Languages

Languages. The means of which we share our vantage points of the world with others. If sharing is important to a person, mastery of language is essential to successfully share what of the world one wants to share. However, language is more than just a construct such as English, French, or Spanish; it is one of many different vessels upon which ideas can transport. In fact, many times the way you arrange words to portray an idea does not resonate the same meaning to you as to someone listening. Look at all the philosophy papers that no one can agree on what they are trying to say. Surely, Kant is lacking in communication skills. If 2 percent of the population understands what you are saying then surely sharing is not important enough to you.

What of music? How is music a language. I remember when the Minnesota Youth Symphonies conductor proclaimed to a full Orchestra Hall that "music is the universal language." So, everyone can understand it? Yet no two people share understanding of one set of sounds, so how is this a valuable sort of understanding? One persons' ugly is anothers' beautiful and one persons' inspiring is anothers' scary. How can something so wound up in subjectivity be called universal?

What about the nuances of speech? The inflections of the voice and the order of the words, like poetry, can have an effect much deeper than meaning. Two people can communicate an identical idea yet one will arrange the words and his/her inflections in a way that has a totally different impact on the audience. And language is sharing, so it matters not the concepts of the speech but the shared effects of the layout of the words. It isn't about what the speaker got from the words, but about what he or she shared with all others participating in the sights and sounds at play. Many Obama-scared folk told of the effects his listeners had from his words and claimed that his words involved some sort of supernatural effect that all competitors lacked and this was clearly to be feared. Since his speeches impacted people deeply and struck them in places that really mattered to them, they were very concerned that the audiences weren't, like with other politicians, having trouble focusing on the meaningless microphonal ranting.

The point to my wondering is merely to think of what it is I wish to communicate and how I ought communicate it. I seem limited to English at this point. I have music but that is a confusing world of pomp and circumstance with little meaningful value left in the frequencies. What ideas does one most want to share? And what is the best way to share them? In other words, what feelings and perceptions of the world do I deem worth spreading, and what means will suffice to do the spreading?