What then is the real nature of language?
Concerning its origin, Jespersen (Ultimate Origin of Speech) says it became tabu in the French . Societe de linguistique, among famous linguists, too controversial for academics to talk about. Whitney wrote: ‘No theme in linguistic science is … more voluminously treated than this, and by scholars of every grade and tendency; nor any … with less profitable result in proportion to the labor expended … windy talk … subjective views which commend themselves to no mind save the one that produces them … in inverse ratio to their acceptableness. This has given the whole question a bad repute among sober-minded philologists.’ (OLS I. 279) We hear of living languages, dead languages, revived languages (like Hebrew), but language is not separately existent like a person, having no separate existence like a dog or tree. It is just a function of living humans, or at least a system shared by a speech community to facilitate communication in its multifunctional individual members. In Creat
