Despite what some people think and claim, it’s not just a matter of reading in one language and writing in another: especially when dealing with legal or technical documents, even a short text can require a substantial amount of research. Of course, over time it becomes easier, as one learns where to look for reliable information, and simply stockpiles commonly used turns of phrases to look up in a pinch.

I have worked on projects big enough, sometimes for huge companies whose products you most likely use or have used—I cannot be any more specific due to non-disclosure agreements I have signed—to realize, first-hand, that translation is way more than that. Each individual project, no matter how big or small, has its own peculiarities. Translating a mobile app for children requires a different approach compared to the technical manual of a safety valve testing rig, for instance, and a certificate of pending charges has very little in common with the product descriptions of an online shop specialized in DJ equipment.

While mistakes can happen, translation is one field in which striving for perfectionism is a very basic requirement. It is true that once the project is delivered, never hearing again from the client is a good sign (it means everything went fine and no revision is required!), but sloppiness is never a good way to start. This is especially true for certified translations, a field I recently started working on.

Knowing that a translation is going to be certified by the agency means that, as a translator, I represent the agency; and the agency is solemnly claiming, to the full extent of the Law, that the translation faithfully matches the original text. Nothing is allowed to go wrong. And this opens up a whole new can of worms for each project: should I use the American date format, with the month before the day, or the European date format, with the day before the month? Should I use the British or the American spelling, if I’m translating into English? What is the best way to rephrase this without drifting too much from the original, while at the same time being fully clear for the reader? And what if something simply does not exist in the countries where the destination language is spoken?

It can be daunting. And it’s a good idea never to feel too confident, for overconfidence is the root cause of catastrophe (“look ma, no hands! look ma, no teeth!”). I was lucky to have wonderful supervisors and coordinators for all the agencies I work with: they guided me as I took my first few steps and encouraged me, putting up with my incredible level of early paranoia. Sometimes I still worry when I pick up a job: the customer may not be clear in her requests, or something may be unreadable if it’s a scan, or I may just have no idea how to translate a specific passage until I research it in detail.

But I always made it work, and it’s very rewarding on many levels. Sometimes I stop and think about what I do, and what it means to me—why I love it so much. Translation is the ultimate tool for communication. When you speak one language, your message has a limited pool of potential recipients: those who understand that language. By translating it into other languages, the pool grows considerably, and your message gets one step closer to being universally understood.

As a translator, I am enabling people to achieve that goal, whatever their message may be. It’s often commercial in nature: press releases, apps, websites. Sometimes, however, it’s not: I have translated texts for charities, for projects that involved or were targeted at kids. I distinctly remember one Sunday morning, when I almost accidentally picked up one such job; I couldn’t stop myself, and left a comment to the customer simply thanking them for what they were doing, and for allowing me to be a small part of it.

And then of course, there’s the other kind of material: the certified documents that end up on the desks of notaries, lawyers, ambassadors. Each one of these, no matter how small or short, make me feel honored, and that’s for a simple reason: because they all tell a story. Sometimes the customer shares a few basic details: “I need this to apply for citizenship”, or “this is for my son’s passport”. Other times I can infer it: a university transcript is the prime sign that the student is packing to work abroad, for instance.

Yet many times, there’s not enough context to tell what it is for, and my imagination runs wild. I wonder why this person with a French last name is requiring his father’s birth certificate to be translated, or what the property mentioned as being for sale looks like, or whether there is any update on the prognosis described in this medical report. I wonder, and imagine, and dream. Like when I was thrown all the way to a hundred and thirty years ago, trying to read the gorgeous but amazingly cryptic cursive of a birth certificate from the 1890s. That was barely thirty years after Italy was united into a single country. That was before the first modern plane flew. That was before the world knew what the Great War was. That was when school was something for the rich, and the common folk couldn’t even sign a certificate because they simply couldn’t read or write. I have no idea why this stuff needed to be translated, or what the customer’s ultimate goal was; I cannot come up with any reason beyond genealogy research.

But at the end of the day, as curious as I am, I do not even want to know. I’m content with knowing that someone’s communication need was fulfilled, and I was the one who enabled them to do so. That’s why I do this.

