The True “Evolution”of Language

ONE CAN SCARCELY OPEN a book on the subject of any human activity without being immediately confronted by the dogma of ‘progress’. The first clothes ‘must have been’ animal skins which ‘primitive man’ draped around ‘him’self. The first drum ‘must have been’ made by primitive man’ slapping ‘his’ fat belly (no joke - we have actually read this one in a serious music book!). The first language ‘must have been’ half-animal squeaks and grunts. There has never been a scrap of evidence for any of this. It is all conjecture based on one simple dogma which has been dinned into every modern child by the age of ten — the dogma of ‘progress’.

Now let us look a little more closely at this last example of language. The popular books, of course, happily rattle out the predictable party-line; but, as in many cases, the more serious studies are faced with a more serious problem. The simple fact is that throughout the whole of the known period, language has not progressed, but degenerated. The earliest known languages are by far the most complex, subtle and phiosophical. The later ones, like Latin and Greek, are much simpler, but still complex compared to modern language, which is a crude instrument, better suited to describing physical events than subtle philosophical concepts (this, of course, is perfectly in accord with the crudity of modern philosophy and the disproportionate emphasis placed upon the physical sciences.

In order to explain this fact, modern linguists have postulated that language developed in a manner resembling Curve A in the diagram - a slow, painful ‘evolution’ (of course), followed by a relatively slight decline over the last few thousand years.

But this theory ran into another difficulty. Out of countless studies made of the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples — American Indians, Africans, Polynesians etc., not one language was found to be In a ‘primitive’ state, and few were so ‘primitive’ as modern western speech. So linguists were forced to adopt Curve B - a slow evolution many thousands of years ago, followed by a sudden huge ‘jump’, and then a long period of decline. Now this is an absurdity even from the evolutionist point of view, but when one will cling to a dogma in the teeth of all the evidence, one is frequently led into absurdity.

Actually, of course, there is no evidence for anything except the last part of the curve. The rest is pure conjecture, like the belly-slapping. If we stick to the actual known facts, we can only postulate Curve C. This is naturally unthinkable to the modern mind, but it fits in very well with the words of Scriptures:

“What is your language of the earth, My children, what are the words of your speech? Are they not fallen from the first, the mother language? Are they not brok­en and impaired?”

The Scripture is telling us that language was created not by maid, but by God. She gave us the pure and perfect language spoken by the Angels, and we have gradually allowed it to degenerate as we have turned away from Her.

Students of Aristasian philosophy will often have seen how, time after time, the analysis of the etymology and origins of a word can be used to elucidate the metaphysical significance of the concept which it expresses. This is a whole science in itself — the science of hermeneutics; and it is possible only because language is not a mere set of conventional tokens, like road signs. It is a structure as perfectly ordered and organised as the human body — for it was ordered by the same Intelligence. Nothing in it is merely accidental or arbitrary; every word has a metaphysical reason for being what it is. That is why the analysis of words will always lead us back to the same metaphysical truths.

Language developed not upward from squeaks and grunts, but downward from pure Truth. We have abused and misused it, chopped it into a thousand different tongues, twisted it to fit false philosophies and worldly sentiments; but still we have only to look clearly and closely at our language, and it will quickly lead us back to pure Truth.