ature of Human Language

OUTLINE The talking, thinking animals of Leo Tolstoy
I. Introduction
II. Natural law and the Grammar of Nature's Language
III. Non-verbal communication used by plant, animal, and man
IV. When the non-verbal is verbalized: the making of human language
V. Nature's Language is universal
VI. The inefficiency of human language
VII. Conclusion
Bibliography

THE COSSACKS, by Leo Tolstoy

An aristocrat by birth, but for three years from 1851 an officer in the wild Caucasus Mountains in the settlement of Starogladkovskaya, Leo Tolstoy drew from his immersion in the Caucasus – and the lives of the people living in complete harmony with nature there – a sensitivity to life that is to our age foreign. Befriended by the Cossacks and their hunters, and spending untold time in the forests being shown how to unravel the wisdom and ways of the creatures from time immemorial there, he, like the Cossacks themselves, grew to see the likeness between all life and human (Konrad Lorenz on ant and animal information processing click). Olenin, his autobiographical hero, sitting silently in wait for game, a cloud of mosquitoes covering every inch of his body, "Imagined vividly what the mosquitoes thought and buzzed: 'This way, this way, lads! Here's someone we can eat!' ." He was taught, and like his Cossack teachers believed, that all life has wisdom and from that wisdom (all animals have wisdom of their environments of which people know nothing) process information as does the human. And we may note that it is from the animal that we, the speaking ape, arose – to whom grammar and the thought-ordered sentence is indispensable. In the story that follows, Yeroska tells Olenin that animals can process information – that is, to think like people and "talk." It is in their drama that we see the sides still drawn today: between those allowing intelligent thought in the animal kingdom and those who cannot conceive that it is possible. The essay is in the camp of the former: the grammar-oriented thought-ordered sentence is natural to life.

SETTING: Yeroska telling of hunting scene

• OLENIN: Young aristocrat and minor officer in the Russian army • YEROSHA: An old Cossack hunter

"Yes, that's the sort of man I am. I am a hunter. There is no hunter equal to me in the regiment. I will find and show you any animal, and any bird. What they do and where they go—I know it all! Do you know what kind of man I am? As soon as I see a track—I know the animal. I know where he will lie down, and where he will drink or wallow. I make myself a perch and sit there all night, watching. It's another matter to go out at sunset; you choose yourself a place, press the reeds down and sit there waiting, like the good fellow you are ... Once this spring a fine litter came near me, 'In the name of the Father and of the Son,' I says, and I was just about to fire when the sow grunted to her pigs. 'Danger, children,' she says, 'there's a man here,' and off they all run, breaking through the bushes. I felt I should like to get my teeth in her." "How could a sow tell her brood that a man was there?" Olenin asked. "Why shouldn't she? You think an animal's a fool? No, she's wiser than a man, though you do call her a pig! She knows everything. Take this instance. A man will pass along your track and not notice it; but a pig, as soon as she gets on to your track, sniffs and runs away. That shows she's got some sense, doesn't it? You don't know your own smell, but she does. And there is this to be said too. You want to kill that pig, but she'd rather go about the woods alive. You have one law, and she has another. She's a pig, but she's no worse than you—we're all God's creatures. Ah dear, Man is foolish, foolish, foolish!" The old man repeated this several times, and then letting his head droop, he sat thinking.

I. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of language is to enable a systematic means of communicating and in human society, it is through words. Except for man, all the universe creates and communicates in silence and non-verbally – and animals, of course, communicate or process information well, but do not use human words. And, while one person may communicate with another person in words, our internal self-communication seldom uses words, is based on feeling and images – most faint and unformed – and primarily non-verbal: such comprises the lion's share of human communication. God, the greatest Communicator of all, does not even use an audible language. Over three billion years ago, life itself began – non-verbally. For 20 billion years, Nature has had her own language – and it has been very successful. And, with that language, the most sophisticated entity in the known universe was created: the human brain. Studied throughout all of modern history, the brain is but yet only partly understood. It was built with Nature's language. That language is what we know as natural law – and it is unspoken.
We use language with a certain type of grammar. From where did language arise? How did it arise? Why did language and grammar arise? Language did not arise from a vacuum. To the contrary. From the simple grammar-like behavior of forces acting upon particles and animals interacting with one another, in the pages which follow, we shall explore how the language and grammar of the talking animal (us) is patterned on, and but a shadow of Nature's own. Language is but a pattern of sounds, known as words, reflecting no more than the observations that the human being has made on the ordered and orderly behavior of animals and nature Herself. And, when we realize that we began as a single cell, all the mass and intelligence which we call "us" is but Nature Herself draped around the form we see in the mirror each day. The same "re-cycled" cloth that Nature has clothed communicating animals with since life began. When we use language, it is actually Nature Herself talking. Let us begin this interesting story.

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II. NATURAL LAW and the GRAMMAR OF NATURE'S LANGUAGE

Christopher Higgins asks: "Are there genes for grammar?"^[A] In answer, Noam Chomsky states: "that language is a largely inherited faculty."^[B] Maynard Smith, affirms that: "Children learn grammar rules and the rules they learn are stored genetically." ^[C] Cohen and Steward say: "Our DNA seems to code for language learning ability within the brain."^[D] Lewis Thomas writes:

We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize and deploy words into intelligible sentences, is innate in the human mind. We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar. ^[E]

