Language's Value

I just realized that language is an excellent tool for understanding state dependency and value.

I thought "It would be sad to have never learned how to read." as I read a random sign here on the bus. Then I realized that, to a Korean speaker for example, I never did learn how to read, not in the way that I was doing now, casually reading a sign.

This turned into the concept of reading every language, which ultimately found me narratively in Africa, encountering an isolated tribe. In this narrative, their language is only known by a couple/few hundred people on Earth, so it is objectively one of the least useful languages to know in the world, in terms of the odds of another individual encountered knowing it. In this interaction, however, it is the only language of any importance, and knowing it will likely mean the difference between life and death.

Imagining the usefulness of something as a shape refracted through a field, this language's shape went from flimsy and diffuse to clear and sharp, as I moved through my own narrative. As an aside, the change of the shape exceeded the speed of light, much like a shadow can, given that it is a concept. The ability to conceive of this shape is the unseen value of language, as language feels like one of the few aspects of the human experience complex and intertwined enough to create such a shape, allowing it to possess the weight of form in places where less ingrained concepts have none.