However, ever since the introduction of cheap compact cameras (and, god forbid, cheap reflex cameras), photography became mainstream. There is nothing inherently wrong with it – the more the merrier, right? – yet there are some trends in photography that I simply do not understand, and some that are just plain bad. Needless to say, these annoyances are most often perpetrated by hipsters or (gasp!) wannabe hipsters. Now, it has to be clarified that my concept of hipster includes not just the traditional, American-ish hipster, but more generally all those “subcultures” – trust me, quotes were never more appropriate – that strive to be alternative and ultimately fail to be unique. This includes, admittedly due to my cultural vantage point, the decadent leit-motif that seems to permeate the life of Italian teenage girls and young women. I may write specifically about this matter, as it’s not specific to photography.

So, without further ado, let me present a roundup of the most annoying trends in photography today. It goes without saying that this is merely my personal opinion.

Straight out of camera (SOOC)

Try running a search for SOOC on Flickr. At the time of writing, it yields over 500,000 results. Are the all ugly pictures? No, not at all. That would be most unfair to say. However, I just do not understand why anyone would want to show off that the picture was entirely unedited, as if it were demanding credit for their ability.

While I can guess their reasoning – “I don’t need to photoshop my photos to make them look good” – it comes with a side effect that apparently they fail to see: it’s like saying “I have a good camera”; but my point is: you just purchased that camera and lens, you didn’t engineer it. You have nothing to brag about.

I am not deliberately bashing SOOC-ists here, for many years ago I used to think that post-production was evil too. I tried to get the best out of my then compact cameras, and it did pay off in the end, because it made me learn many things about imaging systems and optics that I probably would have never cared about if I had just run to tweak the levels to compensate for horrid exposure choices.

I love reflex

This is somewhat linked to the equipment show-off of SOOC-ists. With the ever dropping prices of digital single lens reflex cameras, or dSLR for short, more and more people are purchasing them. Again, this is not inherently bad: I have a dSLR too. My gripe is that these people get a cheap camera – before anybody complains: mine is a cheap camera too, and it’s over six years old – and think they are the artistic heir of Ansel Adams, Annie Leibovitz or, for the most decadent of the group, Diane Arbus.

It’s simply ridiculous. A reflex camera doesn’t make you a true photographer any more than standing in a bike shed makes you a bicycle. Moreover, most of these new artists only ever use the infamous 18-55 mm kit lens, simply because they have absolutely no idea what focal length or aperture is. They also shoot in auto mode, only venturing towards traditional priority modes when they are bored and start wondering what they are, but fail to grasp the mathematical correlation between variables they are simply unaware of. Manual mode appears complicated to a few of them; to the others, the random results raise a silent doubt that their toy may be broken.

Of course, this is often not a concern as the camera is usually paid for by parents. If they were purchased by the photographers themselves, there would at least be more knowledge of how they work. We all tend to make the best out of what we worked hard to afford.

The Seventies are the new sepia

It is said that one can tell when a generation reaches its failure point when its members start being nostalgic about an epoch they never lived. If that’s true, we’re doomed.

Instagram may be seen as some as a refreshing novelty, but the truth is that it’s so overdone and artificial that it’s long gotten out of hand. It takes more than a “pretty” old-style filter to turn the picture of a teacup into a piece of art, yet more and more people are willing to pay for the thrill of sharing the same uniqueness as a few million other people. And just like sepia, all of these photos look dull.

Moreover, what makes more sense than spending hundreds of euros or dollars on a camera or smartphone and topping up a few more coins on an app like that, in order to simulate old and/or broken equipment? But wait, it gets better: here comes…

“Analog” is the way to go

We just don’t get it, they tell us: how can we not understand how much more beautiful analog photos are? And indeed, I cannot understand what that’s even supposed to mean. This irks me on more than one level, because it borders with linguistics.

First of all, I think that calling it “analog” is incorrect. While film certainly is a continuous system rather than a discrete one, I find it surprising that the same wannabe artists who claim to have found the holy grail that finally lets them express themselves will reduce it to a matter of analog vs. digital. What makes “analog” photography so much better, according to them? Film. So why not call it “film photography?” It also sounds more poetic.

Indeed, film has a much wider exposure latitude – and, consequently dynamic range – than even the best digital imaging sensor, or at least negative film does; slides are another story. But do they know any of this? Most of the “analog” photos touted by these people are improperly exposed (admittedly, quite a feat with negative film!), developed and printed by cheap automated minilabs, and digitized at low resolution using scanners that are little more than toys. What’s the point of all of this?

