Words

            Have you ever taken a moment to stop and think about words. I mean, really think about them. Not the meanings of words, so much as the existence of them. They’re amazing!

            It’s so fascinating that we have this in-depth method of communication. Humans wouldn't have accomplished anything close to what they have without it. Yet, if you stop to think about it, words are downright weird. We make nonsensical sounds with our mouths and vocal cords and, somehow, when we hear them, they have meaning for us. How did this come to be?

            I've thought about this a lot, as I've worked on writing my own languages. Most (if not all) spoken languages these days are built on the blocks of previous languages. Words and grammar have evolved and become so natural to us that we take them for granted – at least until we find ourselves wandering in a foreign country where no one understands what we’re saying. How did it start, though? What was the very first word?

            My theory is that the first word would have been an order, such as “Go!” or “Get!”. That seems the most likely place for a primitive language to start. You want someone else to do something, so you create a word that, when accompanied by a gesture, can convey your meaning. A language has started.

            But, by telling someone else what to do, we recognise that we are different than them. We start calling them “You.” Then, since we have a way to address someone else, we come up with “Me” to refer to ourselves.

            From then, it snowballs onwards, with the language getting larger and larger. We come up with more commands and, for clarity, we come up with words for objects as well. That way, we can tell “you” to “get” a “tree”. Poor you will have a hard time of that, but at least he understands what we want.

            Then, of course, names for people come into existence, so we can distinguish all these “you”s from each other. Plus, if everyone is “me”, we feel like just another “you”, so we want a name to use for referring to ourselves.

            Armed with our new language, we charge into the future, teaching these odd sounds we've made up to our children, and they to theirs, until the vocalisations become second nature and no one even thinks about how remarkable words are. In fact, we even have squiggles to visually represent words.

            The squiggles are taught to us as sounds that string together into the words we know, but eventually they take on a life of their own. We see a word and, even if it’s spelled wrong, we know what it means just as well as if we heard it. It truns out taht as lnog as the frsit and lsat letetrs of a wrod are in the rhigt pacles, it deosn't eevn meattr waht odrer the rset are in! W3 c4n e3en r3pl4c3 c3r74in l3773r5 wi7h numb3r5 4nd 57ill b3 4ble t0 r34d. I wouldn't be surprised if I ardshfu tunboef slinwy guwisju and you still understood what I was talking about.

            Yet, all this time, it is still just random sounds we make or generate in our heads. Sounds that, more than likely, would sound incredibly stupid if we didn't know what they meant (some sound stupid even when we know what they mean). Somehow, there is a transition in our brain where the sounds and squiggles that represent a “tree” turn into a tree.

            Aren't words incredible?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.