How to Understand Each Other? Talk to An Infant.

Words are used for transferring the ideas arising in a certain man’s head. Man is a social creature. Without sharing ideas Man is hardly able to exist. Man is always in need of exchange with others concerning his inner unseen for the purpose to learn and develop constantly. This development is also an indispensable need of man’s nature and it’s founded on communication. Without development the man do can exist, but not live. The conscious communication and interaction with other creatures is needed to make from a human something more than just a physical organism, to sort him out from other living creatures and let it title an intellectual creature.

What is the final and the most complete way of idea exchange known for nowadays is human language. And the smallest indivisible sense particle of the human language is a word. It seems that speech is more prior definition than “language”. But the speech doesn’t include some complete and general structure arranged between people who speak. In my proper understanding, speech can be described as any number of any sounds one man pronounces and the other man (interlocutor) understands. But it doesn’t mean that the third person will understand them if heard. An example?

To answer this question, let’s try to model such situation. Imagine that me, I say a certain sound – be it “hhh”. And pronouncing that, I show to you (my interlocutor) my neck, and give you in such a way a notion that my throat is ill. Then, when I fulfill the same number of actions again, you will probably understand that my throat is ill. But the third person will surely not. Why? Because we haven’t come to mutual arrangement about the common understanding of the sound pronounced. Then, summarizing – the third person can not understand us, because there was no arrangement between us about the meaning of the sound.

Another finding here is that to make more people understand some concrete set of sounds, these sounds, first, should be comfortable for use and in so doing sharpened to the optimal form – they have to be structured in the way to be convenient for usage of many people. And second, there must be “mutual arrangement” about common meaning of the words we use.

In our daily life we do it in the very manner.  Just try and remember how we teach babies to speak. We do it exactly as it’s described in the example given. Here is just one problem – the baby is taught by two or three persons only and this few number of people can not transfer all the existing meanings of a certain word. Naturally, it’s not even required in case of the baby. Because, maturing, he/she will communicate and interact with other people obeying his instinct demanding to satisfy the social need of every man – to develop and learn more by communication and interaction. And in such way he will have many opportunities to enrich his vocabulary and push envelopes of every certain word.

So, finally, on the one hand, there must be mutual arrangement about the meaning of sounds and their combinations and, on the other hand – the optimal structure, convenient for common use. As we saw, the speech partly fulfills this function, but locally. On the scale of the whole people there is only one phenomenon the most effective for interaction and communication – language. Language with its complete structure. Language with its sound effect, and usability.

If you doubt about the abovementioned, just try to arrange about a certain sound or word meaning with some baby, like in the example we studied. I guess, he will persuade you totally.