“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in Philosophical Investigations . Human beings will not be able to interpret an unknown language without shared human behaviour as a system of reference. Wittgenstein developed the concept of ‘language game’ to show that the ‘speaking’ of a language was part of an activity or form of life that gave language its meaning. Words and actions are woven together; language does not reflect reality, it is part of reality. Since lions and humans do not share activities or forms of life, there cannot be a mutually intelligible language.