Again, the problem here is that these photographers are oftentimes just teenagers who are not paying for their hobby out of their own pocket. One of the reasons most photographers I know – myself included, obviously – shoot digital is that it’s much more cost-effective. You buy the camera, the lenses, the accessories, the memory cards and you’re good to go for a few years. And you get much more mileage, waste zero cents on tossed pictures, retain detailed information on each shot (EXIF was an invaluable tool to me when I was learning the theory of photography.) Conversely, “analog” photography requires you to buy film beforehand, spend time loading it up, only offers at most 36 pictures per roll – though you can stretch that to 37 or 38 if your camera has a good winding system – and you have to pay to have it developed and printed, then you have to scan it back to post it online. All of this takes time and leaves you at the mercy of the minilab.

Now, I want to point out something important here. I am not bashing film photography at all. Once a year or so I whimsically get a roll of film and take out my father’s Pentax ME Super for a ride; I even bought two more lenses for it a few years back. But I am simply not going to ever claim that digital is fake, because I simply cannot afford to work with film all the time and even if I could, I wouldn’t. The kind of photography I do is often impulsive, in a “seize the moment” style; for that, and especially for macrophotography, I need to be able to take a long stream of pictures in a short period of time, and see results immediately. And I need the highest quality I can get, which means 16-bit RAW files. Even for those with lower requirements, it makes absolutely no sense to use a medium that theoretically provides better results (negative film) and have it crippled by mediocre development and printing services and hideous scanners, especially as negatives are unique, whereas files can be duplicated, restored and worked on all over again as many times as needed.

Still, I know some fellow photographers who know how to deal with negative film, understand its strengths and shortcomings, and either develop and print them on their own, or go to (expensive) labs where the procedure is supervised by people who know what they’re doing. They also use film specifically for what they need – this wonderful dusk landscape by my friend Daniele Faieta was shot on the highly praised Velvia 50, craftfully using its ability to record warm light to obtain such cozy mood – and at times even doing unconventional things such as overexposing and underdeveloping.

But promoting “analog” at all costs gets even worse…

Lomography, or the art of randomness

I just don’t understand lomography. I just don’t. It makes no sense to me. For those who don’t know, Lomography is a “global community” (though it’s actually a trademark by Lomographische AG) whose motto is “Don’t think, just shoot” and promotes “ten golden rules” about how to do it. It’s the ultimate hipster manifesto. Be fast, try the shot from the hip, you don’t have to know what’s in the frame before you shoot, and the unmissable one: don’t worry about rules. Sounds fun, right? I guess it is. We all experiment with our cameras, especially digital ones: it’s free, fun, and delivers immediate satisfaction.

The problem is that this is done on film cameras – sorry, “analog” cameras – with two peculiar details: first of all, it doesn’t use 135 film (the typical little rolls we all know and love), but 120 or 220 film (the kind used in Medium Format cameras), which is somewhat more expensive and difficult to find, and possibly more expensive to develop because minilabs don’t normally work with them. But the most amazing thing about this whole thing is that the camera are deliberately defective: the build quality is poor, they have low-quality plastic lenses that create heavy vignetting and aberrations of all kinds, the bodies leak light. The shutter is often mechanic and its speed fixed, the aperture cannot be changed, and all of this is compensated by on-camera flashes, though it generally falls short of providing even illumination. This is because the “original” Russian-made LOMO camera, the LC-A, was pretty much like that (but without a built-in flash), but western clones are definitely more expensive. It’s an enormous, worldwide niche market.

The results are pretty much horrid, yet followers of this movement swear that it’s what photography should truly be like, because it’s instinctive. It is not just the looks they go after – admittedly, in some (rare) cases lomo-like effects can be a nice addition to a properly taken picture – but also and especially the experience. That’s exactly what Instagram is about, and we have come full circle.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder: what would Ansel Adams think of this? He who walked miles across mountains with thirty pounds worth of equipment together with a burro that carried another hundred, and needed half an hour just to set his glass plate 6-1/2 x 8-1/2 camera up? His shutter was a piece of wood he physically removed to let the light reach the plate. Oh, how the concept of “artist” changes…

This is especially true for languages — such as English — that allow long sequences of words to be joined together without prepositions, and that use the same word both as a noun and as a verb.

