EL ORIGEN DEL LENGUAJE

Por: EPICURO

El origen del lenguaje no se estableció por convención, sino que la propia naturaleza del hombre, que en cada pueblo experimenta sentimientos y recibe impresiones particulares, exhalaba el aire de forma personal bajo el impulso de cada uno de aquellos sentimientos o impresiones, y también según las diferencias producidas por la diversidad de los lugares habitados por los pueblos. Más adelante, y de común acuerdo, cada pueblo estableció sus expresiones particulares para poder comprenderse mutuamente con mayor claridad y concisión. Y, cuando un experto introducía una noción desconocida, le atribuía un nombre determinado por la pronunciación que el instinto natural le indicaba, o bien elegido por una razón que escogía el motivo más poderoso para adoptar aquella denominación.

Fuente: Epicuro. (1994). Obras. (Trad. Montserrat Jufresa). Barcelona. Altaya.   

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WHAT'S THE MORAL SENSE?

By Mark Twain

I was thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of the jail was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we were in the jail. We were in the torture-chamber, Satan said. The rack was there, and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern or two hanging on the walls and helping to make the place look dim and dreadful. There were people there -and  executioners- but as they took no notice of us, it meant tha we were invisible. A young man lay bound, and Satan said he was suspected of being a heretic, and the executioners were about to inquire into it. They asked the man to confess to the charge, and he said he could not, for it was not true. Then they drove splinter after splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain. Satan was not disturbed, but I could not endure it, and had to be whisked out of there. I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward my home. I said it was a brutal thing.

¨No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it, ¨ and he went on talking like that. ¨It is like your paltry race -always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing- that is monopoly of those with  the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflcting it -only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive the Moral Sense desgrades him to the bottom layer of the animated beings and is a shameful possession.

Taken it: Mark Twain, Dover Publications. 2014. Págs. 481-482