Language

                I found the experiment very hard when I was not allowed to talk! I did this experiment with my dad and brother and found it very hard because I am the most talkative and open with my family. It was hard to watch them partaking in the conversation and not being able to contribute my ideas, at least verbally, to the conversation. Even though I tried using hand signals and facial expression, nothing is the same as being able to use symbolic language.  The impressions of my dad and brother during this conversation were uncertainty and frustration because they did not really ever know what I was trying to say and because everything took longer! They definitely changed the way they talked to me because of the fact that I could not speak back. They started asking really simple questions because they knew it would be the easiest for me to answer without using symbolic language. My dad even started to “take advantage” of me not being able to talk and just kept talking and “assuming” he knew what I was saying even when that was completely opposite the truth! I believe that the culture that uses symbolic language has the advantage in communicating complex ideas over the culture that does not use symbolic language. I think the natural tendency of a culture that uses symbolic language toward a culture that does not use symbolic language is one of distain and probably frustration with them when they are not able to communicate with them.  The distain comes from the same thought that all anthropologists have to be careful of and that is the idea that “my culture is the best.” The individuals that I can think of that have difficulty communicating with spoken language are deaf people and babies/little children. Speaking people normally feel very awkward around those who are deaf and tend to have a proud attitude thinking that deaf people are less important that themselves or less human, but they are not! They just simply cannot hear. Babies and small children normally have a hard time communicating with spoken language because they have not fully developed yet. Adults will usually alter their words to speak in a language that they think their baby can understand better (baby talk) and they know that they cannot have full on conversations with their one year old.

                I did not last very long when I had to have a conversation without any hand signals or emotion showing! This was especially hard because I use my hands a lot when I talk! And I didn’t realize how much we use our eyebrows when we talk! Five seconds into the experiment, my dad my dad started teasing me because my eyebrows were moving and I didn’t even know it! My dad and brother again found it frustrating to talk to me when I could use not expression or hand signals. They also found it boring and said that it didn’t seem like I cared, almost like I wasn’t really present in the conversation but off in a world of my own. The use of signs in our language is very important! We use hand signals and emotions to illustrate what we are talking about and to add emphasis where it is needed. As in my experiment with my dad and brother, conversations become boring and the other party might not know exactly what you are trying to say if you are not using emphasis on certain worlds or hand signals to clarify exactly what you are talking about. A sentence could be taken completely the opposite of the way you intended just by the absence of emotion and hand signals. I think there are people who have hard time reading body language. This kind of people can be hard to have a conversation with. They do not realize when they have “over stayed their welcome” and need to let the other person talk. They could be viewed as selfish people because they are always doing the talking but maybe they just have a hard time reading other people’s body language and think it is ok for them to keep talking.  Having the ability to read body language is a huge benefit. Knowing how to read a person’s body language could be the difference between completely misreading someone and taking something the wrong way or understanding what the person is trying to communicate. Many times a person could be trying to “send” an important message to you but unless you are able to see and recognize their body language, you might completely miss the message. One situation where I think it would be beneficial to not read body language is when there is a speaker addressing group of people. This is when the communication is one way and the audience is simply listening to what the speaker has to say. The speaker should not look at the person falling asleep and assume that his speech is boring. The listener who is falling asleep might have pulled an all-nighter the night before doing homework. The audience is not giving feedback in this situation and speaker does not know the private lives of everyone listening so looking just at the body language of everyone listening might not be a good way to judge how his message is being received.   I also think that many times, and it seems like this happens more with women than it does with men, we read too far into someone’s body language and make it mean something we want it to mean or make it mean exactly the opposite of what it was intended to mean. We need to be careful to not take things too far and to make sure we truly understand what someone is intending to say and not put our own meanings on someone else’s body language.

                It would have been a lot easier in part one of the experiment where I wasn’t allowed to talk, if I had been able to write down what I wanted to say. This is because there would not have been any guessing involved, my dad and brother would have known exactly what I wanted to say. One down side to only being able to write though is that it takes time and even though I would have been able to communicate better, it would have taken me a lot longer to do it!  Written language provides an advantage to the culture that develops and uses it in that it is a way to pass on their unique language. In cultures where languages are not written down, that language might become extinct faster because there is no one studying it or learning it other than those who actually speak it. If a language is written down, people from other cultures can studying the language or even try and learn it even though they are not with those people who speak the language. The culture that has written language also has another way of communicating in that they can send messages and not depend solely on word of mouth. The written language has impacted globalization greatly because the written word has been able to travel around the world for a much longer time through letters, newspapers, books, etc… than the spoken word has. It has only been in the past few centuries through the use of the internet, television, and radio that the spoken word of one country has been able to reach another country that speaks a different language.  Because of written language, things can be written down and passed on from generation to generation and from culture to culture. The history of a people that is written down is less likely to be changed over time than it is if that same story was passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth.