Beautiful Thing #50: Language

  While language is but a portion of the elegant and complex system that is Communication (#324), it is quirky, lovable, and fascinating enough to merit it’s own number and blogpost.  Congrats, Language, you’re #50.

    Sure, the fact we take it for granted despite it’s virtues and industry gives it that beautiful Cinderella quality, but language is also beautiful for the way it combines two seemingly opposite qualities: it is man-made and at the same time, it is alive. 

   Try giving Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a read.  Just for a page, if you can read the whole thing… mine hat I doff to thee.  After straining every nueron in your brain to descipher this text which is supposedly written in English, it’s hard deny that language is a perfect example of evolution. 

    Like a DNA strand, Language is made up of tiny bits of information strung together.  Taken together, those bits of consonants and vowels make up and idea, a couplet, a sonnet, a love song.  And like DNA those bits can recombine to form an infinite amount of permutations: different breeds and species of expressed thought.

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