Are animals also programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar: Animal languages have their own syntaxes. On December 3, 1997, National Geographic Television aired a program on 90% of the world's creatures. And, they live in the black, lightless ocean depths and use a bioluminescent language. Like Morse codes tapped out in light, and hundreds of strobe lights shimmering a rainbow of lights chasing one another in sequence around the edges of the translucent bodies of the creatures of the deep (some 40 meters long), bioluminescense is of such variety and sophistication that the strobe lights of Las Vegas are not more fascinating. Life forms described as "organized sea water" (as that is what they are), the presenter of the program stated that with 90% of earth's population in the ocean, bioluminescent language is by no comparison the predominant form of communication on earth. Human language must make up far less than one percent of all sound-based languages, and sound-based languages comprise under 10% of all bio-communication systems – bioluminescent language pervades. We speakers are in a tiny minority and three billion years late to join life's show which put on all the great dramas before our entrance.
Still, everything processes information to communicate: animals often use sound and always with either syntax (sound groupings in specific orders: bird songs are an elaborate example) or context if a single sound is just accompanied with some action or conspicuous lack of it as in motionless concealment designed to preserve life. Whales have over 90 sounds that they communicate with. An NBC Dateline International segment shared recent research airing the belief that the prairie dog uses more sounds in communicating with one another than any other animal on earth. Elephants have been recorded on equipment used in whale sound research able to detect the plethora of sounds below the frequency our ears can detect: on audio tape is recorded over 40 elephant sounds which have been identified with clear meanings. A trainer of chimpanzees has taught one learner over 1,000 symbols used in communication. Some ants have complex chemical systems. The preceding has spoken of bioluminescent and sound-based manners of communicating. What of image-based communication process endemic to the living creature? And what would that have to do with grammar?
Animal and insect see the world in discrete images – the relationship to grammar: Eyes are made for seeing. The giant squid has a brain and eyes, the later with lenses that move backwards and forwards like a camera lens. Crabs have two eyes that can move independantly of one another and squids. The clawed toad, Zenopus laevi, maintains 15,000 photoreceptors (pixels) for each one square milimeter of space in the eye.^[F] An adult has an eye surface area of 60 square milimeters for a total of 1,800,000 million pixels. That frog has more pixels in one eye than the most greatly totted high definition television set has on its entire big screen. Therefore, for its purposes, Zenopus laevi sees more fully than we with high definition TV's or the best computer monitors that money can buy.
Visual image in the animal and insect is to be certain, different from the human. But, then too, (in detail), no two humans report seeing the same thing while looking at it. In what follows, we would like to draw the conclusion that because animal and insect vision is so developed, that they must see discreet objects and thereby process information in discrete objects. In such a manner, then, animal and insect information processing would parallel human (rather, vice versa as animal and insect preceded human). The discussion follows:
Insect vision goes back a long way and has had time to still develop since then. G. Horridge, of the Center for Visual Sciences, writes that: "The earliest ancestors of arthropods, 400 million years ago had 360⁰ vision. Insects fly expertly among obstacles in a three-dimensional cluttered world, chase mates or prey, or land and take off to escape capture."^[G] Even bees, Werner Backhaus of the Institut fόr Neurobiologie, Freie Universitδt Berlin, writes, "... learn the color of flower dummies quickly and their memory for color signals is durable and accurate."^[H] M. F. Land of the Neuroscience Research Center, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, writes of the spider's eyes, "Spiders are known to be visual hunters. The image is of good quality in all eyes."^[I]
From what precedes, while it cannot be proved, it should seem logical to draw the conclusion that as animals and insects are usually oriented to visual memory and relate to the world visually, that they process information in the manner of image-processing and further in a subject-acting-on-object relationship. And, this how human grammar processes information in the sentence: the smallest unit or brick of communication.
The importance of the sentence: Language has the interesting feature in that in the United Nations or in a conference, they can be simultaneously translated and in the movies, they can all be dubbed. This means that man and animal prescribe different sounds to the same subjects-verbs-and objects and that while they may have different ordering, in one "thought-unit" i.e. sentence, they are identical! What is probably common is that man, animal, and insect share the same visual image of an object, have the same understanding of the order things occur, and think in "thought-units" i.e. sentences.
The sentence, animal to the human, and the five concentric circles of the brain: From the aquatic invertebrate (1st circle), through the reptile (2nd circle), simple mammal, to the human (5th circle), the "brain" can be described as five concentric circles (here is not the place for detail) where each "higher" creature owns a circle not owned by the creature next lower than it. But, this means that all the four smaller circles are embedded in the human's own brain. Unique to the human is the neocortex enabling more thought. To give voice to thought, we talk for we alone have the Brocca and Wierneke centers. But, the neocortex merely magnifies the fundamental processes which all animals experience and the Brocca and Wierneke centers enable us to verbally articulate them. It is not as simple as that, but the reader will understand the point being made.
The fox has been called "wily" for it can out-think the common person and befuddle the clever hunter. The porpoise is used to assist slow-learning and emotionally deficient children for it can empathize with them and show care and sympathy. It is the dog that the lonely or aged person takes as a companion: an animal that also empathizes and sympathesizes when the human species is too busy to care. People turn to the dog for emotional support. In essence, man and animal think alike as witnessed in hunting animal out-thinking man or how when dog attacks man, he interprets man's thoughts and actions and in perfect counteraction can, if large, kill man.
But, so can any large animal in confrontation kill man: meaning, man thinks like animal (not vice versa). Man only has the advantage over game fish, fowl, or trophy animal when using weapons. On an even playing field with man as naked and unarmed as animal and without gun, net, or trap, man would most often be out-witted and/or overpowered by animal. Meaning, man and animal use the same thought-processes – but this is obscured for the human has weapons and can voice his or her thoughts.
Today's intelligence of human society is unnatural in the sense that man cannot live with and is stranger to nature. If the Arab world stopped supplying oil to the rest of the world, modern life would become extinct as the city-dweller would have no means to survive and billions would die due to starvation, disease, or a winter-freeze. We would again, like our ancestors Yeroska in the Tolstoy story above, take to the forests and woods and there those many remaining would war for land and civilization be thrown back several thousand years, all the gains of the last two thousand years lost in one action. But, the so-called lowly insect and animal would survive.
Meaning that the animal's intelligence would carry them through an oil-stoppage but an oil-stoppage would end man's civilizations. The point being that animals can evaluate a situation sufficiently well to prosper in it. Animals process subject-verb-object information in thought-units logically. But, again, man and animal simply interpret the ordering of subject-verb-object in their simplest thought-units i.e. sentences voiced or unvoiced. And these units added together become thinking. But, in essence, thinking is some ordering of subject-verb-object in thought-units – the simple sentence. The following explores this more closely.
While a movie will document a whole story – or the hand of one person being extended to shake that of another – each second of the film will contain some 30 frames with the smallest interval or unit of a single larger action. It's the brick of the house or cell of the body. In human communication, the sentence is the smallest frame of a continuous action. The sentence is important for it has the clearest, most discrete, well-defined unit of a complete action where one subject through one verb acts on one object.
This utter simplicity is captured in the most basic form of grammar. In grammar, for any given action, one thing (subject) acts (verb) on another (object). With subject, verb, and object, the marvel of human language is that it has interpreted all phenomena of nature into an audio (spoken) visual (written) system of human communication based upon words and syntax.

