Where did language come from? We find ourselves in situations that bear a strong resemblance to the labyrinthine hallways of evolutionary theory: Plenty of brainy PhD's are more than happy to spin scenarios for smithsonian magazine as to how the grunts and hoots of our lowly monkey ancestors transformed into a complex system of open and predominately immaterial concepts packaged in a dizzying array of meaningless mouth noises. authors like that cave bear woman or movies like the quest for fire attempt to present the idea of the prelingual or semilingual human beings, trying to teach each other to talk around the fire. Well, all that is garbage: it all evolves out of the language oriented mind's attempt to conceptualize (that is, form into language based constructs) the mind of a creature without language. It comes off as ESL for apes. Written language is a slightly more rooted exercise in developmental history since it has left traces behind more than just the end result of what we work with day to day, but then the written is rooted in the spoken so the problems remain. I'm of the belief that there was in fact an original human language, and that it's development was set into motion by a few geniuses who received it as a visionary revelation, probably under the influence of hallucinogenic plants. Of course that's only an opinion. We can rely on nothing more than the knowledge that all the components of all languages seem to display themselves at a fairly fixed developmental point in early childhood. The etymologists will tell us that there is a deep and mysterious accord traveling through language, all the way around, all the way down and all the way back. Once we spoke a common tongue.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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