Let's Talk...

Imagine for a moment that you can only vocalise a limited number of discrete sounds due to some unspecified combination of mental and physical constraints. You can only whistle, grunt, growl and bark, albeit with at least the sophistication of varying pitch, tone and volume. You also have the facility to combine these primitive utterances in simple combinations; say to indicate a warning to your fellow species' members that danger approaches and roughly from which direction, or where there might be food to be had. This is a given in most of the animal kingdom, and where Homo Sapiens differs greatly from both the bulk of that kingdom and from our long defunct ancestors, the early humans, in all their variety. We have developed, through a combination of concept of mind and the development of language, an introspective sense of our place in the world alongside our fellow creatures. This has allowed us to break free of our immediate environment and the constraints of merely being able to 'signal'.

It's one thing to be able only to interact on a level as basic as this - and to be honest, it's pretty effective from a survival point of view - but it is ultimately the great limiting factor in the development of organised society. Mere 'signalling' limits one's world to the immediate, both in time and in space: without language and the abstraction of thought it offers, there is no 'there' or 'then'. Navigating the world and its perils is de facto,  pretty much a reactive existence. With the development of language, entailing both the mental leap from mere signalling to abstraction, and the development of a more sophisticated vocal apparatus with which to achieve speech itself, we can see things hitherto outside of immediate experience: knowledge of things outwith that experience can be communicated to us by fellow beings who have ventured to places as yet personally unvisited. We can share knowledge abstractly through the medium of language itself, and we can invent hypotheticals and myths and poetry and art that transcend our isolated immediacy in this world. We are language, and language is us...