Many have heard of the attempts to teach monkeys how to speak. Monkeys, apes, orangs, choose your preferred human precursor. There was one lab that kept at it for many years. I think they were using resus monkeys. They taught the monkeys sign language. The monkeys could sign for food, banana, hug, water, and many other aspects of their life there in the lab. I have no saved references for this, but you can look it up.
The last report I read from the lab was a kind of 'closing up shop' report. "The monkeys had nothing to say."
This was the one result the researchers were not expecting, yet I propose this result is huge, and should be extolled abroad. It smacks of the null result from Michelson & Morely.
In our centuries-long struggle to understand cause and effect, the researchers were constrained to conceive that animals arose first, and "having something to say" arose later. This is a decent hypothesis. But a hypothesis that, I would argue, was severely challenged by the results of their experiment. The only way for them to continue testing this hypothesis is to get different species - maybe the great apes have something to say, maybe it is just the Resus species that has nothing to say.
If anyone has spent time with a very young human baby, then you have directly perceived the opposite situation. The young human has so much more to say that it has the way to speak. This continues for years. As the human baby learns language, it is *always* behind the curve - always has much, much more to say than it has the words for. You might still feel this way about your ability to put into words what it is you want to say.
Reversing the causality, I propose that language arose because of the need to say things - not the other way round. Certainly if you have read any Noam Chomsky you know that there are many levels from the cellular, to the brain structures, to the timings of the abilities to learn languages, that are really completely unexplained from the usual bottom-up neo-Darwinian paradigm. In other words, no one who thinks that blind matter somehow created the ability to speak can explain how your 4-year old can speak both English and Japanese and on a dime switch between them according to whether she is speaking to you or to her Japanese nanny.
Getting back to the "language arose because of the need to say things". This has several levels of instantiation for all of us. We all have gone through the early years of learning to speak one or more languages. Generally none of us can remember that phase. Why not? Probably because most of our describable memories are formed in a spoken language - so we cannot recall in a spoken form the learning of a language.
And, this general feeling that I have more to say than I know how to say extends out through many parts of ourselves. Why can't I say to my wife those things that I know she would love to hear? Why can't I explain my mushroom trip to anyone? Why can't I explain to myself later in the day those clear feelings I had when I woke up and knew that there was nothing really to worry about? Our human condition is one of vast possibilities being plunged into coarse, dark matter. We feel there is much more to be said than we can say. We already know much more than we will even explain. The many languages we use are all just playing catch up to something in us.
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