Take for instance this news story from New Zealand. The headline is “Police chase driver in hospital.” There are two ways to parse it:

1. Policemen have chased a driver within a hospital’s premises
2. A driver who was chased by the police was hospitalized

(Note that in Australian/NZ English, just like in British English, collective nouns are usually conjugated with verbs in the third plural person, unlike in American English.)

Such ambiguous phrases don’t even require verbs. The noun phrase “The beautiful girls’ school” could be interpreted as:

1. The beautiful school that is for girls only
2. The school that is only for beautiful girls

There is no solution for this issue, except for rewriting such phrases in a more explcit way. For purely educational purposes, using parentheses  may come in handy to identify the building blocks: “(Police chase) (driver)” vs. “(Police) (chase driver).”

Or we could all switch to Lojban…

Latin, for instance, is usually deemed to be a dead language, but this is not the case. To begin with, Latin is still the official language of the Vatican, and while catholic functions have been in local languages since 1964, papal documents continue to be redacted in Latin to this day. Moreover, while there are no native Latin speakers, there are hundreds of millions of people whose native language is directly derived from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian; these are usually called “romance” or “neo-latin” languages. The word romance has unfortunately nothing to do with feelings, and is rather a reference to roman. Ancient Romans did, in fact, spread the usage of Latin around the world.

The evolution of languages is usually caused by their speakers’ movement across the globe: as populations mix, so do their languages. The best example of this is probably Romanian, whose name betrays a Latin origin even though it’s geographically distant from the area where its cousins are spoken. Indeed, the novice might find it surprising that Romanian is indeed a romance language, considering how the Balkan area separates its speakers’ pool from Western Europe, but linguistic evolution, like any other cultural trait, requires taking into account the bigger picture. The area then known as Dacia was inglobated by the Roman empire in 106 CE, but stayed a Roman province until until 271 CE, when the Goths conquered it. During those 165 years, vulgar Latin set its roots in the area, but was then polluted by subsequent linguistic interferences. Modern Romanian shows a striking mix of Latin and Slavic traits, the most immediate of which are postfix articles: EN lake, ES/PT/IT lago, FR lac, RO lac — EN the lake, ES el lago, PT o lago, IT il lago, FR le lac, RO lacul.

The more a geographic area is conquered by different populations, the more intermixed the local language will become, as it draws from all of them. Even more fascinating than Romanian is Maltese, which inherits from Italian, Sicilian, English and Arabic. Written Maltese can look to the untrained eye like a mishmash of random letters. This is how the first article of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights looks like in Maltese:

Il-bnedmin kollha jitwieldu ħielsa u ugwali fid-dinjità u d-drittijiet. Huma mogħnija bir-raġuni u bil-kuxjenza u għandhom igibu ruħhom ma’ xulxin bi spirtu ta’ aħwa.

A recording can be found here (courtesy of Omniglot.) It definitely sounds more Arabic than anything else.

The fact that languages differ over time as the distance increases can be proven by Portuguese, specifically its Brazilian variety. Whereas European Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, to the point that they are almost mutually intelligible in writing, its South American counterpart is so different that some consider it to be an entirely different language, much more so than American English is to British English. The most striking structural distinction is that most Brazilian Portuguese dialects lost the second singular pronoun tu in favor of você (originally vossa mercê, ie. “your grace”, akin to Spanish usted), which is conjugated with third singular person verbs but is used informally. Interestingly, a similar pronoun, vos, is also used in several South American varieties of Spanish, especially those in areas geographically close to Brazil.

Languages generally evolve by simplification, as can easily be seen comparing the complex case system of Latin with modern romance languages, none of which use cases other than for pronouns. Moreover, language evolve under one’s own eyes. When I went to elementary school twenty years ago, the informal yet very common construction a me mi, as in a me mi piace was considered a serious mistake because it implied repeating the same thing twice. While it is not something that one would use in writing, it has become accepted in all but the most formal settings. (Note that the correspondent Spanish construction, a mí me gusta, actually requires the repetition.) A similar thing has happened in English: until a few decades ago, substituting whom (accusative) with who (nominative) in phrases such as I don’t know was considered bad practice; nowadays, it is standard English. Of course, phrases usually used as “whole blocks,” such as for whom the bell tolls or to whom it may concern, are likely to retain the original inflection for much longer. Sometimes the simplification is done by law, usually in the form of spelling reforms. This has recently happened with Greek in 1982 to drop its ancient polytonic orthography, and to German in 1996; the latter wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Many reforms have been suggested for English, but none has ever been attempted. It is worth to remember this satyrical piece, attributed to Mark Twain, about how such a reform could be carried out over the course of at least two decades:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

