"On the Origins of Speaking"

www.ontheoriginsofspeaking.com

Keywords: Linguistics.  Etymology.  Primitive language roots.  Stone Age language. Universal language roots.  Language origins.  Ur-language.  Language evolution.  Semantics.  Psychosemantics. Semantic contents of phonemes. Word formation.  Words as meaning strings.  “Lithic” language.  Origins of thinking.  JP Cohane.  Eric Partridge.  Wittgenstein.

“On the Origins of Speaking” by the ninth Lord Walsingham, ISBN 1-4120-7697-8,  Softback and Hardback.  The softback cover is well done.  The hardback cover is a modern composite material for libraries which will stand up to more wear than conventional board or buckram covers. The book  is a radical revision of conventional etymology, claiming to restore semantics to the chief role in language evolution, in place of the easier empirical phonology currently espoused.  It has very little to do with Chomskyan grammatical speculation which substitutes a mathematical formulation for semantics, nor with ur-language research, “Nostratics” or other word traces based on phonology alone, which soon get lost.  It picks up where Charles Darwin left off, arguing language and thinking are not subject to evolution by random genetic variation and subsequent natural selection of the fittest, which on reflection it is perfectly obvious is in fact confined to the organic kingdom and does not apply to either the geological kingdom on the one hand nor to the intellectual kingdom on the other.  Darwin’s ferrets have distorted his message, that of a gentle agnostic, in order to impose on humanity a secular materialism congenial to the aridity of their minds.  In reality our genes determine our legs but not the walks we may take, and similarly our genes determine our brains but not the thoughts we may think.  We ought not to confuse structure with activity.

Needless to say the book is highly controversial as well as using some intricate thinking to uncover prehistoric semantic trees.  If it were fiction it would outsell “The da Vinci Code”.  The author, now of an age (over eighty) when concerns over neither career prospects nor even the judgment of his peers any longer carry any weight, has tried to include within the covers of a single book the results of over forty years of linguistic studies, after conventional education in three universities and a largely mis-spent life pursuing conventional intellectual will-o-the-whisps of a historical, political, military, business and philosophical nature (including symbolic logic).  Furthermore the book is written in a popular style and is readily understandable by anyone of any nationality with a sufficient general education to make his or her way in the contemporary world.  The only jargon is simply explained as the ideas are developed, with one or two coinages of the author’s own, for instance “Lithic”, the Stone Age language roots the author claims to have discovered, concealed like flies in amber in the lexicon of languages all around the world today; and “psychosemantic trees”, of which there are a dozen printed out, showing the descent of meanings all the way from the original Stone Age elements of speaking. The principal novelty is to identify the original meanings of individual phonemes way back in the Stone Age which when strung together were compiled of their constituent meanings to make up words, which have since been simply learned by rote ignoring the constituent meanings.  This is quite contrary to the widespread, perhaps universal belief that the phonetic roots of words were and are randomly chosen.

Meanings and their phonological clothing can be traced backwards in a manner similar to triangulation in survey, several allied meanings pointing out an earlier common meaning, often of a more general nature, and these in turn capable of triangulation again until the Lithic original is discovered.  The reasons why these original meanings for the single phonemes were picked by our hominid forebears can then be sought.  It does not call for an improbable single source of language, begun  in a single place and then spread around the world by messengers - one must suppose with an extraordinary yen for travel and preaching.  The same first meanings for sounds were found all over the world because the very same human psychologies were responding in the very same ways to the very same world they lived in.  If it included bamboo then you used the psychosemantic meaning of boo to describe the multiple burgeoning shoots of foliage the bamboo presents.  Otherwise you might direct the usage to the bubs, the buttocks and the bough.

Nowadays the meanings start coming through with the letters of the alphabet, and the psychosemantic element in their meanings had already been recognized by Alfred Kallir, the Oxford mystic apparently adept in esoteric ancient Jewish patristic sources, in his 1961 book “Sign and Design”, at one time an inspiration to the present author but now largely discarded.  The ancient speech patterns stand out more in ancient (dead) languages because the speakers were  nearer to the Lithic (Stone Age) speech patterns in those days.  In fact they had barely abandoned them: their abandonment is a comparatively recent innovation, probably no more than ten thousand years old while Lithic language lasted say sixty times as long.  We definitely “could have done better”.  Clumsy Wayland Smiths have held us back, hammering their way forward obliterating the detailed ‘scrimshaw’ thinking of their more intelligent cousins.

