Speaking technically about the production of human speech, the quantum would be the phoneme, the linguistic definition for a unit of sound. Words, after all, are composite objects and should therefore not be considered quantum: in written language, they are composed of letters, and in spoken language, they are composed of phonemes.
But that wasn't what the OP was asking, or at least not how I interpreted the question. The question was whether thought should be considered the mechanism/substrate underpinning human language. My comment was about the relationship between thought and language, about which of those shapes the other, and to what extent they should be considered independent or universal.
Yes, when we (adults) reflect on how we talk, we tend to form opinions and meanings in our head before we produce sentences. So that might lead us to conclude that thought informs language, and not the other way around. Yet children learn to speak before they learn to think, at least that's the prevailing theory in child development studies. So then "the idea" cannot be the quantum of language because it is only true for adults who have already learnt both.
Then we also have evidence from cultures like the one in the article, which shows that when a language is missing certain concepts (numbers in this case), the adults who grew up in that language also lack the abstract mental capacity associated with it (counting in this case). The blanket statement "the idea is the quantum of language" implies that ideas are universal concepts, yet the evidence we have shows that ideas are shaped by one's childhood language.
So, to reiterate my point: language and thought are most likely two interdependent processes, each of which shapes the other. The more interesting question is whether we should really consider them as separate processes, or whether "thought" is just a manifestation of an internal dialog with ourselves, in which "ideas" are the langauge.
But that wasn't what the OP was asking, or at least not how I interpreted the question. The question was whether thought should be considered the mechanism/substrate underpinning human language. My comment was about the relationship between thought and language, about which of those shapes the other, and to what extent they should be considered independent or universal.
Yes, when we (adults) reflect on how we talk, we tend to form opinions and meanings in our head before we produce sentences. So that might lead us to conclude that thought informs language, and not the other way around. Yet children learn to speak before they learn to think, at least that's the prevailing theory in child development studies. So then "the idea" cannot be the quantum of language because it is only true for adults who have already learnt both.
Then we also have evidence from cultures like the one in the article, which shows that when a language is missing certain concepts (numbers in this case), the adults who grew up in that language also lack the abstract mental capacity associated with it (counting in this case). The blanket statement "the idea is the quantum of language" implies that ideas are universal concepts, yet the evidence we have shows that ideas are shaped by one's childhood language.
So, to reiterate my point: language and thought are most likely two interdependent processes, each of which shapes the other. The more interesting question is whether we should really consider them as separate processes, or whether "thought" is just a manifestation of an internal dialog with ourselves, in which "ideas" are the langauge.