This is a short essay that I wrote for English class. The assignment was to tell what famous person you would like to spend the day with, and what you would hope to get out of the experience. I couldn't really think of any historical person, so I sort of improvised. :-)
If I could spend a day with any person, in all of history, I would like to spend it with the creator of language. No one knows who this was; though the religion, myth, and legend of many cultures lay claim to the Speaker, History holds him secret to herself. The Speaker left behind no fossil words to mark her passing, no telltale sign of who she was, to be found by some future archaeological dig.
Perhaps he was not even one individual, this Speaker. It is possible that she gave birth to language in many different places, many different times. It may well be that once the brain evolved to a certain size, a sufficient level of complexity, speech became inevitable. Or perhaps there was only one Speaker, one lone poet who simply had to share the beauty he saw in the morning sunrise, or the majesty of the stars on a moonless night. Did this gift of the Speaker become the DNA of all the words to follow? or was language our destiny-an inevitable consequence of being human?
I want to know! I want to know who this magician was who conjured that first word from thin air. What spark of inspiration led this Speaker to realize that a color could be described with a sound-that movement of lips and tongue could explain thoughts and feelings? I want to hear those first words as they burst forth from a throat that had never known speech. Were they rough hewn and harsh to the ear, or did she polish them long in heart and mind before releasing them on the world? I want to know if the first words of our kind were practical-something to aid in the hunt, directions on gathering food? Or were they the whispered endearments of a mother to a frightened child? Perhaps words of passion exchanged between lovers? Were the first words of the Speaker a war cry to encourage his men in battle, or were they offerings of peace given to chance met strangers? I want to know if this seed planted by the Speaker was slow to take root, a word or two a generation, a sentence a century; or did that first spark strike a raging fire that sent the Speaker and her people rushing forth in a frenzy of naming? This thing that flies is bird, this that runs is deer, this trembling that overtakes me alone in the dark-this is fear! I want to know!
All of these questions (and a host of others) would cause me to seek an audience with the Speaker. From my time with him I would hope to gain some understanding (however small) of how we came to be who we are, and perhaps from that divine some clue as to where we may be headed. It seems to me that language shapes us, body and spirit, just as much as we shape language. How different would we be if we had no word for war? Would we still be human if we had no word for love?
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