• Three quarks combine to form protons.
• From fighting to mating, all animals have their own form of either audio or visual language or both.
• Beginning with primitive symbols, man was the first animal to have a written language.


Natural Language is a facet of natural law: i.e. the logically sequenced force bringing subjects and objects into interaction. From particles to galaxies, natural law made all objects and further brings them into a logical form of interaction which itself is the structure that human language reflects as many examples below will reflect. The irony in the above bulleted examples is that in each level of hierarchy, each word shows that nature itself is discernible as subjects and objects interacting (predicates/verbs) with each other in the relationship of time (past, present, future), modified by adverbs (quickly, slowly), adjectives (fast, slow), prepositional relationships (by, through, with, above) and so on in certain syntax. The role of syntax in language is that:

Via words, syntax orders and defines spatio-temporal relationships such that a change in syntax results in a change in relationships: and only a very specific syntax describes a certain relationship as a reading of Chinese medical texts of 5,000 years ago or any ancient literature testify to: i.e. truth doesn't change with time and has unchangeable relationship or syntax – Caesar substituted for Jesus makes a different story.

We will call this Nature's Language and it refers to natural law or anything else that can be explained. When referring to natural law, Nature's Language is unchanging and non-verbal (often visible objects moved by invisible processes) and – confined to the shortest and simplest of sentences – has only one correct syntax to define a given thing. Hence, the fact that universal truth can be recognized across cultures and ages as in, "Rain (subject) falls (verb) to the earth (object)."
Universally identical interpretation: Now, and prior to the formation of any language, human's interpret Nature's Language largely the same way in terms of DISCERNING colors, sounds, actions, events in personal and tribal life (birth, marriage, achievement, death) and so on. First a note on the "sound" of human language for while it is true the human voice has a variety not found in the animal kingdom, it shouldn't be considered as a universal standard.
What is and is not unique about the sound of human language: Human language is unique in that its sound is an accidental occurrence in the sense that we have certain kinds of lungs, teeth, soft lips and tongues, and different from what a beetle is equipped with or the way an alien would sound. Human language is probably not preordained and there may not have been a human language if a giant asteroid had not created conditions which lead to the extinction of the dinosaur creating an environment where the human ancestor wouldn't be a mainstay in the diet of some two-story tall carnivore. Human language, and the way it sounds, is largely historical chance (and squiggly lines denoting letters representing a random mixture of guttural, labial, dental, and aspiratory sounds arranged into alphabets are even more an act of pure chance). John von Neumann, of the Manhattan Project, wrote of the accidental nature of language that:

It is only proper to realize that human language is largely historical accident ... Their very multiplicity proves that there is nothing absolute and necessary about them. Just as languages like Greek or Sanskrit are historical facts and not absolute logical necessities. ^[J]

And, with evolution creating creatures that evolve in intelligence, had it not been the human, undoubtedly some other life form would have risen to the intelligence we find in the human – and it would "sound" a different way. In this sense, the human language is not unique. If there were no human language, some other creature would have sooner or later risen to this role.