In some cases, languages do however indeed die without evolving, but a more correct term in this case is “extinction.” Most scholars consider a language to be extinct when it’s no longer used and there are no direct derivatives. Language extinction is closely linked with the story of populations as a whole, and almost always to catastrophic events such as genocide. For instance, Many Native American languages are now extinct, as the people who spoke them were killed during the colonization. The few survivors eventually stopped using them (or were too young and were never taught to speak them) and began using the language of the colonists. In some cases, if the pool of speakers is already small, there may be no push to teach it to other people and they may eventually die and take the language with them. This is the reason behind the attempt, in the recent years, to revive languages and dialects at a concrete risk of disappearing.

As we have seen, language defines culture and identity. When a language becomes extinct, the loss for humanity as a whole is much bigger than a set of grammar rules.

I have already said that language is the foundation of human culture. It is, however, more than that. Language is one of the very few “inner traits” that define the different ethnic groups, that is traits not immediately visually discernible when seeing someone new. Everybody can tell if somebody has a similar ethnic background: Caucasian people look different than African people, or Asian people. Yet, while is it true that a Swedish will probably look different than an Italian, it will be virtually impossible to discern a Spanish and a Portuguese just by looking at them.

Groups defined by a common language

In such cases, and especially when populations mix due to varying borders over the course of history, language effectively define the identity of populations. Not surprising, many stereotypes are based on making fun of how a foreign language sounds and how immigrants speak the local language: in Italy, Asians are often mocked by replacing /r/ with /l/, an obvious reference to the Japanese liquid consonant. More often than not, this is done in good spirit, as is the inevitable attempt to have foreigners pronounce words that contain sounds that they are not familiar with. When in the UK, my group caused immense frustration in the activity leader who tried to pronounce “biglietto.” This is all usually done in good spirit today, yet in war times a similar technique has been used as a way to detect potential spies.

Sometimes, even in the modern day, a language is used as a common trait by a group and used to differentiate given group by others. Such is the case of Catalunya, which succeeded in having a top-level domain, .cat, to be made available for websites in Catalan. While this is not uncommon nowadays, with “content-based” top-level domains such as .museum and .aero, it is the first time that a language has been awarded one.

Another case for political unrest that is mostly visible through language is the current state of affairs in Belgium. The country is divided in two main parts: French-speaking Walloon and Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has been struggling to have a strong government since 2007, and while there are deeper cultural and economic differences between the two areas, language is by all means the most prominent and immediate one.

In Northern Italy, homophobic, xenophobic and wannabe-secessionist political group Lega Nord insists that local dialects be taught in schools and used as official languages in public offices, also to mark a clear distinction between the North and the South of the country, and possibly to make it harder for immigrants to integrate, as they would have to pass a dialect test before being granted the permission to dwell in a given town.

It is interesting to note that immigrants from the same area of the world often tend to form clusters. Prime examples of these are the numerous “Chinatowns” and “Little Italy” neighborhoods. This happens not only to get the immediate support that derives from kinship; it is also a way to retain the group’s original culture. How long this lasts is debatable; it is a fact immigrants today are able to keep up with their origins more than immigrants could do just a few decades ago. To this day, respect for foreign cultures is more widespread, as is the ability to stay in touch with the motherland. Back in the day, it was not uncommon for second-generation immigrants to only have a basic knowledge of the family’s native language, even though the accent that came from their first-generation immigrant parents stayed for several more generations, and in some cases it became a distinguishing trait of the specific local group (see for instance the Brooklyn accent.) This kind of accent usually has a much stronger connotation of pride for its speakers compared to “standard” ones such as the Boston dialect.

In other cases, a social class might lay claim on its speech, slang and accent as a way to differentiate itself from the upper, “snob” classes; see for instance the Cockney speech.

