Since my last post talked about communicating, let me communicate for a minute about talking.

Actually my last post didn’t talk.  I wrote – you read.  Now this post will communicate – I’ll write, you read.  About talking.  Well, about language.  See?  We’re communicating!

I’ll try to make this quick – I read a couple articles about language  – more preceisley about the evolution of language.  The first article was about something called “ultraconserved words” which, as near as I can tell, are words that are so fundamental to language that they change little enough over time that using a list of ultraconserved words a modern person could communicate with a person speaking a dialect 15,000 years old.  In other words, if I went back 15,000 years in my time machine I could communicate with English speakers of that era.  The second article was a critique of the first article challenging it’s premise.  I won’t go into the details – both articles are interesting but somewhat heavy reading.  Follow the links if you want to give it a try.  I want to make a different but related point.

I don’t see how two people separated by 15,000 years of…what’s the word I want…evolution (?) could communicate effectively when people can barely communicate with each other today. So much of communication is context – perspective.  Two people separated by that much history would have no idea of the other’s perspective of the world around them.

I’m surprised when people today communicate at all.  It’s not that we don’t have the means.  And the means keep changing all the time.  How long until verbal communication becomes a thing of the past?  People have to have a common perspective – a shared context – to communicate effectvely.  So I guess what I meant to say is…hell…most of the time I don’t even know what I’m talking about.