III. NONVERBAL LANGUAGE USED BY PLANT, ANIMAL, AND MAN

• Plants: Natural law is the force bringing subjects and objects into interaction: hence, subject-verb-object. Plant's use a non-verbal form of Nature's Language in the form of subject-verb-object in the proper spatio-temporal syntax in such a manner that its apparent desired objective is realized in communication or interaction. When drought-driven kudu overeat the acacia tree (subject) within minutes it increases (predicate verb) by 256% a potentially lethal substance called tannin (object) to chase away (secondary verb) the kudu (noun) due to tannin's bitter, unpleasant taste and potential result – it can sometimes kill the kudu. Trees covered with nets to protect them from the heavy ravages of catepillars nonetheless showed an increase in tannins as nearby trees were heavily stripped by the insects. It is suspected that airborne pheromonal substances alerted the unaffected trees of the danger and this warning elicited an appropriate response.^[K] The writer goes on to discuss a dozen other such cases of plant communication systems. Similar to both human, animal, and plant are the use of subject-objects-verb in a proper spatio-temporal and syntactical relationship.

• Animal: In reality, grammar and syntax are nothing more than a verbalization for what happens in nature. Languages seem to be something all living things have a capacity for. And, what would be involved is the discernment of the subject-verb-object particulars of Nature's Language relevant to some life form. Lewis Thomas notes: "Nature abhors a long silence. Somewhere, underlying all the other signals, is a continual music. Termites make percussive sounds to each other by beating their heads against the floor in the dark ... Spectrographic analysis of sound records has recently revealed a high degree of organization in their drumming. Bats communicate with each other as well by clicks and high-pitched greetings. Almost anything that an animal can employ to make a sound is put to use."
  He continues, "Drumming, created by beating feet, is used by prairie hens, rabbits, and mice; the head is banged by woodpeckers and certain other birds; the males of death-watch beetles make a rapid ticking sound by percussion of the protuberance on the abdomen against the ground; Fish makes sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles. Gorillas beat their chests for certain kinds of discourse. Animals with loose skeletons rattle them, or like rattlesnakes, get sounds from externally placed structures. Turtles, alligators, crocodiles, and even snakes make various more or less vocal sounds. Even earthworms make sounds, faint staccato notes in regular clusters."^[L]
  And then there are the pheromonal substances, the scent-communicators. Female tigers mark out a ten mile square territory by spraying their scent which in effect says, "This is my home." Ants deposit a chemical trail to follow, a bee will vibrate, a moth leave an airborne scent to attract a suitor. Nature is too proud to restrict her mode of communication to any given means. Nor would human words seem to be her prize. With the ease of a feather drifting through the sky, she can communicate through any and infinite means.
  Those who use sound as well include our dogs, cats, wolves, bears, hyenas, whales, porpoises, seals, crickets, toads, frogs (from ultraviolet light becoming fast extinct) every kind of bird, mammal, and insect. These sounds are not mindless and without purpose: they are systems of communication. And, they are subjects acting on objects through some very brief and cogent structured syntax. Richard Dawkins writes, "Animals go to great lengths to make communication effective ... The traditional story of ethologists is that communication signals evolve for the benefit of both the sender and receiver."^[M] i.e. communication is for subject and object.

• Man: non-verbal human language is a language with syntax: The human being employs the same things to make the same range of sounds that animals do and perhaps many times for the same reasons. Autonomic and orphaned children beat their heads against walls. People drum their fingers to show boredom, tap their feet in nervousness, dance in joy, click their tongues in frustration, blow air through puffed cheeks to show exasperation, whistle and snap fingers for surprise, beat their chest in resolve. People hum, snort, sniff, clear throats, smack lips, and the list goes on and on. Non-verbal actions have a spatio-temporal setting, have syntax, i.e. are forms of grammar. Watching one dog cow to another or observing young animals play chase shows a clear sequence of actions where one specific non-verbal behavior begets a specific other. In conclusion, all animals discern subjects using verbs to act on objects. The human language is tailor-made for the human. Each animal has uncannily devised its own language after making its entrance onto the stage of evolution. Each language is sufficient for its specie's needs.
  • When the non-verbal is nonsequitor and non compos mentis – the case for non-verbal grammar syntax: If a man, for hours, were seen staring at an empty space and whistling as a man would upon seeing a beautiful woman, he'd so alarm onlookers that someone would call the police who'd send an ambulance to take him a mental hospital. The point being that non-verbal actions are appropriate, but only appropriate under appropriate circumstances. Actions done out-of-place show mental disorder. The word "disorder" shows that there is a proper "order." That proper order is Nature's Grammar. There is an unspoken syntax within which non-verbal communication must be displayed i.e. the person (subject) acts (predicate verb) towards a specific thing (object). A smile at the wrong place – or no smile where there should be one – a twitched nose, biting one's lip, all tiny non-verbal signs that indicate the natural non-verbal syntax is out-of-order: something is wrong. And that it's wrong means that there is a "right." There are natural and spontaneous syntaxes that convey information from subject to object through the verb of action.
  Daniel Goleman covers the behavioral and brain sciences for the New York Times and his articles appear throughout the world in syndication. He both received his Ph.D. from Harvard as well as having taught there. Formerly, he was senior editor of Psychology Today. Look what happens when people use the "wrong" nonverbal language:

