But was it truly an invention? Or a compulsion?
Perhaps our distant ancestors felt
compelled to find a way to share complex ideas. So they
invented spoken language. They could have invented sign language, as the Neanderthals did in Jean Auel's
Earth's Children novels, e.g.,
Clan of the Cave Bear. Nonetheless both words seem fine to this mediocre linguist and I'm not going to split that hair.
Depends on what needs to be communicated, and by whom. But to me, an inferior language reflects an inferior people—a people whose culture is so narrow and pompous that it will dilapidate a fledging raw talent to extinction. A language is the seat of a society’s culture, affecting directly or indirectly access or obstruction to an individual’s most personal compulsions. The German tongue gave me Nietzsche, the British one, Iris Murdoch—imagine your modern world without Darwin or Freud.
But every population seems quite capable of changing its language to keep up with its cultural advances. The schedule of the first Paradigm Shift from the Paelolithic (hunter-gatherer) Era to the Neolithic (agriculture) was largely the whim of geography: in regions with a north-south axis like Africa and the Americas it was impossible to spread successful ideas about plant cultivation and animal husbandry very far because the species could not adapt to different climate zones, slowing the development of civilization. So in Eurasia with its east-west axis (including North Africa which was on a continuum with Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa), both the Agricultural Revolution and the second Paradigm Shift, the Dawn of Civilization, occurred many thousands of years earlier than they did for the Olmecs and Incas. The languages of Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire were just as sophisticated and just as suitable for the daily lives of their speakers as the languages of the other four civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China) during their considerably earlier Bronze Ages.
I’m not sure I follow: ‘utilitarian’ describing the arts? Perhaps as a theme or a reaction to it, but not as a building block.
That's my point. "Utilitarian" purposes outweigh artistic purposes. Language conforms to Maslow's Hierarchy: first it has to facilitate our survival and security before we start worrying about using it for self-actualization.
You mean the politics of commerce and the commerce of invention as being more important than soul? How depressing.
The soul doesn't have much of a chance to worry about lofty questions unless the body is fed, clothed and protected. I'm not saying that non-utilitarian concerns aren't important, I'm just pointing out an obvious priority. Our ancestors spent a couple of hundred thousand years focusing their lives on survival before their stone age technologies wrested enough control over the environment to leave them time and effort to start producing art and philosophy.
I haven't got the source material on this computer, but the earliest artifacts of artistic expression are less than a hundred thousand years old. This correlates broadly with several key technologies such as cooking--if you've ever tried getting a day's nutrition by chewing up raw meat (without a knife) you'll understand how many hours we save out of our day by cooking it first--hours we can devote to loftier pursuits.
Ah, but here’s the catch: I came here as an infant knowing neither.
Are you saying that as an infant you had already started learning a different language? Or that you learned both simultaneously but your parents established one as the primary language of the household?
Why, in the city of Wanders!
That sounds like a Dutch name to me, but I can't find any city by that name.
Ebonics for me also seems lazy. A throwback to when people were less literate and didn't understand the structural grandeur of language.
You mean the majority of human history? There was no writing until several thousand years ago, and for most of the time since then there was so little written material that most people didn't know anyone who could read and write. Literacy only began to spread after the invention of the printing press and has only been widespread in the West for a couple of centuries. Somehow some very great languages evolved despite that handicap.
If you learn French in school in Alberta, I doubt highly that you will understand the craptacular sputum they hack up through their smoke stained teeth in Quebec.
The French and the Quebecois have little trouble communicating. I suspect considerably less trouble than a man from Birmingham, England and one from Birmingham, Alabama.
In some cases, slang does seem like it dumbs down language, but in some cases it enhances it.
How do you think languages evolve to adapt to evolving culture? Only in countries like France and Germany do scholars or bureaucrats spend their days deciding what new words the "common people" should be allowed to add to their language.
We have to allow a bit of creativity on that front and allow people to mingle with the language a bit or our own English lexicon will become like latin... beautiful in tongue and text, but rarely ever spoken correctly outside of scientific and scholarly circles.
Priests speak the best Latin because they actually speak it. But I'd like to see even a priest speak "correct" Latin at a rave, an off-road motorcycle competition, or a teddy bear collectors' convention.