Language II

Just as living tissue has an identity (as dog, rhododendron, Aunt Mary...or bone, neuron, chloroplast) that is not intrinsic to the cell, words have roles aside from their dictionary definitions. It may be a noun, and if a noun it may be the subject, direct object, indirect object, of the sentence of which it is a part, which sentence has a significance beyond the meaning of the word. Furthermore, the word is a word in a particular language. And of course the word is really only a puff of air, a squiggle on paper, a series of 1's and 0's in a hard drive which also have no intrinsic value at all. Just like the DNA in a cell, a phoneme can express itself in any number of ways. Those ways may be finite in number but genes are the means by which every form of life on earth is transcribed into a living, breathing thing, just as that finite set of phonemes is responsible for every language humans have ever spoken.
As the terrestrial gene pool is shared among multiple creatures spanning generations, humanity's languages are shared among individual speakers spanning generations. Like genes, language is used to transform the material of the planet. Unlike genes, language has no true material existence, although material people are required to generate the language that turns clay into bricks and bricks into houses in the same way proteins are needed to transform the chemistry of the earth into cells and cells into livers. Except when it stops working properly we don't give much thought to our livers, but livers too have a significance beyond the materials from which they are composed. In Air and Angels, John Donne said,

..But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too..

And what exactly are the works of man other than words that have taken limbs of flesh? First comes the thought, the idea, the will, a dream, then theories are devised, plans made, activity organized, and the material of the planet is transformed into something that did not previously exist. All this would be impossible without language.
Complex social order does seem possible without language, as in ants, bees, termites, unless you want to label the sharing of information via pheramones language. It may very well fit some definitions of language, in which case you could say that language does not depend on the medium it uses. If we gain knowledge of extraterrestrial life we may find that it does not depend on the materials we are used to- carbon, water, oxygen, nitrogen- but expresses itself in entirely unforeseen ways. Such is the stuff of science fiction.
As it is, our human language is such a commonplace part of our existence we seldom think how marvelous it truly is. One of the most marvelous things about it is that it is not under any sort of central control, not even in France which has an academy dedicated to maintaining the purity of the language. Words and phrases may spontaneously erupt from who knows where and spread through the speech community like a virus, and a few years later they may disappear just as quickly. Conversely, speakers of Indo European languages who have been separated for thousands of years and thousands of miles, cut off from each other by geological and political barriers, retain words in common. The classical language of India, a country separated from western Europe by oceans, mountains, deserts, hostile political groups, and a vastly different climate, is called Sanskrit, a word easily understood in any language with a Latin heritage. 'San' means holy, as in saint, and 'skrit' means writing, as in script. Sanskrit, as classical Latin is to some extent an artificial language, refined and promoted by a priest-like class of scholars. Latin was for centuries after the demise of Roman power a common language for educated Europeans, and it would be hard to overestimate the importance to English of all those Latin words we have adopted. They came into our language by many routes, but without them we wouldn't be able to carry on the business of an advanced culture.
It is estimated that there exist 6000 languages on earth and attempts are being made to reconstruct a primordial language from which all are descended. This is based on the assumptions that language first appeared only once and that remnants of this speech can be recovered at this late date. Whether or not these assumptions are true, the effort should be hugely rewarding. However, I suspect that human communities are perfectly capable of entirely replacing the words of its language within a few generations. People are demonstrably capable of combining elements of several languages into new constructs variously called creoles, pidgins, jargons with which speakers of dissimilar languages use to communicate with each other, complete with simplified grammar and hybrid vocabulary. If the example of Chinook Jargon is any indication, cultures alien to each other have more difficulty hearing and pronouncing unfamiliar sounds than learning unfamiliar words and grammatical structures. Sometimes I think of English as pidgin French. Hybrid words, simplified grammar, and a very quick evolution characterize English. Our most common words are usually Germanic in origin, while our huge lexicon incorporates words from Latin, some directly, some indirectly through French. No child has any inkling of any of this as he learns to speak and yet he unknowingly learns the history of Rome at the same time.
Nobody set out to invent Chinook Jargon, or English. They evolved spontaneously, one as a trade language along the northwest Pacific coast the other as a way for a new set of overlords to communicate with a conquered people.
How has English been shaped? to a large extent it was shaped by literacy and the printing press. Even today England is rich with dialects. Londoners, Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, and Oxford dons are easily identifiable by their speech, but standard English comes from the London dialect Chaucer wrote. A few centuries later it was an instrument worthy of Shakespeare who transformed it. What astrologer or prophet could have foreseen that the son of a glover in provincial Stratford on Avon would be responsible for massively reshaping the English language? The king didn't appoint him to the task. Entirely on his own volition he wrote his dramas, comedies and histories to be performed on stage in front of an audience of riotous Londoners. For money. And ever after his phrases and vocabulary have become the common property of all English speakers. In a very real sense Shakespeare still lives, and we live in the word universe he created. But not even Shakespeare affected the cadences of our daily speech as much as the Authorized King James translation of the bible. Is it mere coincidence that as our culture has abandoned its reverence for the bible its literature has become impoverished?
This brings us to another point. The language, like the greater culture which is largely constructed with language, is bigger than any one person can contain. An infant is born with a predisposition to learn Language in the abstract, but with no knowledge of the specific language he is about to learn. Without that language he can never become a fully developed member of human society. Literally, a person without language is not a human being. For that matter, without language there would be no human beings. Oh, there might be human-like apes prowling the forests, gathering fruit, digging roots with sticks, killing the occasional unlucky wild goat for meat. But they would not be human, they would be another variety of chimp.
It seems that sometime in human history language itself became part of the environment to which we adapted and that it was this adaptation that changed us from being another type of chimp to being human beings who rule the world. From being a means of signaling the presence of a predator, or the location of ripe berries language allows us to learn about the lives of Abraham and Sarah who have been dust for perhaps three thousand years. Roughly a hundred and twenty generations separate us from Abraham and Sarah but their story is now read in every part of the world. Where in the bone and tissue of the larynx is there any hint of such a capability? One of the fundamental tenets of science is that from an initial set of parameters the entire history and content of the universe should theoretically, if not practically, be predicted. And did the larynx cause language to evolve- or did language cause the larynx to evolve? The former is the neo- Darwinian theory, the latter closer to the Lamarckian view.
My view is that there is a dialectic at work, a back and forth, as in the grammar of language versus the words, or the concrete versus the theoretical, or the ideal versus the concrete. But there must be more to it. Is there some unacknowledged force of nature, something akin to the electro-magnetic, that draws us on? We have a ready made vocabulary for this sort of thing, but words like soul and spirit turn scientists blue in the face, and in any event they have been appropriated by druids, wiccans and suchlike. So I will call it a latency force. Since I just thought of it I'll have to give it some thought.