Language in sentence

3279 examples of Language in a sentence

And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests.

Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phrases you can't use and words you can't say.

In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language.

According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven.

And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language.

Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result.

Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft.

And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings.

Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit, language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit.

And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language, but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language.

And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills.

Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language.

Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn't have before we acquired it.

All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity.

Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs.

Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved.

Language really is the voice of our genes.

Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre.

There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles.

And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile.

And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside.

And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups.

And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question.

And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases.

And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.

Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us.

Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language?

So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language.

Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language.

But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language.

Related words