How do/did people who never learned a language think?
In: 1738
My feeling is that the development of language was what jump-started civilization, because speech forces you into linear thinking. You can only say one word at a time, so speaking makes you learn to arrange words in a specific order. This trains you to think in terms of sequences, before and after, cause and effect – fundamental concepts that lead to planning ahead, developing procedures that had to be done in the right order, and teaching them to each other. I think speech was the key to all that as opposed to simply holding a big leaf over your head to keep the rain off.
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