"Perhaps of all the creations of man, language is the most astonishing." (Lytton Strachey)

While I was sitting in the dentist's chair at the V.A. yesterday, Diane, the hygienist said she had asked her mother what was the most helpful thing she could remember in the 20th Century and the answer her mother gave her was "hot water". A strange answer, to be sure, but fully understandable if you think about it. It reminded me of my choice of the light bulb as the "Greatest Invention in the History of the World." Since that blog, I've thought some more about it and decided that I was wrong. The greatest invention was right in front of my eyes...rather in front of my ears. And the answer is "language". Two questions came to mind: How did this language instinct in humans originate? And how did the first language come into being? But, for sure, it was invented!

My Doctorate major was "comparative linguistics". So, I know something about the subject of language. Concerning the origin of the first language, there are two main hypotheses, or beliefs. Neither can be proven or disproved given present knowledge.
1) Belief in divine creation: Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans. The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures. This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language. It can't be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and human society are inseparable. Wherever humans exist language exists. Every stone age tribe ever encountered has a language equal to English, Latin, or Greek.

2) Natural evolution hypothesis: At some point in our evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible. In other words, at some point in time humans developed a language acquisition device. This is not unusual. At some point in time as the human brain became more and more sophisticated, we developed a wheel device, a printing device, a TV device, an internet device, and so on.

Invention hypotheses: Moving on to our second question, if humans acquired the capacity for language either by divine gift or by evolution, then exactly how might humans have devised the first language? There are several hypotheses as to how language might have been consciously invented by humans. Each hypothesis is predicated on the idea that the invention of language and its gradual refinement served as a continuous impetus to additional human mental development. None of the invention hypotheses is convincing and most sane linguists agree that the origin of language is still a mystery. Even so, I am now going to stick to my contention that Language is the greatest human invention, and I don't care what the super delegates might say. Also, if this blog is a little academic, I'm sorry, but I can't keep writing about food, restaurants, luncheons, doctors, shows, aches and pains, etc. At some point I have to cater to Mensa.



Speaking of doctors, aches, and pains, I thought it might be of some interest to my readers to see a picture of my scooter.