One view suggests language is a representation of reality that varies from language to language and as a result produces different understandings of reality.
Chomsky's view suggests that language is essentially the same from one language to another language.
You and I talk about flexible meanings in the symbols of language. I think my view is that while the symbols might stay the same meaning changes, gets added to words and it gets taken away from words. Language is a process that moves.
What do Cognitive science people say about language and how we understand things.
What they come up with is an interconnection, sometimes called Global to mean really interconnected, that ultimately defies attempts to define it with structures. That old Austrian Wittgenstein's conviction "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is a tidy axiom. But we forget that synthesizing thought predates the noises of spoken language and we have to work out how to say things and sometimes we have to invent new words, or take on from another language, like "schadenfreude."
God knows where grammar comes from
We humans did not make our vocal cords from scratch, they go back to simpler time 400 million years ago to when we were air breathing fish. A lung fish which had developed folds to prevent water entering our air breathing swim bladders.
