Early Thought Patterns

PRELUDE

One can posit that it requires as much ingenuity to devise a language as it requires to learn it at one's mother's knee; that the development of a written form of a language must devolve upon a need to communicate something quite specific to someone not present or to remind oneself of something one might otherwise forget. These positations bring with them the recognition that intelligence was not lacking to our early progenitors, but that they were indeed deeply intelligent at the time language began (indeed, before language began,--or there would have been no need for it); and that language and the notation of language are two very different considerations, the first prefacing the second by how many millenia we can never know.

In fact, the relationship of what we can assume about language before it was written down and what we know about language after it was written down is both problematic and thorny. We can be sure, for example, that what got written down was of a certain nature: significant rather than off-hand, formal rather than informal, self-conscious rather than naive, serious rather than facetious, denotative rather than connotative. Did people use slang? tell jokes? argue over trifles? tell lies? Can we possibly believe that they did not?

It is not my purpose here to attempt to pinpoint the time when human characteristics came into being. It is clear that the several concentrations of protohuman life would have developed at their own paces, with the various aspects of development in different orders within different groups.