for language is a medium through which thought can take place. If there is no language there can possibly be no thought. The idea of thinking without language seems impossible but however that sparks the debate on how deaf people think or how babies think. The human brain tends to process information through the use of the five senses and therefore a babies thinks in the aspect that they are born with which is the eyes. There is a sense of visual understanding and visual thought in young babies and in the deaf even in grown humans when describing something abstract such as peace or love the picture of a dove or a heart pops to mind. Also for someone who is blind and deaf like Hellen Keller, when she was presented food in the movie "The Miracle Worker", there was a sense of recognition with that food. She might not have necessarily know what the name of the food was, but she recognised the food by smell. Hence there was a recognition, therefore for people who know language thinking using language as a medium seems essential but even people without the knowledge of language have some sense of recognition through medium of the five senses.

Going back to the theory of children's having the ability to listen and understand by putting things together explains why during the holophrastic stage, the child speaks sentences using single words. This is probably because of the child's association of that word with an action. The child has understood that the word means a certain action and therefore speaks sentences in single words. Also when the child says such single words such as 'more' and the parent gives more of something, through the idea of positive re-enforcement, the child then tends to say 'more' to get more of something. The child has associated the word with the action and this association in the mind of the child has brought about a sense of understanding for the word and it's action and causes the child to say the single word to get the output. If the child is given more of something by saying 'more', why would the child need to say 'can i please have more?', if the result is the same. Obviously it is nicer to ask the the latter way but the child isn't processing a lot of the language at such a stage and is taking baby steps into the realms of language.