The Opening Volley

The concept of language operating in a four dimensional matrix may not be new. It certainly isn't a new way of explaining how language works or how it comes to be what it is in the minds of human speakers. It is very true that modern technology and general wide-spread literacy makes us think that language is what's in the newspapers and magazines and books. However, that is wrong.
     Language is and always has been the noises that come out of our mouths. Even back when the Sumerians first started recording their language on clay tablets, some ten thousand years ago, language was sound. Fortunately modern humans have been able to decipher the codes of the Sumerian writing system and through that and the continued Sumerian writings over time have come to see how the Sumerian language developed & became more powerful.
     But language is and always has been the noises that come out of our mouths.
     Language is also the sound that goes in our ears and it is at that point that the true mystery of language begins.
     While it is true that millions of neurons and millions of muscle fibers are involved in making any language sound come out of our mouths, it is the way that language as sound becomes thought in the mind of the listener that is most mysterious.
     We know that there are four sections in the brain that seem to be tied to language comprehension. These sections of the brain are part of the production of speech and in understanding what we hear. The process by which noises in the environment become thoughts is really unknown. It involves neurons, yes, and it involves neurons that are not common property to other animals, particularly animals outside of the primate group. In this we are lucky to have living examples of our evolutionary forebears available to humans to see how this all works. And it's obvious from the research that human language and the vocalizations of primates are connected and connectable.
     But the so-called "lower primates" that end up in research institutes and testing cages are proof of the singular audio nature of language. We have in the recent past taught chimps to use keyboards with symbols to communicate their desires or to answer our questions, but once away from those keyboards, chimps vocalize. We humans built the keyboards; the chimps have just learned the trick of using them and they have learned that trick only recently.
     Chimps & other primates show us that language is simply a bunch of noises, controlled food barks, warning calls and other auditory markers that have been part of the evolution of life on this planet since the first audio receptors showed up in the dawn of life on this planet over 650 million years ago.
     Humans have been barking, grunting, making political speeches and preaching from the pulpit for barely a tenth of that time. Since those early barks, we have developed a wide variety of language skills and learned the power of language as a tool to direct social and intellectual growth, change and decay. We have figured out how to sell each other and how to sell each other things we may not really need. We have figured out how to make people kill, how to make people sit down and talk and how to make people think that they have imaginary friends who will protect them from imaginary evils. We are so sure of ourselves because of language that some even think that there are others like us – gibbering away – across the galaxy and throughout the universe.
     We have confused language for literacy and have decided through language that we are the pinnacles of creation. We have learned a lot about using language.

The facts are contrary.

We are highly intelligent animals with reflective consciousness and a huge capacity for inferred knowledge and memory. At the same time we are monstrously powerful animals with a mean streak that runs so deep that we have forgotten that we are just animals.
     Within that construct exists the language artifact. It is an artifact because it is a symbolic tool that clearly defines our species. We know of no other animal with our communications skills and we know that because our communications skills have isolated us from the rest of the animals.
     Language as an artifact exists as a matrix of four dimensions. The three most easily visible are sound as individual phonemes, sound as units of meaning or morphemes and the collection of morphemes into structures that communicate meaning & action. The fourth dimension is time.
     Languages change over time by changing the operation of the three physical dimensions. The sound systems of languages change and with those changes come changes in morphology, which leads to changes in syntax – in the way sentences are formed and words are collected into meaningful utterances – which change the languages themselves.
     Thinking of language as an artifact similar to a stone tool or a straight razor or a laser surgical instrument recognizes the simple fact that language has become our most fluid and most easily mistaken tool. Recognizing that the passing of time changes language just as it changed the stone blade on its way to becoming a surgical instrument requires that we recognize the way that language extends through time in the same way that DNA extends through time in the record of life and the evolution of life on this planet.
     Such a cognitive leap is necessary in order to understand just what we have been doing for the past six million years as animals traveling through time while language developed within us and changed the world around us. Once we take that cognitive leap we will recognize that this is our last evolutionary step.
     Genetics and natural selection have brought us to this point in time as animals on a small planet in the middle of nowhere special. Language has brought us to this point as conscious, thinking animals who are just now coming to grips with the simple truth of existence. That truth demands that we face the ultimate challenge: we are here because, at some point in the dim past, someone avoided being lunch. Being able to think that and to recognize that demands that we see an overarching, ultimate fact.
     We are here because the goal of life is to keep the DNA around. Now the DNA has a voice and we are it. We can go no further. We have out-evolved our place in the physical world and it is only language that keeps us around.
     If tomorrow we were to suddenly fall mute, all of our grand ideas and thoughts, our music and literature and science and philosophy and our superstitious belief in divine beings would disappear like dust in the wind. We would return to being the animals we always have been. But without language, we would never again understand how the stone tool became the surgical instrument.

Then even the stone tool would be useless.