  Children who can't read or express emotions well constantly feel frustrated. In essence, they don't understand what's going on. This kind of communication is a constant subtext of everything you do; you can't stop showing your facial expression or posture, or hide your tone of voice. If you make mistakes in what emotional messages you send, you constantly experience that people react to you in funny ways. ^[N]

  This shows that without being able to articulate how or why, we have a very complex and accurate set of expectations to accompany every situation. And, when the nonverbal syntax is off, we move away from that person in suspicion. Goleman goes on to discuss the importance of Nature's Language: as mentioned, this means proper syntax, or subjects acting on objects in natural ways that hold true even though not articulated into the form of human words and language:

  People's emotions are rarely put into words; far more often, they are expressed through other cues. The key to intuiting another's feelings is the ability to read non-verbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expression and the like ... In tests of several thousand people in the United States and eighteen other countries, the benefits of being able to read feelings from non-verbal cues included being better adjusted emotionally, more popular, more outgoing, and - perhaps not surprising - more sensitive

  ... Empathy, it should be no surprise to learn, helps with romantic life ... In tests with 1,001 children, those who showed an aptitude for reading feelings nonverbally were among the most popular in their schools, the most emotionally stable ... 90% or more of an emotional message is non-verbal. ^[O]

  But, back to the point. Non-verbal communication may be a left-over of pre-human communication. We come from the animal and animals negotiate romance, territory, and social order amongst their own non-verbally. Each animal species fights its own kind and each has its own actions to determine supremacy and servility – non-verbally. Except for the occasional talking parrot, animals instruct their young, display helplessness, sickness, anger, joy, depression, hunger, fear, and so forth, without so much as a single word spoken in any human language. They build homes, migrate in troops across the world on land, in sea, and air. They have lives every bit as full and complete as the life of man from one-celled paramecium to the great blue whale. And, they do all these things non-verbally.
  We can only conclude that non-verbal language is at least the equivalent of verbal. And, when a group of animals out-smarts man, then, maybe their non-verbal is greater than our verbal. That the human uses non-verbal communication in all likelihood is testimony to the fact that it is effective and even more effective than human spoken communication for the conveyance of emotion and real understanding of ourselves and others. Interestingly, the bland bookworm person with a photographic memory speaking in a monotone is shunned while a multi-dimensional multi-media person with colorful voice, facial expression, and personality reaches us on many more levels (most non-verbal) and always popular.
  Physical form of non-verbal communication: We have not yet come to terms with the fact that non-verbal activities supersede the intellectual abilities of the human mind and are themselves intellectual in nature. Non-verbal language is powerful indeed. It is Nature's Language that builds the human brain. Gregor Eichelle, an embryologist in the Department of Biochemistry at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, explains the development of the brain and ends saying, "What is perhaps the most intriguing question of all is whether the brain is powerful enough to solve the puzzle of its own creation." ^[P] Teams of computer scientists talk all day and night to made a Big Blue chess-master who beat Andre Sakarov. But, Nature built Andre's Sakarov's brain and each of their own brains without the manuals and verbosity that accompanied the construction of a Big Blue. And, for Nature to make all of their brains capable of utilizing human language costed less than the yearly salary of any one of them. It cannot be said that human language is greater than Nature's language.
  Standard features of all human languages: While each human language is made of different sounds – and these different sounds grouped into different words and modes of sentences, and thoughts – each language interprets Nature's Language the same way: i.e. the same discrete subjects, objects, verbs, and spatio-temporal syntax are found. Therefore, given the same subject, object, and verb in a sentence, the order of words – though even varying through syntax – would generate an identical or nearly identical meaning.

