More than Words

 More than Words

For as long as I can remember I’ve been taught that words can never harm me. And this, for the most part, has proven to be true. Occasionally I’ve made use of words that are able to result or harm, but that I usually brought upon myself. Words also allow us speech, the combination of the two, words and speech, have resulted in everything we hold dear. Being able to speak and then being permitted to speak is what has afforded us our freedoms and rights. Simple really.

It was while pondering the extreme power of words one day when I was hit by a sledgehammer. If words can so seriously effect our place in the world just imagine how it may have effected our very WAY of thinking.

I’m going to assume that like myself everyone thinks in words/language cos if not I’m way crazier than I’ve accepted myself to be. This led me to thinking that if we’re restricted in our vocabulary we’d also be restricted in what we could imagine. And our imagination being the seeding ground of all we discover, invent and are able to apply in the form of art , literature and architecture.

I lost a bit of track about here and editing will be required.

Back to basics, simple words can be extremely important, for example: top; this word demands that there be a bottom, a middle an underneath, perhaps an infinite number of behinds arounds and besides. But I digress, what I’m trying to get at is this, if a culture has no way of recording words we cannot expand our vocabulary and if that ability is missing so is all, or at least, most of the functions I mentioned earlier. A small example would be: up; he’s up the tree, if ones vocabulary is lacking it becomes difficult to explain where exactly up the tree he is, is he, half way up, at the top or at any position between the bottom or the top. In some African languages one would be at the top or under the tree, not enough info there.
So how does one then begin to invent things requiring esoteric thought, to invent the wheel one needs to understand rolling, to invent the aqueduct one needs to have an idea of how to express gravity without even knowing what gravity is (it had yet to be described), to design any form of architecture one needs to be able to describe load spreading and foundations. Ouch that has got to be difficult without all the words I just used to describe describing stuff.
Once it becomes unnecessary to struggle with all that describing, the mind will relax in its need to fine tune itself and settle with the necessities for survival. This is the beginning of my hypothesis for the developmental differences between the sub Saharan African brain and that of all the tribes that went out of Africa. The difficulties found in cold climates and high altitudes forced the brain to get out of its comfort zone and come up with solutions and this can only be achieved with firstly words then the expansion of vocabulary (this being made possible by the invention of recording words, writing) leading to entirely different ways of thinking causing the brain itself to evolve and become more esoteric/abstract.

This is what I believe led to the difference between the haves and the have nots. (So to speak)
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