a Custom Rap
by Nathanology
What is the origin of human language?
And is it innate to the human mind,
Or contingent, and acquired?
And as we sat around our fires,
By what strange combination
Of sounds and gesticulations
Did language first arise?
Let’s think about what’s happening now —
I’m speaking, you’re reading
Or hearing these sounds —
Phonemes are linked
Into morphemes, bound
In a bundle of meaning,
A feature that’s found
In Language —
Talking ‘bout language —
Making up language is what makes us human,
For it’s a function that no other creature
We’ve found in creation is certainly doing.
Sure you’ve got monkeys
That make certain calls
When danger falls,
And then you’ve got dolphins —
Each with a signature whistle involved
In presenting itself
To the pods it bonds with —
And parrots are known to parrot,
And it’s apparent
We prate to our pets,
And African elephants even have sounds
For “There’s humans around” —
They don’t forget.
— And yet, this is not language:
For language is way more intense:
Language has grammar,
And ways of referring
To future intentions and absent events.
So monkey may see,
And monkey may do,
And monkey may even have words for it too —
But the only known ape that can talk about whether apes talk, is me and you.
A great ape with a language instinct,
A Language instinct,
A Language instinct —
But is language innate? Or did they have to wait
For the day when it came? — you can say what you think.
Children learn it naturally
From their habitat and their family,
And they add to it and organically
Expand and adapt its vocabulary.
That’s based. ….And basically,
It ain’t even limited to makin’ these
Vibrations, see?
Ere anyone teaches them signs,
Deaf kids make gestures speak.
— We’ve been on this sphere
Several hundred thousand years,
But it’s hard to tell how long it’s been
Bending one another’s ears
With the hopes and fears
And the myths and truths
In the twisted roots
Of our mind’s ground —
Cuz until 5000 BC
No one tried to write it down.
Went from the sea foam,
Then to a tree home,
Then got a great big brain in our wee dome —
Whether obtained, or innate in our genome,
It’s set the agenda by which we’ve grown
Into what we’ve known —
Our projects, our politics
All are conditioned by words:
Language conceptualizes relations,
And yet where it came from, no one is sure
Am I made with language instinct,
A language instinct,
A language instinct? —
It’s framed in the brain — and yet, when none speaks
A language once made, it becomes extinct.
I say,
I think,
A complex thought —
We may thank language for all we’ve got,
But what we’ve wrought
Is often fraught
With conflict, brah —
It’s costly bought.
For language makes culture
And culture imposes
It’s codes on the self —
It’s collective psychosis,
Commandments of Moses,
The Babel that crashes —
Animals don’t have to have all that baggage!
For that advantage
That has had us align
In the days we had to survive
May have advanced humankind
To the point that every species that has languished behind,
Lacking language, pays the price of peaceful silence by dying.
And I would be lying —
Which only my kind can do —
If I didn’t acknowledge that while I’m an ape,
It’s probably equally true
That me and you, ecologically, are not — we’re something new:
The language-using planet-changing ape that made the zoo.
We’ve come this far,
It can get us beyond:
The language by which
We’ve been getting along
With sufficient success
To survive the best
Can be used next to address our wrongs —
Let this song start conversation
We survived — now that we’ve made it,
Let’s apply our very language
Solving problems we’ve created.
Am I made with a language instinct?
A language instinct,
A language instinct —
Whether obtained, or innate, we can think
We can change what we made and return from the brink.
A great ape with a language instinct,
A Language instinct,
A Language instinct —
We can make change, in remaking the link
With the nature we came from —
Say what you think.