• Why and how animals use subject-object: Most insects and animals eating insects eat objects as tiny as a dot at the end of the sentence. Insects have compound eyes (focal points more difficult for nature to determine than our simple complement of two eyes) and in the case of the spider, it must identify the mandibles of insects caught in its web. It's the mandibles spiders bind and immobilize first. Then, one-by-one, spiders bind and secure each leg. Thus, things as tiny as legs are identified as discrete objects. And, not only are legs identified, spiders first attatch their "glue" to the "foot" and not even the mid or upper leg!
  Spiders next entomb the insect. They anchor one leg as a pivot-point and use their remaining seven legs to spin the animal around. Afterwards, it punctures the insect's abdomen, sucks its juices, and usually "drops" it out of the web when finished. Therefore, in its visual vocabulary, spiders identify insect, head, mandible, leg, foot, abdomen, etc., etc., etc. In its three weeks of incubation, the larva of the Tralantula Wasp eats the inner organs of the paralyzed tralantula in reverse order: least to most important – and the heart is last. Therefore, except for the fact that animals cannot use the spoken word, they have a clearer and more extensive visual vocabulary for items in their subset of the environment than any human being could hope to have. Transform a human into an insect (and keeping his human brain), the human wouldn't last a single day as the insect's visual vocabulary would be far supreme to man's – in their environment. Intelligence and languages are relative. And, man's language decidedly inferior to an insect's if man were operating in an insect's environment.
  Animal visual vocabulary for their sliver of the world is far, far superior to a human being's understanding of and enumeration of the objects found in that world. Thus, animals clearly behave as subjects acting on identifiable objects. In the particle world, forces and matter particles just as clearly have subject-verb-object relationships where they identify and react to objects of the size of 10^-15 cm and smaller. At that level, we're in the nucleus. Within the proton are found three quarks, nine kinds of gluons, a host of weak force particles, gravitons galore: what a party! And, every subject acts on an object with unerring precision. From top to bottom, the universe from particles to biological life operates on the basis of subject-verb-object. When DNA is made, each of the thousands of genes must be identified, singled-out from all others from some gene-recognition "team" in the cell. Each raw molecular material which is used to make the genes for the Monarch Butterfly or the Dalmatian, must identify exactly what molecules it is that will transform into the pattern for their spots. Nature operates based upon subjects acting upon objects.

• When animal's talk and its relationship to human language: When a nestling sees its mother return, it gives one sound for the recognition of the mother, another in recognition of the morsel of food, another demanding more food, and still another when seeing imminent danger as when a cat approaches. Animals, then, clearly identify objects with audio sounds. One difference between the human and lower animal is that human beings have different sounds for these things: food for a human would probably not be a "squawk" (although perhaps in some human language it is) but a word like "berry." A nestling's squawk and the human word "berry" refer to the same thing. A second difference is that the human has far more words to represent objects than lower animals.
  But, this does not necessarily mean that man sees more for both a hawk and insect see more on their scale than the human could. Given the spider spoken of above seeing in minute detail the discrete anatomy of the insects it preys upon, for the range of their vision, they may see every bit as clearly as a human being. And, as they may see in the same relative detail, they identify the same number of discrete objects. We should note that seeing is not the same thing as cognizing for while a human may see a forest in front of him or her, there are hundreds of things that would not register consciously as in a word being formed to denote it. A person may not note the many nicks in the side of a tree and share that ignorance with an insect who may see and not cognize as consciousness is focused elsewhere. Both man and beast probably only cognize things directly relevant in general or at a particular moment in time. The point and significance of the above is that relevant objects are discerned and related to and the human is more inclined to give an audible sound as a referent to that thing that the animal perceives and would not assign a sound to. And, therein would seem to lie the difference between man and animal: both seeing relatively the same of their environments, but one verbalizes while the other does not.

