The buddha spoke an indo-european language language, as most of us do, english being the lingua franca of the digital silk road. This language has a certain grammar. We don’t have to know how a verb is conjugated or a noun declined to have an intimate mastery of grammar, we learn it at our mother’s knee. 

   Our mastery of language is unconscious. We use it as a tool, to manipulate our social environment. 

   This tool is an arbitrary thing, a contingentl artifact of a particular cultural evolution, conserved by accident as a bottleneck in the development of a society. Languages grow and change and proliferate and there have been countless languages and dialects throughout human history, reflecting the profound diversity of life. Like the cultivation of wheat or corn, we have selected and monocultured a small number of languages and grown dependent on them for general communication.

   There are problems with this tower of babel, but having us all speaking the same language produces persistent blind spots. A great deal of modern - that is, post-modern - philosophy is devoted to dissolving problems by realizing they are artifacts of grammar and syntax.

   Specifically, pronouns. You have to specify single or plural. Gender, and that’s a biggie. The whole us and them thing.

   And then there’re verbs. You have to specify past present future. Everything is always an object located in time and space.

   These conditions of communication profoundly affect our (mis)understanding of what is going on around us. Our language makes really commonplace observations seem profound because their descriptions are not permitted by common usage. Stuff is hard to talk about because of conventional language habituating us to conventional views which may be wildly inappropriate to contemporary conditions. Specifically, the ability of media to lie effectively. The use of language to obscure, disinform, misinform, propagandize, bullshit, prevaricate, and so forth. 

   The roots of the indo-european languages so prevalent as to be universal were in a central asian pastoral community who likely invented the wheel.  People were finally able to put the horse before the cart and the rest is history.

   The “linguistic turn” so prevalent in current philosophy has been around from the beginning as our thoughts are limited by the medium in which they are thunk. The buddha spent much of his time cutting through confusion.


   So I have been reading this book about the origins of “proto-indo-european” and I would like to share the following quote:




Excerpt From: David W. Anthony. “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” 


LANGUAGE EXTINCTION AND THOUGHT

The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a critical time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innovations in transport, most important of these the beginning of horseback riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles. They were in no way superior to their neighbors; indeed, the surviving evidence suggests that their economy, domestic technology, and social organization were simpler than those of their western and southern neighbors. The expansion of their language was not a single event, nor did it have only one cause.

Nevertheless, that language did expand and diversify, and its daughters—including English—continue to expand today. Many other language families have become extinct as Indo-European languages spread. It is possible that the resultant loss of linguistic diversity has narrowed and channeled habits of perception in the modern world. For example, all Indo-European languages force the speaker to pay attention to tense and number when talking about an action: you must specify whether the action is past, present, or future; and you must specify whether the actor is singular or plural. It is impossible to use an Indo-European verb without deciding on“these categories. Consequently speakers of Indo-European languages habitually frame all events in terms of when they occurred and whether they involved multiple actors. Many other language families do not require the speaker to address these categories when speaking of an action, so tense and number can remain unspecified.

On the other hand, other language families require that other aspects of reality be constantly used and recognized. For example, when describing an event or condition in Hopi you must use grammatical markers that specify whether you witnessed the event yourself, heard about it from someone else, or consider it to be an unchanging truth. Hopi speakers are forced by Hopi grammar to habitually frame all descriptions of reality in terms of the source and reliability of their information. The constant and automatic use of such categories generates habits in the perception and framing of the world that probably differ between people who use fundamentally different grammars. In that sense, the spread of Indo-European grammars has perhaps reduced the diversity of human perceptual habits. It might also have caused this author, as I write this book, to frame my observations in a way that repeats the perceptual habits and categories of a small group of people who lived in the western Eurasian steppes more than five thousand years ago.