Hominids spoke, perhaps six hundred thousand years ago; and they had tamed fire and already had hearths at the mouths of their caves, long before the earliest traces of ash have been found.  The fact is ash decays, give it time.  This is no good news.  Our linguistic progress has been some five times slower than the boffins have imagined – another nasty Copernican knock for Sapiens Sapiens’ self esteem, robbed at the same time of priority in learning to speak, an achievement of our hominid forebears.  This however in itself is better news; since the extreme vulgarity as well as the simplicity of  the origins of speaking is best kept at some distance from the relatively sensitive souls we have cultivated in the interim.  An inordinate proportion of our original thinking appears to have been formulated around our genital performance, with the feminine external genitalia rather dull, no more than a quiver, while the male external organs are almost baroque by comparison: so that the psychosemantics of Tarzan’s penis featured largely in hominid ratiocination, something of a comicality today.  It must say something for the theory language was largely invented by the girls for gossiping.  But what?  Much of Freud’s psychological output can now be seen to be fanciful, based on the wild and exaggerated perceptions of psychedelic drugs, the yellow submarine school of thought.  Sober members of society can scarcely be expected to follow him.  But there is no doubt his subconscious directed him to a highly pertinent area of interest.  The sexual patterning of our earliest perceptions can still be detected underlying the wording of the languages of today, probably all of them.

Meanings were originally attributed to single phonemes (roughly the letters of the alphabet of today) as folk learned to pronounce them, and they were given the meanings that the bare bottomed naming committees hunkered around their hearths at the entrances of their caves took to be their natural meanings.  You have to exercise your imagination in full in order to get at all close to what it must have been like to be discovering an entirely new means of communication to add to the historic cries and hand signals, along with the other bodily gestures, mostly sexual, that you had grown up with.  No doubt it was a long drawn out process extending over generations, as language slowly built: a cumulative compilation just as it is today.

So Ba, the sound made by the lips, was taken to mean lips  - “lips speaking!” - and so as well as mouth (Arabic bab) the fleshy bits, and so the flesh, and so the body and bilateral symmetry as with the bicycle and also the haunches (bum), and so the Great Bearer, the constellation of The Plough painted on Egyptian tomb ceilings as an ox haunch.  The Plough constellation was thought to be pulling the upper firmament around the Pole Star like an upper millstone being turned around a lower one.  The upper firmament was made of stone with holes for the fixed stars letting through the upper fires just as volcanoes let the lower fires through the lower firmament.  The firmaments were crusts.  The idea the name referred to an animal (ursus, the bear) is a very long standing misunderstanding indeed.  It never did.  The first plough, from pa-lau-kai, feet-loop-making, was a yoke of oxen tied to a pole tied to a centre post on the threshing floor, driven round to tread out the wild cereals gathered before farming proper had started - when the trick was transferred to a plough share to till the soil in straight lines.  Pa, the thinned diminutive of Ba, was thus the skin, and so a skin tent, a roof, a surface, a lid (as in our English pie), a visible surface as in the Greek panorama, the whole view, all of it, and the demonstrative ‘the’ in Egyptian; and the polis in Greek from pau-lai, all the roofs collected together and so the city state; or else it was a small shoot and thus any minor protrusion like a foot, a tail or a penis or just a piece of anything.  An Egyptian paraoh, a roof or shelter against the sun (Ra) was read by Sir Wallis Budge in his magnificent hieroglyphic dictionary of 1925 as the royal house, when the Pharaoh, with the ahi or aitch in it making it start with the pahei, the ecstacy piece or penis, was really His Royal Penis.  There is a connection between the American campus Hi as a greeting expressing albeit mild pleasure and the high experienced on drugs for example and the dizzying highness looking over a cliff and even sexual climax.  The semantic texture is there if you open your eyes to it starting with an extreme, even a traumatic sensation as in “hot!”.  There is a chapter devoted to Ha and its meanings.

