Our languages are symbolic: the sound of a word isn’t related to its meaning. A visual language could instead be literal. You don’t need to invent or learn a word for “bear” if you can show the image of a bear instead.
A simple visual language (no abstract concepts, no tenses, no nesting) probably doesn’t require human intelligence. If an animal can recognize something in reality, then it can recognize that same thing in an image. Thus animals could tell each other about food, predators, locations, and events, and they could coordinate much better, and also try to deceive each other. This language would work across species, since images are universal.
The visual cortex can already “visualize” mental images, so it’s not implausible that it could “project” them externally if it had a projector attached.
A human-intelligence-level language gradually evolved from such beginnings might not use abstract concepts the same way we do. For example, cats and dogs exist and are easy to picture, but the general concept of an “animal” doesn’t have a natural visual representation. Our solution of introducing an arbitrary memorized symbol or word is not an obvious or forced one. And gradual language evolution, keeping some mutual intelligibility with other species, would probably have different constraints and a different result than the rapid evolution of a novel concept that your own sister species cannot understand.
Worth noting that the visual cortex already does project mental images externally using, for instance, the limbs. Human languages around the world make constant use of this, combining speech and other conventionalised modes of expression with depictions like manual gestures. The keyword here is iconicity, when the form of expressions does resemble their meaning (and this is why “our languages are symbolic” is only a very rough approximation of the truth; in actual fact, our languages are indexical, iconic and symbolic, and each of these offers its own constraints and affordances). There is a large literature in linguistics and cognitive science on the forms and functions of iconicity in human communication. And there is good evidence (from archaeology to comparative visual anthropology to linguistics) to think that human-intelligence level-language evolved exactly from such beginnings, featuring a combination of indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs.
Our languages are symbolic: the sound of a word isn’t related to its meaning. A visual language could instead be literal. You don’t need to invent or learn a word for “bear” if you can show the image of a bear instead.
A simple visual language (no abstract concepts, no tenses, no nesting) probably doesn’t require human intelligence. If an animal can recognize something in reality, then it can recognize that same thing in an image. Thus animals could tell each other about food, predators, locations, and events, and they could coordinate much better, and also try to deceive each other. This language would work across species, since images are universal.
The visual cortex can already “visualize” mental images, so it’s not implausible that it could “project” them externally if it had a projector attached.
A human-intelligence-level language gradually evolved from such beginnings might not use abstract concepts the same way we do. For example, cats and dogs exist and are easy to picture, but the general concept of an “animal” doesn’t have a natural visual representation. Our solution of introducing an arbitrary memorized symbol or word is not an obvious or forced one. And gradual language evolution, keeping some mutual intelligibility with other species, would probably have different constraints and a different result than the rapid evolution of a novel concept that your own sister species cannot understand.
Worth noting that the visual cortex already does project mental images externally using, for instance, the limbs. Human languages around the world make constant use of this, combining speech and other conventionalised modes of expression with depictions like manual gestures. The keyword here is iconicity, when the form of expressions does resemble their meaning (and this is why “our languages are symbolic” is only a very rough approximation of the truth; in actual fact, our languages are indexical, iconic and symbolic, and each of these offers its own constraints and affordances). There is a large literature in linguistics and cognitive science on the forms and functions of iconicity in human communication. And there is good evidence (from archaeology to comparative visual anthropology to linguistics) to think that human-intelligence level-language evolved exactly from such beginnings, featuring a combination of indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs.