"I am the one who blows like the wind, embracing all creatures. Beyond the sky, beyond this earth, so much have I become in my greatness."
Speech; Rig Veda 10:125.
Few causal paths are as weirdly remote as the human one to language... This is what one would expect from this fact alone, that - despite its utility once you have it - only one single species among millions has found its way to it. Yet those who search for its origin keep looking for robust selection pressures for language, and that means barking up the wrong tree... In fact the path to it is a succession of rather frivolous steps, each one attested in other species, but each one rare, and hardly one of them is to be found among those normally discussed in language origins scenarios. It is only by traversing them all in succession - and none of them demand the next step, as the animal examples show - that you end up, without ever having intended it, as a language-talking species. The vanishing multiplicative probabilities of that singular path are what brought us here, and it is not possible to even imagine the unlikelihood of such an outcome till you retrace the path that produced it. Doing so casts language itself in an unfamiliar light. It is not quite what we tend to think it is, basing ourselves solely on having been born into it...
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