Echoism provided Ish for the flame, because when you dunked your burning brand in a puddle at dawn to save resin it said ish as it died.  It still does.  But then the flame springs upward as if in some way wickedly alive (like Satan, which is originally from Sa-, the flickering activity, -tan, of the world), so ish came to mean up as well as ouch!, burnt and hot; and also warm, at ease around the hearth, a pleasant feeling, pleasant, sensation, sense, also up, upright, high, above, vertical, a vertical  mark, and so a one, one, warm blooded, alive, life, mobile, movement, active, sea (water in its active avatar), animal, shining, bright, light, vision, see, and so on.  So shang means up in Chinese, and shan is a mountain or mountains or mountainous, and Shanghai is above the water, on sea, a port.  In Malay sa is a vertical line or one, or better in full satu, a vertical cut or division mark.  Ia is he, a person, originally i-a, it-that, or he-that, and sahiya is the first person, I.   Si in Malay is an animate marker, so si-a-mang, the siamang monkey with long arms swinging through the forest canopy is brer un-heavy, Brer Weightless.  Apa means what?, really from un-that, identity undetermined; and siapa is who? but really brer what?. Our ash means un-burnt (or that-burnt), but our ash tree is neither burnt nor unburnt.  It springs up like the flame, with a bare trunk seeking the sunlight through the forest canopy.  An oak, which is named for its very hard wood, has the opposite tactic of spreading to cut out the light from surrounding vegetation.  It seems that it aims to get there first while the ash is a Johnny-come-lately, but both the fittest in their own niches and at the same time less fit out of them, which makes the forest an unlevel playing field - a bit like the EU.  The phoneme ka was first of all identified as the sound of knapping flints (with to knap from ka-na-pai, strike-present-flakes) which went on for a million years at least and was old when language was young, so it is no surprise it got recognition.  It thus came to mean strike, drive, stimulate, kindle, command (al kai-da, which ‘commanding-does’just as il duche ‘does-all-the commanding’, from the Latin dux, and duke, dai-u-kais, where the –s is just the Latin substantive ending), hard, sharp, strong, powerful, Almighty, (Al Akhbar, A-kha-bara, That-Strong-actor), force, forceful, make (mostly make, which was what the performance was for), and so on.  There is a chapter on the meanings of ka.

Our words are not, as conventionally imagined, made up of randomly chosen phonemes on their own meaningless, but on the contrary were originally sentences, or at least phrases, compiled as strings of meaningful phonemes in a language the author names as “Lithic”, the Stone Age language the semantic contents of which have survived, a bit like flies in amber, in the lexicons of languages all around the world today.  This alone is a “bouleversement” bowling the senators over.  It is going to take them a long while to get used to it because some of them who have been proclaiming the precise opposite are going to look a bit silly.  The Biblical Babel story records, albeit fancifully, the abandonment of the Lithic protocol, which was common to all speech and so could be worked out, with a soothsayer’s help (like “Mene mene tekel upharsin!”), regardless of the mother tongue you spoke, in favour of a lexicon learnt by rote.  The author, now in his eighties, has made a study of languages, including Egyptian and Sanskrit as well as aboriginal languages of Malaya, Borneo, Australia, Africa, North America and Amazonia, which has occupied his spare time for forty years, showing the same phonemic meanings underlie the most diverse compositional idioms making up the cacophony of the six thousand plus extant languages and probably as many again which have not survived.  These patterns are reproduced in “Psychosemantic Trees” of meanings as they have developed for each phoneme in turn, with illustrations of their idiomatic strings in words in use today.  We are not being lived by Lithic meanings in the way that Dawkins makes out we are being lived by our genes.  His is a simple category error jumping between kingdoms as if the genetics of our legs determined the walks we may take, so he can stay on his single plank.  He is in fact a classic exemplar of the single plank ranter, now with tenure as a boffin at Oxford..  Our semantics are merely the constructs of human whimsy from which springs language and so grammar and so logic and so math and science, and roughly in that order.  The whole world as we see it is a human construct based upon our senses.  It is a narrow window.  The real world is what it is; and not another thing such as we seek to show so we may feel more at home in it.  We are drawing on the wallpaper what we believe to be on the wall behind, which we can never see (roughly Kant’s “thing-in-itself”); and then the wallpaper turns out to be papered inside our own skulls!  And then we turn out to be trying to turn it into a protective carapace – to save us from ourselves.  Every generation simply learns its language and this includes the original psychosemantic contents as a subconscious keel, which is still accessible in our dream time and can even be accessed with earnest integrity and severe study while wide awake, but it generally remains subconscious and only secretly influential – sufficiently so to have kept Lithic alive in the longest game of Chinese Whispers for over half a million years.

