Банникова Алиса Борисовна
16 лет
Город Иваново
МБОУО Гимназия №3
What the world would be like without languages?
The topic of the contest has caught my attention at once. The world without languages – sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But, as I’m fond of such weird things, I have thought of two hypotheses, if I can say so, to express my suppositions about this.
The first hypothesis:
The initial absence of human ability to emit sounds
If the evolution was too lazy to design a mouth, a throat, vocal chords and the speech centers of the brain, and people had to do without making any noises, there would be no “language” as we understand this term today. No words, no names for surrounding objects, therefore – no distinct history, literature or science. The progress would be slow, with deaf (as speaking is deeply connected with hearing), mute yet quite intelligent creatures lost in the world of their own figurative way of thinking. And, who knows, maybe we would still be drawing childish primitive symbols on the rocks to express ourselves…
The only advantage of this plot is that it would be harder for people to deceive each other. The attitudes, emotions, fears and so on would be easily “read” from the facial expression, gestures or postures.
The second hypothesis:
The sudden disappearance of speech power
Imagine yourself wake up and realize you can’t say anything and neither can your family or friends. The whole humanity is deprived of the major ability – sounds like a real disaster!
The woken-up hemisphere of the planet would try to inform the other one by writing numerous articles in various news-feeds all over the Web, alongside with the hysterical messages in the social networks. But all this would only be read in developed countries, by technologically intelligent users, and the others would be left in total ignorance of what’s going on. The uninformed would go crazy or even aggressive because of being scared of such a change.
The others (especially in developed countries) would soon lose their eyesight as the amount of written text would increase dramatically.
Though, I dare to predict the break-through in those fields of science which deal with helping the mute to “speak”, and everyone would do anything to get a device, similar to the one that is used by Stephen Hawking, to restore the speech power as soon as possible. Or some multinational company, like Apple, would come up with an idea of new smartphones with these “vital” functions and would drop the price a bit to make it available for everybody. In this situation, the illnesses which are connected with computer and phone radiation would soon become common among the users as they wouldn’t let these smartphones out of their hands.
On the other hand, this would be the longest period without wars. People would be too busy looking for the opportunity to bring their voice back to notice or develop any contradictions or start an armed conflict.
In the furthest prospect, in a millennium or more, the evolution would be ready with the new era of hawk-eye people with ultimate brain protection from harmful microwaves, though, practically helpless without their devices…
To sum it up, I should say that the speech power and language in particular play the significant role which is hard to overestimate. It’s the most precious gift, the biggest blessing for the humanity (or the miracle of evolution – for atheists). We ought to keep it, save it from simplifying and lexical parasites which lead to slow invisible regressive processes not only in linguistical field but also in the cultural level of people. Call me an alarmist, but I’m sure that shortening words and replacing them with emojis and funny pictures can easily bring us back to barbaric stage without the opportunity to evolve.