Language Origins: An Alternative
Language has always been a curiosity of mine. From the time of knowing no English, to learning to speak it so much in such a short time that the teachers named me parrot. I have always wondered about the value of language and words, after all, it only mattered whether we understood each other or not and words seemed to only complicate things. This curiosity made me ask questions as all curiosity does, most of them stupid but i wondered. What was the first word? Was it ‘I’? What was the first thing we named? ‘God’? Who knows!
And then i stumbled upon a brain teasing clue in memes, that got my curiosity peeking through the curtains, “The brain is the only thing that named itself, everything else in the world, the universe, was named by the brain!” Let your brain process that for a moment.
Every word is a ‘name’!
Religions all seem to agree that speech, language, is a divine gift. That God taught the first ‘Man’, the name of things as proof of his higher standing. While evolutionists have an easier explanation, namely ‘evolution’. While they both may be true, neither was able to slake my thirst. Since divinity is beyond question, it is the one that gives us the ability and scope to ask. So i took it from there.
Consider the first things taught to a child, its names, father, mother, the child’s own. Consider when you call someone. I believe, in the beginning, we knew the names of things and by things i mean everything we lived within, both our nature and nature itself. The trees, the animals, the water, the earth, the sun. I believe the way we named things was not by sitting in a circle around a campfire, while the days hunt of deer roasted over it and deciding together with a vote maybe, to call the deer, deer. But because, the deer responded when called a deer! The mango tree responded when it’s name was called, the earth and the water moved when their names were called. How else to know what to call them if they did not? How else would you know? How else would Moses have parted the sea? X-men to bring down lightning and thunder? How else did the characters in the ‘Last Air Bender’ bend the elements to their will?
“Airbender lol”, right? “These are just fantasy dude”!
But our will lusts for power and there is no greater fantasy!
History/mythology has it that there were some gifted singers who could make it rain by singing a certain Raaga Malhaar. What happened to us? Did we lose the power of calling? Did we lose the names in interpretations? Or did we just… lose their meaning? In our lust did we not misuse, abuse and violate our powers? So much so that we corroded and corrupted the soul? Did we also destroy the soul that exists in all things and now they will not, can not answer? Maybe. Probably.
What is certain though is that, we as human beings, as the special species, have lost much of ourselves. And in our pursuit of power, may be we have lost the greatest power of all, humanity itself!
