WTF is a language?

This, believe it or not, is one of the major problems that linguistics hasn't yet solved. To this day, people are still having pretty fired-up arguments about it.

Questions such as “Is the basic structure of language an innate Universal Grammar or is it a socially learned behavior structured by the functions to which language is put in human interaction?” still stir up a debate among scholars.

Consider the following: Basque?(euskara) is a language spoken in the majority of the Basque Country, a region west of the?Pyrenees,?that comprehends parts of northern?Spain?and southwestern?France. What’s cool about this language is that, linguistically speaking, Basque is a?language isolate : it is unrelated to any other existing languages. But also, most linguists agree that it is the oldest living language in Europe .

Let's put that into scale: the oldest language that is still active, alive and thriving in Europe, has no relationship to any of the languages that surround the area in which it is spoken, but also holds no relation to any language on the face of the Earth. Wild stuff.

I could go on and on about neighboring stuff like Morse code, programming languages, musical notation, or even how people call nonverbal communication “body language” (and rant about why that is so, so, so wrong). But I won’t.

The point is that the earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pā?ini, who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language.

For over two and a half millennia, some of the smartest people on the planet have been studying a field that centers around a thing no one agrees on.

So, is everything lost? Not at all.

Not knowing what defines the essence of a language is no barrier for us to actually use them all. It doesn't even stop us from recognizing which things are a language and which aren't. We're just not agreeing on the criteria.

But the wisdom nugget here is that, when blocked over definitions, criteria and specs, maybe ask yourself "could this thing be sort of like a language in that sense?" and if it turns out that you have enough to go on, just use the thing and see if it solves what it’s meant to solve.

I mean, what if it works?

A t-shirt that says: Over-nouned, under-verbed

Last week, I started one of my favorite processes ever: helping someone quit their job.

While that is an accurate way of portraying what my friend and I are doing, in reality, the process is more targeted toward helping her find her purpose, gain a better understanding of what really moves her, what she likes and dislikes, what does ‘work/life balance’ look for her and, getting a bit ambitious, helping her get a better grasp on her definition of happiness.

Be that as it may, yes, in the end, she will quit her job.

On this first stage of her journey –one that I’ve traveled many times, and with many different people over the years– our session was centered around goals. See, what I’ve learned is that most people get frustrated with their careers because they define their goals poorly, which leads to poor results.

The best formula I came across to reframe the question around goals comes from writer and artist Austin Kleon , who nonchalantly throws around a very compelling statement:

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.

In other words, we should strive to let go of the thing that we're trying to be (the noun), and instead focus on the actual work we need to be doing (the verb).

I’ll give you time to pick up your blown-up brains after that demolition-bomb of a quote.

..

Ok, we can move on now. This is not an unusual problem. Most people struggle with defining goals. In fact, we decided long ago to kickoff every project we do with a Discovery Workshop, because sometimes our clients haven’t defined their goals, sometimes they have defined them too long ago and haven’t revisited them, and other times they have, but not in a very explicit way that allows them to communicate clearly and purposefully.

So here’s an invitation to do your own Discovery Process. It is a proven game-changer.

In case you missed it

Once there was a fabulous thread on Tumblr, about a school that adopted “I hear, I see, I learn” as its motto, and was then forced to change it because the Latin translation was “audio, video, disco”.

You might be thinking, why was that a problem? And if you do, that’s because you have a weird sense of humor, and probably the reason you’re reading this newsletter. We love you :)

In the truest Tumblr spirit, discussion ensued about after someone contributed that, in fact, the Latin word for “I learn” was “Scio” and not “Disco”. Boo-hoo.

But then, the freshly killed buzz was brought once more to life, contending that “Disco” is actually the first person active singular, and “Scio” means something closer to our notions of 'knowing' or 'understanding'.

We are no experts in Latin but, as we usually say around these parts, never let the truth ruin a good story.

See you on the next edition of the Newstone, and of course, I’ll be sure to let you know when –and how– my friend quits her job.

This newsletter was put together with love, dedication, (a bit of) sarcasm and not enough time by the minds behind?Sunstone . Do feel invited to share your comments, ideas, suggestions and/or insults with us at?[email protected]