Imagine if we could share thoughts directly. You could think of something and show that thought to me, and I could keep it among my thoughts. Then misunderstandings caused by language wouldn't exist, we wouldn't struggle to find the right words, and expressing ideas would be effortless.
At the same time, our privacy would be breached because thoughts are deeply personal, social filters would be out of the window (it would probably be best not to share your unfiltered thoughts with your boss), and our sense of individuality would be mostly lost.
One could argue that this might be interesting to experience once or twice purely out of curiosity, mainly because of the no misunderstandings aspect. However, it wouldn't be great to be in that dynamic for long, as language is one of the main aspects of being human.
The reality is that we cannot transmit thoughts as they are. I cannot take one of my thoughts and give it to you. The best I can do is to transform it into language, let it travel in your direction, and wait for you to transform the language I used back into thoughts.
There is infinite richness in how we can combine sounds, words, and phrases to express almost any possible thing we can think of, real or not, related to the most concrete science or the most abstract art.
Our collection of vowels and consonants let us produce sounds that others can recognise. The wide range of vocabulary available to us let us conceptualise our most outlandish ideas. The flexibility and variety of word combinations in any language let us create an immense number of utterances with which we can express virtually any thought.
When thoughts are carried in a language vessel to a listener, they decode the message through the same system of words and rules that the speaker used to encode it in the first place. The thoughts appearing on the listeners mind won't be exactly the same as the ones that were transmitted, but they will be very close.
It's a wonderful thing that we can communicate using language, that a group of people share a map of sounds and words that correspond to specific meanings, a system so efficient and organic that we use it unconsciously.
After all, the impossibility of sharing thoughts as thoughts might be a good thing, as this is what led us to come up with language. Culture, experience, perspective, personality, mood, and other elements attach themselves to language every time it's used, making it not only a fundamental means of communication, but an intrinsic part of human nature.
