Language is the strongest tool to put forth your
thoughts and I feel it does reveal a lot about the speaker. In intra-language
communication, when one has exact words to express our thought, the body
language radically changes & so does the confidence level. It is seen
people with a command on a language, on vocabulary and delivery, are not only
able to speak better but also comprehend better because they have a language to
assist their thoughts.
Language does shape the way we see the world, the
way we think. So not only it helps in expressing our thoughts, it many a times
constraints them too. This is where we need to observe people who are
bilingual/ multilingual. When speaking of inter-language interaction, people
who speak more than one language can generally articulate better. This might be
because they have more words and tones for expression. For example, my Nepali
friend uses different words for exclaiming in different situation like “achu” on touching something too hot, “attu” when she’s too cold. In Hindi
belt, generally the expression is “ahh”
for exclaiming. Using such words also form the part of the language you speak.
One might conclude, Nepalese is more expressive than Hindi, and so might be the
people. Japanese speaker would be more sound oriented, English speaker more
tone oriented.
If we compare the use of language to say a working
of a computer, language requires real time mapping between words and meanings.
It’s like you hear a sentence, nerves take it to the brain, then looks for
meaning of the word, then the formulation of sentence, tries to draw inference
from its stored knowledge and then accordingly creates a picture in the mind.
The process is too quick and shows the structure of the mind. People who know
more than one language have thus a larger data to retrieve information and to
picture it.
Language does tell us a lot about the mechanism of
mind and seen that our ability to think both emotionally and logically is very
much dependent on the kind of language we use.
There is no specific domain for the
expression of language. Two person can speak the very same expression with a
much distinct representation. The way one expresses the thought, often reveals
the way, s/he is thinking. Even the same sentence spoken by a person can
actually differ in the way it is expressed. However, at times, we often find
some people to be over-expressive and certain people to be monotonous. This can
be justified by taking his or her attitude towards the subject under
conversation. This leads us to visualize language as the complex mixture of
thinking and emotions. Thus considering all the three major functions viz.
cognition, feeling and volition. This provides the tick to checkpoint for a way
to understand, how a mind is structured.
If one inquiries into the reading
habits of a person, one finds, a certain type of people, reads the sentence and
then hear it and thereby recognize the meaning. Another set of faster reader,
reads the sentence in mind and then captures the meaning of the sentence. But,
there also exist a much faster reader, who out of vision of looking at the sentence
phrases, recognizes its meaning. This trend shows that our mind is trained to
look at a particular sound or symbol and relate it to particular image in the
mind. A person who is impaired to do such a matching suffers from dyslexia. It’s
more like developing an understanding of dependent variable based on the
knowledge of independent variable. Now, suppose a person has matched a
particular set of symbols to an image in mind and now that he articulates what
s/he is thinking, s/he is basically converting is image of thought in mind to
this set of predefined symbols. Thus, in a way we are able to capture the structure
of flow of thought in mind. However, a strong critique of it could be that, due
to language, a particular person is trained to think in those directions. Given
the free will of mind, one may choose to think differently, but due to
conformity problems, one has to give up his/her own way of thinking. This is
quite observed when an amateur SVO person, trained in SOV, is asked to converse
in SVO. S/he often end up distorting the SVO into SOV. This is because, s/he is
not initially coming up with his/her own mother tongue and then translating it
to the foreign language; rather s/he is directly converting his thinking into
the words of foreign language and that s/he is trained to think in SOV lines.
Still, we can bit by bit generalize some universal grammar; which is quite an
insightful in providing a major way in which one’s mind is structured, leaving
aside the free will freedom.
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