Perspectives: Whose Language

2 Pages 378 Words

After reading through “Perspectives: Whose Language” and reading the pieces by Orwell and Rushdie, an interesting thought comes to mind. As the importance of language is obvious for obvious reasons, I feel like it is even more important still than one might realize. The problem with communication in my opinion is this… thoughts and emotions are like fluid and words are like solid. I feel that one could think and/or feel in a certain direction forever, but there are only so many words. To further exacerbate the problem, most of us don’t even know most of these words. Now analyzing deeper, wrap your mind around this. We all have some thought or some idea that we immediately associate with any word that we know. We all have our own definition of what the word means. When one person offers up a few sentences to another, what are the chances that each will relate the same idea to each word? Probably, after the logical adding up of the words and their individual definitions in the sentences, it is probably less than likely that the two people will have the same idea or the same thought in their head. Thus, the miscommunication that results can prove to be worse than had no one ever said anything at all. This shortage of words in relation to the infinite possibility of ideas is the limitation of language. Because of this limitation, all we can (and must) do is strive to learn more and more ways to better verbalize ideas. This is how we get free. There were certainly no translators to help out when the Europeans first ran into the Native Americans and I can’t help but wonder what their communications were like. How many terrible wars may have been the result of miscommunication? It’s my assertion that Orwell’s excerpt from Inside the Whale and Rushdie’s excerpt from Outside the Whale are a classic example of verbal exchange in which each respective side of the argument fail to refute the other. I think it’s a ...