“Language evolved and is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. It is a system of thought” (1), common to all humans. The system is innate and unique for humankind. It might have been created as some kind of brain rewiring that happened to one of our African ancestors.
“[…] we might discover someday that language is like a snowflake, that is, assuming its form by what amount to laws of nature in the simplest possible way. To put it picturesquely, we may discover that language is “designed” to be beautiful but not usable – more prosaically, that it favors computational efficiency over communicative efficiency […].” (2)
The 7.000 or so languages that exist are just different forms of externalization of the language snowflake. They are complex and independent ways of expressing the same organic thoughts.
According to Chomsky, language was not conceived as a means of communication, which is only one of its peripheral functions. That is in this periphery where conference interpreters take action. In our professional context, human language is definitely a communicative tool.
Maybe the interlingual communication which we serve is possible only because the inner language system is the same for all humans. We all share the same, genetically programmed language faculty. Possibly the reason people coming from different realities, speaking different languages can truly understand each other is that deep inside we all have one human language.
