Thought and language

What thinking person has not wondered about the relationship between thought and language? When we express a thought in language, do we start with a fully formed idea and then “translate” it into a string of words? Or is the thought not fully formed until the string of words is assembled?

On one hand, language is a form of symbolic communication that allows us to shape our understanding of reality and of ourselves. But on the other hand, one does not need the crutch of a language to experience emotions and feelings. Multiple theories exist to support each argument.

THOUGHT BEFORE LANGUAGE:

“My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless, and normal, the same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.” - Tom Lubbock. Language puts labels on thoughts that we have and language wouldn’t have come about in the first place if we didn’t have any thoughts to verbalize, to begin with. There are three basic components involved in any kind of verbal activity and those are, conceptualization, the action or process of forming a concept or idea of something, and then comes formulation, the component in which the content is mapped into linguistic form and lastly, articulation, the formation of clear and distinct sounds in speech. The idea that thought is the basis for language is further seen in the way language and thought develop in infants. Studies show that even though the language is absent in infants and babies, disjunctive syllogism: (A or B; if not A, therefore B) seems to be active. This goes to show us that even without the knowledge of the basic language, babies do have a thought process that goes on to determine the language in later life. Or in the words of psychologist John Hoopkins, “I think many people would say that most of their reasoning happens when they are silently talking to themselves in their heads. What this new study reveals is that preverbal infants are also working through this same type of serial reasoning, and doing so before robust language abilities have been mastered.” All this evidence shows that language perhaps is not entirely necessary to shape the brain’s logical reasoning capacities and thought, in general.

LANGUAGE BEFORE THOUGHT:

Every language provides its speakers with a unique, intricate, and constantly changing medium of expression. Language is essential for developing broad concepts, and for abstract thinking—something humans have evolved into doing. Spoken language provides a set of rules that help us organize our thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts. Language is a form of symbolic communication that allows us to organize, express, and critically analyze our experiences. It shapes our understanding of reality and of ourselves. Good communication skills are vital in critical thinking. A similar theme is pursued under the aegis of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis which concerns the influence of language on world-view. Whorf's writings can be interpreted as concluding that language is deterministic of thought. Grammatical structures were seen not just as tools for describing the world, they were seen as templates for thought itself. He investigates the relationship between pure sounds and peoples' semantic associations with them. Taking nonsense syllables, Sapir was able to show that people associate high vowels with small sensory phenomena and low vowels with large phenomena. While all the previous evidence pointed towards thought-determining language, these points create a convincing case for language-determining thought At the end of the day, it reminded everyone of the famous question “What came first - the hen or the egg?” - “What comes first, thought or language?”