The author’s great grandfather (1804-1870), the fifth peer (Tom 5), collaborated with Sir Charles Lyell, a fellow London barrister, who used Tom’s shell collection – he was an amateur conchologist – which occupied the whole of the long gallery the full length of the top floor of Merton Hall - to establish the sequencing of the tangled sedimentary rock strata by means of the collections of microscopic shells (microfauna) included within the rocks.  It was simply a wild guess, based on the anti-entropic nissus of all life forms, that spark of divinity neo-Darwinists choose to overlook but which had been readily accepted as God-given, to presume the more complex shapes of shells followed the less complex in time.  Anyway it worked.  Lyell’s epoch making book “The Principles of Geology”, which triggered scientific evolutionary study, was published in three volumes in 1830 to 1833.  Darwin took them with him on his five year world cruise, 1833 to 1838, which established him as a “natural historian” as natural scientists were called in those days.  The third volume actually reached him in Rio de Janiero.  Lyell had already established the evolution of the molusca at least, but this detail was suppressed because of the objections of the Victorian church.  Recently republished in three paperback volumes by the Oxford University Press, the references to the shells dating the rocks are frequent; and the Merton Stone, previously unknown, also features as evidence of the shaping of the land by glaciation.  The stone, the largest glacial erratic so far discovered in the United Kingdom, weighing an estimated twenty to thirty tons, was dug up in the seventeenth century in Merton when we were digging for marl (clay) to spread on the light soil to increase water retention and so fertility.  The clay is under some fifteen feet of sand with (now) two to three feet of fertile soil on top, mostly due to cultivations.  Marl comes from ma-lai, mud-looping in modern English idiom, binding the soil for water retention.  It is clay used for the purpose, to glue (a word closely akin) the soil.  Marling was used in the following century all across Norfolk to consolidate the soil to provide the increased fertility permitting the Norfolk Four Course Rotation developed by Cooke and Townshend which revolutionized farming and indirectly led to the population increase which started the industrial revolution when sturdy beggars surplus to employment in farming moved to the towns.  Too dirty to be taken into the cottage industries in the cottages of the industrious they were employed instead in garden sheds, because they might be trusted to cut out a sole after sufficient instruction but hardly to stitch a shoe.  The professional cobblers indoors did the cobbling.  The division of labour and factory manufacture followed.  The technical innovators rightly get the credit for industrial progress but it only takes a few drinks to persuade the present author his family triggered the lot!  Britain got ahead in industry because these sturdy beggars were put to work in spite of their stink.  On the continent they were left unemployed beggars.  Was that the British head start?  It was not that on this island folk were naturally nicer.  They weren’t and aren’t.  It was the channel which had mostly saved them from warfare at home since 1066 which enabled them to empathise with the unfortunate.  On the continent empathy had been knocked out of them by repetitive bloodshed, rape and pillage.  Folk had sharpened each other by confrontation.  We are islanders and should remain so.

Lyell, a frequent visitor to Merton, claimed the Merton stone had been carried on the glaciers from New Galloway in the South West corner of Scotland, but later the President of the Geological Society, Lyell’s colleague Sir Roderick Murchison, preferred West Yorkshire with a similar signature from the molusca, saving climbing the Pennine hills.  Merton Hall, which had a hundred rooms as well as the shell cabinets, burnt in1956 when occupied by a boys school, but the present author remembers the cabinets of shells well.  The shell house, a folly entirely lined with shells in the grounds still survives.  Lyell’s supposed reluctance later to accept evolution was actually confined to questioning the mechanism, and he had a position in society by then which made it difficult for him to espouse a thesis not politically correct.  He was received at court.  Queen Victoria would be put out.  Darwin hinted at his predicament when he wrote “considering his age, his former views and his position in society I think his action has been heroic”.

In 1859, when Darwin reluctantly published “On the Origin of Species”, to present Sapiens Sapiens as descended from the apes and the amoeba was sacrilege, and he was more or less obliged to take full responsibility upon himself, pretending he had thought up the idea of species evolution based on the geological evolution discovered by Lyell, but leaving out any mention of the molusca, perfectly well aware it was really the other way about, in order to save his mentor from the social obloquy he anticipated for himself.  The media naturally followed suit, having even in those days no independent understanding and instead just following up report.  So the history of science has recorded Darwin’s virtuous pretence as fact, unquestioned for a hundred and forty six years.  Clearly not many have actually troubled to read Lyell’s old book since 1859.   Tom 5’s son, Tom 6 was a colleague of Alfred Russell Wallace, a major benefactor of the Natural history Museum in London, a governor of the Huntingdon Museum in the United States, High Steward of Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Royal Society founded in Isaac Newton’s day.  His only extant work is a volume on “The Microlepidoptera of Hawaii” published by The Royal Society in 1912, of which the author’s copy with hundreds of coloured prints of insects wings, forty to a page, is one of the very few to have survived.  In it he identified species from either side of the Wallace line separating Asian species from Australian ones, and a third group of indeterminate provenance he believed might be evidence of a Pacific “Atlantis”.  With the Garden of Eden now established as under the South China Sea, drowned by the great glacier melt some fifteen thousand years ago, perhaps he was barking up the right tree.  In any case the present work attempts to set the record straight by confining the Darwinian scientific strictures to their proper domain and returning linguistic and intellectual history to a more liberal arena, just as Darwin, Charles Lyell and even Tom 5 originally intended.  It is no part of the author’s game plan to rescue religionists from secularism, but the book does it in passing nevertheless.  Neither intelligent design nor creationism is included however.

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