The Body
| Lurking behind the process of language acceleration,
from its dim origins through the period of development up to the present, is physiological
reality. The body, to some extent, determined the language and the speed. To what extent?
We don’t know. It seems likely that our physiology, both the macro (muscles, bones,
etc.) and the micro (neurology), played a large role in the way language arose and
developed, including its initial speed. What if there was originally a very close, critical relationship between language as it arose and the physiology in which it arose, rather like the soil which gives rise to a plant? Who knows what roots and tendrils of language reach deep into our own physiology and into our evolutionary past? For the sake of this little thought experiment, let us assume that such connections exist, and are deep and complex and old. |