The number of theories floating around about Language are prodigious, even by the grant-induced profligacy of modern academic opinion.
Well, it all started by us imitating birds and animals, says one theory. It really started when men began living in groups, says another. Might be, but Man didn’t learn to speak until he discovered God and ritual, adds a third. That’s not it, it has to do with mother-child bonding, says a fourth. Of course not, it’s all neuro-muscular; it began with the facial muscles and the tongue.
The more widely followed of the newer theories posit some sort of gene, a patch, a point, in mind-brain space. We are not sure where it is, when or how this center came alive, or why on earth it did. But this mysterious center is where it all started. [Only a Professor lost in language would not see the deeply religious origin of such views.]
You can’t get to the ‘Origin’ of Language, an idea deeply embedded in a linguistic-understanding of Self and World, using Language.
If you do, you will build fine elegant models of the ‘Origin of Language’ and write expansive tomes [the most recent one I saw in a bookstore clipped 600 pages]. But it has nothing at all to do with the origin of Language.
If you try and not let your sophistication-gene get reflexively activated, you’ll see that the above penetrating review of language is itself entirely in language.
All in language, including this line about it being all in language. The Self-Loop, all over again.
Not-Two 