Groups within a language

Group identity can, however, also be claimed within a language. Black people, for instance, have been historically referred to by white people using words that had a strong negative connotation, the most common of which is negro. While the origin of the word is not offensive by itself (it simply means “black” in Spanish), it started carrying a negative meaning by the way it was used. Moreover, as the word found its way to different languages and dialects, variations of it appeared; what is interesting is that today the more phonetic transcription nigger or nigga is considered somewhat more offensive than negro.

In any case, modern usage has led to unusual workarounds to be politically correct. Most non-blacks might use the phrase African-American, which of course only applies to black people born in the Americas. In the United Kingdom such phrase would make no sense, and consequently the word black is used without worry, in part because black slavery, or slavery of any groups for that matter, was not as widespread in the UK. (The situation in India, however, was quite different: the possessions of the East India Company was notably exempted from the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.) The race for political correctness in North America about the words used to refer to black people has been exploited for humorous purposes by many comedians, usually replacing black with African-American in unrelated phrases such as “black Friday.”

A very interesting aspect of ethnic and social groups targeted by offensive words is that, over the course of times, members of such groups take on the usage of the same words to refer to one another, in a linguistic phenomenon called reappropriation. This does not mean that the words is decontextualized and cleared for usage by anyone; on the contrary, those who do not belong to the group are discouraged even more from using it. In addition to the original offensive connotation, the now-reappropriated word carries the additional implication that the outsider is mocking both the group and the group’s usage of the word itself. Words that have been reappropriated include most racial and sexual slurs, but can also include words such as nerd or geek. In some cases, some words achieve enough “grammar strength” to be declined: for instance, the word guido (originally used to refer to working-class Italian immigrants in the NY area, from the first name Guido that was probably common at the time) has given birth to the female version guidette.

It is worth noting that members of one group are sometimes allowed to use reappropriated words belonging to other groups or even joking about them, without necessarily sparking harsh reactions from members of the “target” groups. This is clearly visible in Russell Peters’ stand-up comedy. Being the son of first-generation Indian immigrants in Canada, he defines himself as being brown and jokes about how different ethnic groups and their languages are perceived by one another, playing with and effectively demolishing common stereotypes. It is very likely that the same lines would cause controversy if they were uttered by a white man (especially those about Arabs), proving that linguistic reappropriation, and ultimately language, can change the way we relate to one another.

Culture could not exist without language, and not only because we wouldn’t be able to share it with one another. Animals, lacking full languages, are only able to communicate simple pieces of information: there is food over there; a predator is approaching; I am ready to mate. Contrary to popular belief, they do not chit-chat with one another; they are simply relaying basic information. A cat might indicate to one of its kind that it is happy, but will not seek a full conversation with its fellow. They lack the body parts to do so, and are therefore unable to conceive any higher form of communication. This is not unlinke people who are blind from birth: not having ever seen colors, they simply don’t know what color is. It’s an entirely abstract concept to them, much like every human fails to grasp the concept of a fourth dimension. (I strongly recommend reading Edwin A. Abbott’s “Flatland” to get a better idea of the problem.)

Without language, we wouldn’t have any literature, or math, or philosophy, or religions, or politics, or engineering. If we weren’t able to fully communicate and share our thoughts with others, we would be forever stuck in an environment without being able to improve it. Chimpanzees are the most intelligent animals. They are very similar to us, and do have remarkable communication skills compared to most animals, and they are able to use tools. Yet they are not able to do more than what they do. They have no push for innovation. For instance, there are no reports of wild chimpanzees ever attempting to build anything that wasn’t directly targeted at obtaining food. If a chimpanzee had a “human-like” idea, it wouldn’t be able to share it with its fellows, and for all intents and purposes, it would be as if it had not had it. Moreover, we wouldn’t even know, because non-verbal communication has strict limits. Sign language works in humans because we have the innate ability to communicate extensively, and it could be said that muteness is a statistical error: the instinct to communicate is still there. On the other hand, chimpanzees who were taught the sign language were only able to express comparatively simple thoughts.

It would therefore be naïve to limit the idea of language to spoken word, or to a set of grammar rules, or even to a writing system. Language, in itself, is a much broader concept: it’s a foundation upon which we build everything. We are humans not because we have opposable thumbs, or because we walk while standing up. Our very humanity exists because we are able to think about abstract concepts, and we can do that because we have the potential for language.