Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers.Real language is always found in some local variant: English,Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen,when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.
As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups,languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten,languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.
没有语言能力，人类的思想就无法想象，但是纯粹而未分化的语言是哲学家们的幻想。真正的语言总是存在于某些地方性变体中：英语、纳瓦霍语、汉语、斯瓦希里语、布鲁夏斯基语或数千种其他语言。这些语言中的每一种都把说这种语言的人与一个存活了数千年的传统联系起来。一旦在一个人类群体中学会，它就会提供获取大量知识和信仰的途径：当我们思考、倾听、说话、阅读或写作时，这些知识和信仰就会赋予我们力量。我们的语言将我们置于一种文化连续体中，将我们与过去联系起来，并将我们的意义传达给未来的同语者。
作为人类群体的旗帜和徽章，语言也守护着我们的记忆。即使它们是不成文的，语言也是我们保存过去知识的最强大的工具，不时地将知识传递给下一代。任何人类语言都通过提供交流网络将人类社区联系在一起
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
