I'm hoping to get some good discussion and insight on the evolution of language. I have basic ideas about the subject expressed in what follows, but I'd like to get some greater detail that might give me more clarity. If any of you guys can spot major errors in this account, or if you agree, elaborate on some aspect of it, that would be great! Or if you want to amicably argue with me, that's fine too.


The nature of language became entwined with and transformed by technical concepts when it transitioned from representing concepts to someone to representation of something, an object or some such phenomenon in the environment, at which time the endpoint of verbal communication surpassed libido discharge, concordant mutuality or satisfactory behavioral responses and became a matter of correctness. Precision language probably began with quantitative measurement, the standardized approximation of dimensions with detailed visual gauging, hands, feet or mensurational devices, which gave objects more than just conceptual meanings, but also a sort of disanimate conceptual structure, a materialistically causal identity. This type of structural conceptualizing, due to the relatively constant gravitation and additional environmental properties of the planet, proved extremely practical technologically, and materialistic thought implicitly, perhaps even unconsciously, became the foundation for managing the logistics of population growth and eventually civilization, in settlement planning, management of the food supply, and elsewhere.

Soon after the dawn of civilization, technical thinking had ascended to primacy as the fulcrum of human life, though still infused with many spiritual notions, and as writing became a form of speech, expressing the phonetics of verbalization in addition to its initial role as a pictorial schematic for systematically inculcating, inducing and preserving choice conceptual meanings, language grew to be more of a reflective mirror for the non-verbal problem-solving mentality of perception, observation and conception, at least in some social contexts. This conversion of precision thinking, evolutionarily synergized by quantification of the environment, into precision talking seems to have waxed institutional, formative to the construction of overall culture, with the filiation of literature as aesthetic narrative myth into the literary genre of philosophical narrative. Painstakingly crafting speech into lengthy writings provided a venue not only for richer symbolic meaning, but also for the ponderous cerebrations necessary in new efforts to effectively translate the partially unconscious and also at this time unregimented spontaneity of the non-verbal thought process involved in managing material causality into the non-precisional natural language that had organically evolved for both an aesthetic of striking immediacy and, by modern academic standards, a crudely "good enough" representing of concepts, not as an analytical instrument.

Basic grammatical language resembling that of modern humans had likely coexisted in some way with perception, conception, observation and socializing for more than a hundred thousand years prior to the invention of writing, participating to some degree with the natural stimulation of concepts in fellow minds during communicative interactions, but though its forms coordinate with thought, the core mutations of pure natural language unfold partly independent of cognition, and features of verbal expression can transform rapidly whenever populations separate or a distinct sub-culture develops, even one as small-scale as a single family. Words blend, vocabularies expand or contract, sound production undergoes all kinds of phenotypic drifting, a phenomenon external to the baseline meanings and functions imposed by ecological adaptiveness and beyond the structural constraints of single minds or society at any given time. Furthermore, speech offers a large dose of pleasure and entertainment for many human individuals regardless of its particular content, attributable to a whole host of causes, and so it can on occasion traject towards maximized linguistic trait expression, its full capacity, via the naturally selecting impact of affect satisfaction and recreational bonding within relatedly emerging frameworks of both social norms and assertings of social distinctiveness. Simply put, humans like language, and so behavior often selects for its enhancement as it evolves.

The most unique characteristic of human language is its creative potential, for the possible formulations accessible to human willpower by way of speech acts are practically unlimited. Humans not only take pleasure in language as a hub of self-meaning and identity, but variability in the instantiation of these highly conceptual pleasures is inexhaustible, and so speech provides a conduit to the diversifying of intentional behavior. Communicators innovate expression, these novel expressions continually shake up social arrangements in a way that gives not only verbalization but also the full-bodied experiencing of new thoughts, feelings and instincts a niche, and human nature reinvents itself as it constructs its linguistic architectures, a social phenotype infinitely accommodating to behavioral phenotypes. If we can say anything, we can at least in principle be anything we can want to be.

Of course behavior is influenced by many additional causes besides linguistic formativity, factors of environment, brain structure, perception, most of which are at least fractionally unconscious and which all involve constraints: what we want to be exists within boundaries partially outside of our purposeful control. So even as we intentionally create our world by arranging, rearranging, remaking society with the license afforded by our love of and tolerance for language use, our enriching cultures of behavior, even sometimes extremely new niches, can ossify into conventional rigidity, becoming foundational to human life, so that certain behavioral/cognitive archetypes such as the shaman, the warrior, the chief, the artist, the healer, take effect as human society with its linguistically platformed malleability evolves, supra-self psychological phenotypes traditionalized in categories of practice - war, religion, authority, etc.


If anyone troubled to read that, tell me your opinions on this topic!