While I was doing all this, I was thinking about language (no, I can’t explain the connection either); not any specific language, but, language as a concept. I have heard that Attic Greek is considered to be one of the finest languages through which people have expressed their thoughts. As a Latin apologist, I dispute this. Consider the level of inflection:
Greek: 3 declensions, 5 cases, 3 conjugations, 7 tenses, 3 voices, 4 moods;
Latin: 5 declensions, 7 cases, 4 conjugations, 6 tenses, 2 voices (Latin has its own unique way of dealing with the middle voice, so this is not a limitation), 4 moods.
In addition, ancient Greek has evolved into modern Greek, while Latin has given birth to Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Latin also gave us our alphabet and a plethora of loan words.
I don’t think Latin does too badly, but maybe I’m biased.
But, putting all that aside, I want to look at the miracle of language acquisition, and the very existence of language. Who remembers learning his or her first language? No one! You just absorbed it. Mommy and Daddy didn’t sit you down and start teaching you how to talk. You heard them talking to one another and you just joined in the fun.
“Schlork”. “Fnaxta”. “Scroom”. “Tooter”. Maybe even “Bazinga”! It felt so good to be communicating, even if no one could understand you.
And then—gradually—your languages started to synchronise, and your parents started to say “Schlork”, “Fnaxta”, “Scroom”, and “Tooter”. Only joking! You started sounding like they did (mostly). Possibly, this is when you learnt to swear, and to mispronounce words like “noo-culler”, “stastistics”, and “skellington”.
Consider that, when you learnt your first language, you had no idea what you were doing. You didn’t know what a declension was, or a case, or a subjunctive, let alone a periphrastic. (I’m still not all that sure what a periphrastic is either, but I think it is, for example, “of me”, as opposed to “mine”, which is inflected). You couldn’t even conjugate the verb “to be”; and yet, you learnt to speak your Mother Tongue fluently! If you chose your little friends carefully, you might also, painlessly, have learnt, contemporaneously, someone else’s mother tongue.
I’ve spent much of my life dabbling with languages, with the result that I now know enough of the following languages to get myself into serious trouble with native speakers, perhaps even to cause a war: English, Afrikaans, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Koine Greek, Xitsonga, seSotho , seSotho sa Lebowa, seTswana. siSwathi, isiZulu, isiNdebele, tshiVenda, and isiXhosa. I frequently fail to communicate my thoughts accurately via any of these languages, including English—my mother tongue.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first our mother-tongue we leave.
(sorry, Walter Scott).
All this serves only as a curtain-raiser to what I really want to discuss: The Miracle of Human Language. Please cast your mind back with me to the days before iphones, laptops, television, radio, landline telephones, houses, clothes, and shoes (Yay! No shoes!). Think of the times before reading and writing (yes, and ‘rithmetic). A man was judged by the size of his club, and a woman by the length of her hair. The club was for hunting, the hair for being seduced. (What happens in the cave stays in the cave). Life was so simple then; you were born, you lived, you died. Sic transit gloria hominum.
Then, one day, you are standing on the veranda of your cave, grunting quietly to yourself, when along comes this caveman whom you have always considered a hopeless hunter; he’s a vegan. He always has something to say that you don’t really understand.
Today, he says that he thinks that we ought to be able to record, for posterity, what we have thought, said, and done; our dreams and aspirations; our phenomenological observations; our cogitations on the numinous.
“What’s a posterity?” you grunt, ever on a quest for knowledge.
“No, no”, replies Conan the Librarian. “It’s not a posterity, it’s just posterity, without the indefinite article. It’s an abstract noun, from the Latin. Post means after, which also gives us posterior, which means behind. The idea is that our descendants—those who come after us—will be able to learn something about us; how we lived, who we ate, what we believed, et cetera”.
“Et whattera”?
“Oh, that’s also Latin; it means and the rest”.
Instinctively, you think of him as a cave-nerd, so you hit him on the head with your club.
Okay, immediately there’s a problem. You have, hitherto, communicated by means of a series of non-inflected grunts, so you battle to understand the following words: abstract, ought, able, record, thought, descendants, learn, not to mention all that Latin stuff. Actually, the other words are a bit vague too, and the fact that ought seems to be in the subjunctive mood, and have thought appears to be in the aorist tense escapes you completely for the moment. In the language which you use, it has never occurred to you to consider that, whilst grunt is a noun, it can also be an imperative, especially if followed by an exclamation mark (whatever that is); to grunt is an infinitive; grunting, whilst it appears to be a verb in the present continuous tense (or an imperfect, if used periphrastically), can also be a gerund; gruntingly (if there were such a word) would be a gerundive; and let us grunt (there’s our periphrastic again) is an optative (or cohortative).
Have you ever wondered why the halls of academe have made such a complex and confusing study of something that a child learns from its parents long before learning to read or write? Many humans survive their entire lives without ever taking the slightest interest in periphraxy; some don’t even know the difference between periphrastic, periphractic, peirastic, and peripatetic. I know I don’t.
And yet, we manage to communicate through speech!
I think that this is a miracle.