The Puzzle of the Origin of Language

The origin of language presents a daunting puzzle due to two key features of discursive intelligence that have won widespread recognition.

First, language and thought are necessarily ingredient in one another. There can be no thinking that does not employ language anymore than there can be linguistic activity that does not involve thought. Individuals may think without communicating, but any thought unexpressed to others is still realized in interior monologue, using words. Conversely, any partaking in language employs meanings that transcend the particularity of imagery and engage thinking. Discourse always has some conceptual content, even if linguistic expression is restricted to individual commands or designation by proper nouns. Every command expresses something that can be performed by others in different circumstances, just as every proper noun refers to something with a reidentifiable selfhood extending beyond a point in space and a moment in time. Universality always enters into language, requiring more than images for its expression.

Secondly, although individuals may think in solitary monologue, no one can discourse inwardly or outwardly unless the meanings invoked have been established in actual interaction with others. Any intelligent individual may create a sign by associating some intuited content with a general representation, abstracted from multiple intuitions and images. Yet even when an individual recollects such an association, that semiotic connection cannot be assured any commonly apprehended significance unless individuals recognize one another making that association. The same proviso applies to any further modification of the content of signs or of their relationships in expressions. Without any intersubjective validation of the bearers and ordering of linguistic meaning, words and propositions cannot attain their own universal, communicable significance, rendering thinking impossible.

Together the unity of language and thought and the intersubjectivity of meaning seem to leave the origination of language an unfathomable mystery. After all, how can individuals engender discourse if all they have to rely upon are pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual resources, such as intuition, recollection, and imagination? How can they possibly institute, let alone recognize intersubjectively valid meanings and syntactic rules?

Any attempt to evade the looming difficulty through divine intervention only begs the question.