Anyone that has even a moderate amount of intelligence, and without physical impediment or unusual mental issues can communicate verbally. And yet we don't teach verbal communications explicitly, we just pick it up as we grow. Once we're old enough we're taught to speak properly, and to read and write. Reading and writing are simply encoding of our natural verbal ability and so are derivative, teaching writing is basically learning to write the words you would speak, and reading is learning to absorb communication as if it were spoken. What we are really doing is communicating with spoken words, and we have been doing this without the benefit of formal education for tens of thousands of years.
When I think about how we teach language, something that comes naturally to most people, there seems to be some amount of irony. We try to come up with a definition of language to teach, but we're trying to teach something we don't fully understand, and yet do naturally. Anyone that believes that we actually understand natural language has never tried to write a computer program that can read a book and provide a summary.
Even the words that we use often defy definition. Words like good and bad, beauty and virtue have been argued about for thousands of years, and yet we use them without thinking about them and are able to communicate relatively well with them.
This natural ability to use something as complex as language without formal teaching indicates to me that language as we know it is a mirror into our thoughts, and the constructs of our minds. Our brains are specifically molded to communicate via language, and this ability to communicate via language provides an evolutionary advantage. One can see the slow one-up-manship between our language and our thinking in an upward spiral of complexity.
In many ways, language is like music. Many people can learn to play music without formal learning. They just 'pick it up from dad' as the saying goes. And many great musicians don't know one iota of music theory. Yet that hasn't prevented us from developing a very formal theory of music. Likewise we have very formal rules of language, and people are often judged by how well they know those rules. A good musician knows that the rules of music theory don't dictate how you should write music, but is an analysis of how good music was written in the past, and what makes it good. I would say a good speaker should not be afraid to break the rules, or make up their own rules. A good story is probably like a good piece of music, moving away from what everyone else is doing, and coming up with something original, rules be damned. When telling a story the point is to get the point across. A good story, like good music, can be composed by the uneducated as well as the educated, and I might even go as far as to say that education on subjects like music or language theory could make one less capable of original and compelling creations if taken too seriously.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't study language, or music. But we should be cognizant that both are a historical study, a study of what we have done in the past. How we have used language up to now. How we use language in the future is entirely up to us, and perhaps there's still a few notches up in the complexity level that we can gain, if we can just find the thoughts and words to express them. True inventors/creators treat 'rules' with a grain of salt, as they often get in the way rather than lead the way.
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