Where is your mind? Is it in your head? I mean, that’s where your brain is, and your brain helps you remember and plan and make judgments and solve problems. But you also remember and plan with phones and notes and calendars, and you make judgments and solve problems with all sorts of things. You know, when you think about it, the brain is really just a wet lump of fat and protein, no firmer than a blob of paneer. But the mind is huge. It’s an ever expanding organ of tissue and wood and stone and steel and people, because of communication.
A GIF depicting firmness of brain
Communication allows us to even make other people extensions of our minds. We can access their memories and perceptions and knowledge by simply asking: or not. I don’t need to learn how to fix a car and practice medicine and vulcanize rubber or remember everything. Other people are doing that for me, just as I do things for them. We are a species of individuals, that is also one big, interdependent, lumbering growth, a frantic blur of flesh and concrete, a ‘technosapien’ powered by imaginations and passions made real by a hallowed faculty we call ‘reason’.
And all these is possible just due to language. So lets go back to the beginning of language itself.
There is no definitive answer to this question and even experts disagree on this topic so lets pick the most famous theory that it begun around 2 million years ago i.e., in the age of homo erectus, they were social animals and they had the vocal apparatus of a gorilla.They couldn't have made all the sounds that we make.They would have had a range of sounds more like what a gorilla could make.Is that a big deal when it comes to language? Well, no, it isn't.There are many languages today that have less than twelve sounds,. Then not so much happened until 45,500 years ago when we started to paint, the first occurring is located in Indonesia. After looking at that painting i was wondering that even people before forty thousand could paint better that me and that to without any modern tools. But to form a proper language it still required ages , agricultural revolution around 20,000 years ago played an important in that due to agriculture we don't have to travel long distances and communication become more essential due to increasing sizes of communities. But for written language we have to wait more years and Ancient Egyptian was the first one. The first known complete sentence in Ancient Egyptian was recorded in roughly 2690 BCE, making it over 4700 years old.
Photo of Ancient Egyptian language
And after there was burst of language thousands of languages are now used across the world.
All the languages have different beginnings and due to that some languages have different sounds,they have different vocabularies,and they also have different structures -- very importantly, different structures. That begs the question:Does the language we speak shape the way we think?
Charlemagne,Roman emperor, said,"To have a second language is to have a second soul" --
strong statement that language crafts reality.
Recent studies done in regard to this question have shade some light on the topic like the case of Pirahã language in this community they have no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". So if they don't have a sense of numbers we can't expect them to think about Mathematically abstract ideas.
Another example is of the Aboriginal community in Australia also called as Kuuk Thaayorre don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything,I really mean everything.You would say something like,"Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg."In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could.
There are also really big differences in how people think about time. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left.When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body.What's the pattern?
East to west, right?So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all,it gets locked on the landscape.So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way,and if I'm facing this way,
then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way --very egocentric of me to have
the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape.It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time.
So learning new language gives you whole new perspective of the world and makes you think differently. Try to learn language that have different origins then yours like if you know any info-european language try to learn other than that.
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