Language I

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
This is how the Gospel of St. John begins, almost a rephrasing of the first verse of Genesis, which goes, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." God spoke and all we know was created. First came the Thought and then came His Word. The Word, Logos in the original Greek, is a mightier and weightier word than it is in English.
In Genesis much is made of words. We are not told how Adam and Eve came by their names, but we are told that the names of all living things were conferred by Adam while they passed by in a ritual procession. For both Greek and Hebrew it seems there was something momentous, even frightening about words. Perhaps they thought more deeply about such things than we do.
The Greeks went so far as to analyze their language and devise a grammar to describe it, as did the Latins as they acquired the trappings of sophisticated culture. Grammarians in England devised a theory of grammar for their language that mimicked the Greek and Latin theory. Those of us who struggled through the resulting grammar classes (do they still teach grammar in the early grades...or ever?) found out that words not only have meanings in themselves, they have functions which also have names. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs tell us how words function in a sentence, but the more important distinction is between words and grammar. Names are a big deal, as the Genesis story emphasizes, but without grammar nouns, verbs, adjectives, aren't enough to convey much meaning. You can say 'moose,' 'shot,' 'cabin,' 'pajamas,' and various other words but if they are not in the right order we will be puzzled at the meaning intended. Even a native speaker can get the grammar wrong, as in the joke that originated with Groucho Marx: "While I was staying in a cabin out in Wyoming I got up in the morning and shot a moose in my pajamas." Comeback: "If he was wearing my pajamas I would have shot him, too."
All languages have grammar whether or not a science of grammar has been devised for that language, and as the joke shows inattention to grammar can result in unintended hilarity.
The point is that language has two elements, the words themselves, and grammar, or syntax if you prefer. English uses word order to convey ideas not intrinsic to the words themselves, while Latin, Greek, and many other Indo-European languages use inflection. A noun, verb or modifier changes its ending or some other part to indicate who does what to whom. Thus a Latin or Greek verb may take a hundred forms. The system is nightmarish to learn, but has the advantage of precision. The Groucho joke wouldn't work in Latin.
So language is a lot like some other things I have discussed here. There is the thing itself and there is the logic behind it. There is a dog and there is a classification called canis. A dog can be weighed, measured, seen, kicked, it can bite, shed its fur all over your couch, but species is a word that designates a pattern and none of those things can be done to or by a pattern.
It seems that language corresponds to the material world in this way. Words themselves are abstractions, symbols, whether as a sound or further abstracted by symbols on a page or 1's and 0's in a hard drive. Would a rose by another name smell as sweet? I hate to take out the poetry, but a rose would smell the same if we called it an outhouse. (Nevertheless, one of the techniques of spin doctoring is to change the plain word for something into something that will divert attention from a real problem. It works quite well.)
Scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out when and how humans evolved speech, or whether apes, whales, or other creatures also have speech. This requires them to try to define speech, and symbolism seems to be at the root of what distinguishes a warning scream from an arbitrary sound that says, "Leopard in the bushes," as opposed to "Stay away from my banana!" I don't want to get into this controversy. I want to concentrate more on some characteristics of language that I have seldom heard mentioned, and for that human language works best if only because we all have a profound personal knowledge of language whether we have studied grammar or not, or even if we can read.
Staying with the subject of grammar, that Groucho joke points to something interesting. The grammar can be correct while the meaning is false. "The moon is made of green cheese," is a grammatically valid statement that just happens to be wrong. This corresponds to any statement that depends on logic. Often the logic seems impeccable, but the experiment doesn't work.
This leads to the second point. To make any kind of communication it is necessary to have both grammar and words. You can't say anything about "leopard in the bush" by saying "noun, verb understood, preposition, article, noun."
While it may turn out that baboons do have the ability to make such communications with each other, or even to lie about it, only humans have the ability to teach each other through the use of vocalizations alone how to set a trap for a leopard. This is an enormous difference, so enormous that it amounts to a difference in kind not just quantity. Human language is more than just more of the same. And yet there are similarities that should not be ignored. In totality, the story of language has a lot to show us about every other aspect of existence.