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ONE GLOTTOGENETIC THEORIES AND RESEARCH: A Brief Sketch The evolution of language is coterminous with the evolution of Homo. Language is a modeling device available to humans alone. (Sebeok 1985a: 366) Since the dawn of recorded history, human beings have had an abiding fascination with the origins of things-the universe, life, themselves. This is reflected, for instance, in the fact that virtually all of the world's cultures have composed myths to explain their roots. But nowhere has this need to know been more manifest than in humanity's quest to understand why and how the capacity to speak originated. Language has always been universally felt to constitute the feature that, more than any other, sets humans apart from the other species. Thus, it is easy to see why the subject of its origin and evolution has always received, and continues to receive, so much keen attention. Two decades ago, a bibliography compiled by Hewes (1974) contained some ten thousand entries on this topic published from antiquity to the present century. Behind this acute interest one can easily discern the conviction that if we were ever able to solve the enigma of glottogenesis, then we would possess a vital clue to the mystery of life itself. Throughout the centuries the debate on language as the distinguishing attribute of humanity has often focused on whether it was a gift from a divine source or a unique accomplishment of the human mind. The former has been, of course, the traditional view held by most religions. The latter has been the point of view espoused by Western science and secular philosophy , and it traces its roots to ancient Greece, where the term for "speech"-Iogos-designated not only articulate discourse but also the rational faculty underlying and inhering in speech. As Harris and Talbot (1989: ix) have remarked, for the Greeks it was logos that differentiated 2 VIeo, METAPHOR, AND THE ORlGIN OF LANGUAGE "humanity from all living species," and it was logos that provided "the basis for the Classical definition of the human being as the rational animal." As Roger Brown (1986: 435) has aptly put it, "most early contributions to the origins question were transparently motivated by a desire to establish the essential nature of man as either Godlike or animal-like." Paradoxically, the debate pitting a strictly religious against a purely rational account of glottogenesis could have crystallized only within the context of a highly rational and advanced culture, as was the ancient Greek one. But there really is no compelling reason to view these two perspectives as necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive. In the model of the human mind that Vico proposed, which will be described in the next chapter, they can be seen to emanate from different levels of human cognition-the "theological -metaphorical" and the "human-rational." Each of these mental Gestalts endeavors to gain an understanding of things in its own particular way. Needless to say, the human-rational approach, which seeks to unravel how language was generated (or invented) by the human mind, is the only viable one that a corresponding rational science of glottogenetics can pursue . However, attempts to explain why language and mind are intrinsic to human nature cannot so easily ignore the religious perspective. The seemingly self-evident premise inherent in the Greek viewpointthat language is a human invention-is itself an "invention" of the rational mind. The clever and persuasive "thought experiments" that the Greeks initiated to support the invention theory are transparent products of highly imaginative minds. The main form that these arguments have always taken, from the time of the Greeks onward, is that of logically contrived hypothetical scenarios that aim to draw their audience toward a single inescapable conclusion-that language is an invention of humans alone. The following, which is a paraphrase of one of the oldest and most ingenious ever imagined, illustrates how effective these can be in making their case a convincing one: Picture two married couples who belong to the most highly advanced culture imaginable. Each of the four people have achieved the highest degree of intelligence possible with respect to all the other denizens of their culture. The four are in a boat in the middle of the ocean. Both of the females are pregnant, and it so happens that they give birth at exactly the same instant to two healthy babies. As soon as the babies see the light of day, the four adults fall overboard and drown. This means that...

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