I came across a new word the other day. Not that that’s anything unusual – it happens on a fairly regular basis. I like new words =) It was a small word, with a fairly simple meaning. But it amazed me that I could just look at this word – a word I’d never seen or heard before – and just know, instantly, what it meant. Sure, context provides some of that, but even just on its own, on a page, I can look at this completely new word, and know what it means – be able to understand, and explain it…
The word was ‘abiotic’. My dictionary doesn’t know the word, and suggests I’m mis-spelling ‘biotic’… My little sister doesn’t know the word, but I bet you if you asked her, she could tell you what it meant.
Human language is just so fantastically adaptive. We can string words together to make compounds, morph them if their part-of-speech doesn’t match what we need for our sentence, we can make a statement that’s understood to be a question, and we can ask questions that no more need an answer than the most mundane of statements.
We can distinguish between abiotic and non-biological, and know when to use each – and we can not only talk about things in amazingly convoluted chains of “I thought she said he knew what they suggested it might do”, but we can also be understood!
And what’s really, truly amazing is that most of the time, we don’t even notice we’re doing it. We just invent, repurpose and generally mangle words, and our listeners smile and nod, while the babelfish circuitry of their brains chomps up all the myriad sounds, sorts them & files them, and quietly reports back with the results… As listeners, we rarely stop to marvel at what our brains are warping themselves around – we listen to a stream of sounds, hear a statement or question or expression of meaning, and blithely ignore the massive computational power being spent on producing it.
Wow. That’s all =)