Language

“You just don’t understand me!!”

 

The high-rise skyscrapers, the huge supercomputers, the swiftest Concorde are the first few technological marvels achieved by mankind that come to my mind. But what set us off in this direction, drawing a sharp line between humans and all other animals? 

Experts often say it’s the invention of language that gave us the edge. Our ability to communicate with each other using the spoken language allowed us to convey information in a near-perfect syntax that is difficult to misunderstand, and thus helped us build teams, raise empires and colonise Earth like never before. Research is still going on in order to establish if languages had a common origin or a handful of them originated separately at different times and in different places. I support the latter view because given a head full of intelligence, imagination and the desire to share the excitement, inventing a language is the most natural thing to do.

Thousands of years ago, there was a little honeybee who danced for both pride and joy at having found some nectar, and to attract the attention of the other members of his hive who had previously never really thought much of him. There was also a certain single crab who was waving his claws, desperately trying to attract the attention of the pretty females who had their noses high up in the air (only figuratively), pretending to look at the leaping whales in the distance as more and more whales joined in the action. Far, far away there was a fluffy white rabbit with red eyes who shuddered at the noises a female gorilla was making to pacify her husband who was doing nothing but sticking out his tongue, and the rabbit was so terribly concerned about her sisters that she repeatedly jumped on her hind legs to make loud tapping sounds that would scare her sisters away from that place. 

This happened all the time. And the little rabbits slowly learnt to tap their feet to warn all the others of possible danger. However, there was one particular rabbit called Miffy who was very naughty, or so they said, because she used to play pranks on all the other rabbits by tapping her feet even when there was no danger and thus sending them off scurrying frantically. They said she enjoyed it and that she had a hearty laugh each time she did that. Some even said that she was mean, that she misused the tapping to send off other rabbits whenever she found reserves of lush green food that she did not want to share with anybody else. 

Little did anyone realise that Miffy was grossly misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, as a child, Miffy used to be a shy little rabbit lost in her own world. Busy building her own castles in the air, she never pretty much looked around to see what the other rabbits were up to. While the other rabbits learnt about the tapping, Miffy was busy chewing a particularly juicy patch. However, Miffy was an obedient child and always ran away from somewhere if her mother bid her to (by giving her a push). She never knew what they were running from but she could see the contagious fear in their eyes; she had never paid enough attention to realise that it was mostly the tapping that was followed by the scurrying. In fact, she did not know how the tapping sounded, for even though there were certain times when she heard them, she never remembered them, always diluting the memory with those of other jungle sounds.

Miffy wasn’t dumb, if that is what you might be thinking. She was pretty intelligent, curious and creative, but her energy was directed towards other things- those which most other rabbits found uninteresting. 

One cloudy day, Miffy was playing about in the dust under the banyan tree all by herself when quite accidentally, she discovered that she could make a peculiar sound by tapping her hind legs. She enjoyed it immensely. To add to her amusement, all the rabbits nearby scurried away in fear, as if there was some danger! So funny, she thought, and she used this newly learnt technique to scare the others whenever she wanted a little laugh.

Poor Miffy! She never understood why some of them disliked her so much!

Well, if Miffy was a human, someone could have just spoken to her but Alas! Anyway, that was a little story just to amuse you. Of course it’s not irrelevant, and you know that too. 

So coming back to our discussion, I want to ask you, how many languages do you know? If my alter ego was reading this article, she would have thought inside her mind: “English (fluently), Hindi (fluently), Bengali (fluently), Telugu (poorly), French (poorly), C++ (fluently)”, just as she had entered them in a certain website.

Is it, then, that a person who does not know any of these languages can’t communicate with me? Of course he can! Well, he could draw pictures (you must have surely played Pictionary sometime!), or he could make gestures with his hands (hope he knows more than one way of saying it when he wants me to go away :P ), or he could make expressions on his face, and, if he’s inventive, he could perhaps do much more...

Didn’t you ever feel ‘spooky’ when a friend of yours told you EXACTLY what was on your mind? Haven’t you ever had a conversation with a BSNL mobile number, where the signals suck so bad that most of the time you are just guessing what the other person is saying, and yet talk for an hour? And don’t you see movies where two humans of opposite genders bounce photons off each other’s retina and immediately know what to do next?

That’s some communication.

And theses definitely ARE languages.

Some Languages are taught in school. Some are instinctive. The rest are learnt by observation. There is no room for ambiguity in C++ (or is there?), few in the spoken languages taught in school (we call it subtlety and we love it), but the rest abound in ambiguity due to lack of any kind of standardisation and a general assumption that a child will ‘learn them naturally’. And therein lies its beauty, and therein lies its flaws.

The first step towards learning a language is association. You associate a certain representation with an object/idea. That representation could be a word, gesture, etc unique to that object/idea. (Can we give EVERYTHING a name? Scientists routinely christen new bacteria, the IUPAC has its own rules of nomenclature, but can you name a new ‘feeling’? It will most probably be named after you...lol). The kind of ‘association’ we are talking about is highly statistical. The more number of times you see two things happening at the same time, the more you establish a relationship between them inside your mind. In school, you teacher says ‘apple’ and shows you the picture of an apple. 

