There’s a point beyond which origin stories become useless. You don’t, for example, need to know that potato crisps were accidentally created by an irate chef when a customer kept complaining that his potato chips were cut too thick. It’s an interesting bit of information, but it adds nothing to the inherent deliciousness of the chips themselves. Similarly, it is unnecessary to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine to know that Wolverine is a badass — in fact, it is better if you do not, since that movie is unutterably bad.
Etymology, which this column frequently discusses, is the study of how words originate, and how they arrive at their current meanings. At the most basic level, none of this is particularly helpful to your using the language — though it can explain some of the weirder spellings. If you plan to really use language though (particularly if you wish to write), knowing where words came from and what they have meant is invaluable.
But how about the origin of language itself? This must have happened in prehistoric times, since things stopped being prehistoric the minute written language (that we can understand) began to happen, and written language requires some sort of spoken language as well. As a child, I used to imagine a sort of conference of cave persons all grunting out instructions to each other and agreeing that this particular object was to be represented by that particular combination of sounds and that particular shape scratched on the sand with a stick. (I’m not sure why prehistoric men only know verbs and nouns, why they refer to themselves in the third person, or why they are so frequently called Ugg. “Ugg find meat”. “Ugg use club”). How they would have called this conference, worked out what the others meant or developed any sort of democratic process of decision-making without language were questions that escaped me.
Rudyard Kipling (I am in august company) had similar ideas. All of the Just So Stories are origin tales of a sort, but the ones most relevant to this column are How the First Letter Was Written and How the Alphabet Was Made .
Ho w the First Letter Was Written tells the story of Taffy, a Neolithic girl who goes fishing with her father. When the father’s spear breaks, the two are most annoyed — the village (and his other spear) is a long way away. A stranger from another tribe comes by, and Taffy considers sending a message with him. But he does not speak their language, and writing has not yet been invented. She tries to draw what she wants instead. Things go horribly wrong when her mother misinterprets the drawing and has the tribe beat up the hapless stranger. In the next story, Taffy and her father invent the alphabet, since clearly pictures aren’t good enough. A lot of early writing is pictorial, which makes Kipling’s story almost true.
As for the origin of language itself? Presumably it was less a matter of invention than of prehistoric grunts gradually congealing into meaning. Which sounds gloriously gooey, and a lot less bureaucratic than my childhood imagining.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com
