Language Runs Deep in Our Species
There are over 7,100 spoken and written languages today, but which is the oldest? What about the oldest extinct language?
Back before cell phones were standard, my friends and I used to write each other notes during class and exchange them in the hallways between bells. The boys thought it was great fun to intercept these hallway exchanges and read the note’s contents.
To get around this annoyance and privacy violation, my friend Sarah and I made up a code by replacing each letter of the alphabet with a made-up symbol to make our notes unreadable to anyone but us — and it worked. It only took about a week for me to read Sarah’s coded letters as easily as if they were written in English.
I wish learning another language were as easy for me as learning Sarah and my made-up code. But alas, try as I might, my brain becomes an untenable jumble, unable to keep languages straight, and I end up mixing and matching them instead. Still, as a writer, I’m fascinated with language and have often wondered what the first language was. So, I finally decided to do something about my curiosity, and this is what I found.