On somewhat similar lines, people establish causal relationships between various happenings. Characters, motives, etc are literally read off people by their appearance and behaviour. But these kinds of languages can be easily misunderstood.

And this is what bothers me at the moment.

Some people are very good at these unspoken languages. Especially those who are less mathematical (well, statistics say so). These are the people who are observant. I’ll in fact classify these people into two groups: one, who can read people’s moods/feelings and two, who can read people’s background/motives. Well, they have bothered to observe boring people, they deserve the cookies.

I’ll take the license to set off another tangent now...

Why do we standardise things? We want less chaos, less ambiguity. The Standard International Conference on Weights and Measures happened because we wanted to mean the same things when talking about quantities. The IUPAC met so that from hence two chemists will know exactly which chemical they are talking about.

Feynman, if I remember right, was very fond of using symbols of his own invention in Trigonometry. He sure provided a key for the reader but he soon realised that people in general couldn’t appreciate his work because they had a hard time reading it. They had learnt in their school to represent sine as sin, cosine as cos, not as some weird symbols. Feynman was in fact asking them to learn a new language before reading his book! He was, however, an intelligent fellow, and soon realised the merits of following a uniform language.

In the mean time, in a small town far away, around midnight, the police arrested a prostitute who was waiting in a dark alley in a red-light area. The girl vehemently claimed that she wasn’t one, but then, everybody does that on getting arrested, isn’t it? However, does waiting in a dark alley in a red-light area at midnight amount to prostitution? In the language the policeman has learnt, certainly yes. 

Now we have in the spotlight, a saga of tragedies that arise whenever the people involved do not speak the same language. This happens every day, isn’t it?

Let’s have a countdown. Top five.

5. Person who drinks/smokes/does drugs is definitely bad, without a second thought.

4. The girl wearing short dresses is surely trying to attract the attention of the guys, and she would welcome that attention. 

3. A person is ignoring another person because he/she is not interested in that person anymore.

2. That person who is wearing rich clothes and not mingling with the crowd must be very high-headed.

1. One person just behaves sweetly to another person from the opposite gender, and ...do I need to mention more?

0. (Sorry for cheating, I just had to add this point.) This person who doesn’t do things in the normal way is one heck of a rebel! Or a wannabe weirdo...

Although the above might be true in most cases, it can never be 100% deterministic. So as long as there is a tiny bit of probability of non-convention, why be prejudiced? ‘Prejudice’ is a wrong word here. I mean, of course, it is prejudice but it sounds too negative for its meaning in this context. Suppose you start investing with various people, over time you’ll understand which kind of people to trust and which kind not to. So this is some kind of knowledge gained based on statistical associations, on the basis of which you judge people/situations. It is also called ‘experience’. And it is very, very necessary. How else will you learn?

Isn’t it funny that in the above sentence I have, kind of, equated ‘prejudice’ and ‘experience’?

Trusting experience is good but one should always be ready to face exceptions.

Leaving this vagueness hanging about like that, maybe I’ll end this article now, on a personal note. I’m sleepy, anyway. I just hope you aren’t dozing off on your keyboard yet.

It goes without telling that I have written this article because I feel that I have been misunderstood and I have misunderstood the society all along. As the unspoken language of the society dawns on me, I am reluctant to accept it. It’s as if by the way you dress, the way you talk and the way you behave, you are telling something to the people around you- it’s a language. It’s never a reflection of who you are, really. It’s rather, what you want to tell others about yourself. If you want to tell people, “Hey, I’m rich!” you’ll wear fine clothes or casually talk about certain expensive jewellery, or you want to tell them, “Look, I’ve got really hot legs!” you’ll wear short clothes. It’s unlikely that you felt like doing it just like that, or perhaps your dress made you feel like some childhood hero of yours, or  they were gifted to you by someone special and you were just remembering them, though all of this is probable, and I sympathise with you if this is the case.(That doesn't mean I wouldn't wear short dresses to show off. It just means that it's not always the reason.)

At least, this solves an old puzzle for me: Why Sonia Gandhi wears sari when she has a figure good enough for jeans and she would look much better in them.

I feel I am beginning to understand this kind of language a little too late (I’m 20 now!!), and I have no idea that’s good or bad. I’m just feeling a little unsettled. I’m realising how big a role it can play: WHAT I PORTRAY. And with all my heart, I really dislike this language. It has caused people to have a lot of false expectations from me, and consequently the other way round. (Who is to blame: they, who misunderstood?  Or me, who 'told' things I never meant to?)

But I guess, even if I decide not to speak this language, it is good to learn it since majority of the people DO speak this language. And it’s a kind of practical knowledge and I might need to use it sometimes. I can just take consolation in the fact that I need not be the person I show people I am.

However, I want to continue exploring possibilities and interpretations but I am not sure if it will have very pleasant consequences, and also if it will be a foolish thing to do or a really noble one.

Well, who knows?