Much has also been made of the inherent propensities for language

which seem to be specific only to humans, without ever stating exactly what these properties are, much less how they are transmitted. I’d probably estimate that language is more of an invention that an inheritance, but that something is likely inherited that underlies language, probably the logic or causality of it. In Asian languages ‘here’ and ‘now’ are frequently variations of the same word, sound, morpheme, phoneme, whatever, as are ‘then’ and ‘there’, so maybe that sort of equivalence and general space-time coordination is inherent. Maybe the sentence structure of subject-verb-object is the ‘innate idea’ of language that’s inherited, regardless of how long it’s taken some languages to make that explicit. The central idea of an ‘I’ acting on ‘them’ is easily intuited, but the idea of a ‘they’ acting on ‘them’, rather than a ‘them’ somehow attracting the attentions of another, may be equally inherent, at least in this expansive phase of the Big Bang universe. During the Big Squeeze, if everything we experience happens all over again except in reverse order, then logic may indeed be similarly reversed, and guns may indeed suck the bullets out of bodies, with no apparent violation of causality. Nevertheless, all this may very well be the first thing a child learns in this world, even before speech, but not inherited. Language is an invention. Though perhaps bound to happen, hominids were nevertheless without it for most of their history, as they proceeded to tame fire, use tools, and bury their dead.

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