IV. WHEN THE NON-VERBAL IS VERBALIZED: THE MAKING OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

Charles Darwin observed a dog playing with its master. It put a stick down and waited til its master bent to pick the stick up before the dog snatched it away, running off, depositing the stick again at which time the sequence repeated itself. Darwin wrote of another instance where a man at a monkey cage offered a monkey a peanut only to withdraw it when the monkey reached for it provoking chattering and an angry dance from the animal. The man turned away laughing and the monkey suddenly ran for a handful of mud, went up a tree and threw it at the man. The man became angry and Darwin wrote that with open mouth, pointing, and a guffawing sound, for all appearances, it seemed that the monkey were laughing at the man.
In a third case, a baby baboon was straggling behind a troop of 30 in the desert when a band of wild dogs approached prompting the baboons to scurry up the rocks to sure safety. One noble adult turned around going back to the stranded youth, reaching down its hand and pulling the youth out of harm's way. ^[Q] Each form of non-verbal action has its own subjects-object-verb in spatio-temporal syntax. The same holds true for the particle world: a positive ion may remain motionless. In the sudden presence of a negative ion, both will immediately move towards the other: action begets action mediated by natural law.
Language expression, logic, sequence, and the inevitable human option: Darwin wrote the above non-verbal animal sequences. In order for a Darwin to express anything in words, human culture before him had to identify discrete objects and name them. The naming process required the assignment of some combination of dental, aspirated, nasal, and guttural sounds (those comprising all human languages) to an object – in this case, nouns or the words "baboon" and "wild dogs" – nothing more than arbitrary sounds and one of perhaps 1,000 names that a human society has given to denote the animal we in the English language call dogs. These arbitrary sounds had to be agreed upon, accepted by the peoples to which the word is introduced and hence it becomes a referent.
Secondly, Darwin, like all other humans, had to discern the logical process – and logical processes typify nature. There are no illogical processes in nature. The logical process involves the discernment of steps: (1) the dogs saw the baboons and started running. (2) The baboons noticed the dogs and began their escape. (3) One infant remained behind. (4) An older baboon went to his rescue. To define this logical process, Darwin again had to rely upon a culture before him which identified actions (verbs), such as "to see," "to run," "to escape," "to reach out." Again, these actions have been assigned arbitrary sounds people agree upon that serve as referent words. Societies have produced thousands of arbitrary sounds making referent words for "to see," "to run," etc. Thus, following the logical sequence that nature presented, Darwin could write that the "dogs ran after the baboons and they escaped."
Society also had to produce words for invisible states like "to be hungry," "to be scared," "to be quick," and to fall." And, Darwin could say that, "The dogs were hungry and the baboons scared of falling from the mountain." The bible says that God told Adam to name the things of the earth. Whether He did or not, that's exactly what the human being has done. The human has named discrete objects found in nature, discerned the actions in which objects and processes engage, and then described the whole thing. Therefore, because objects are involved in logical relationships, and the only way to describe them is the way they happen, the human has developed a thing called grammar and syntax. Human grammar and syntax are nothing more than a description for the way things work in nature. Human language is just a poor mimic for Nature's Language.
The lost and a major point: Unfortunately, there is no place to make a major point such that it would be seen and regarded. That point is that the primary subject-object-verb relationship, the oldest, and the most abundant, are those that are found in the subatomic and atomic world where forces act upon tiny particles of matter. All subject-object relationships are built up from this^‡ and it should be said that what the human being calls language and grammar is a phenomena that has its basis in the physical relationships that existed since the outset of the universe. This ends the comment made on the major point of this essay.
^‡The Nobelist, Albert Szent-Gyφrgyi writes: "As points may be connected to letters, letters connected to words, words to sentences, etc., so particles can join to atoms, atoms can join to molecules, molecules to organelles, organelles to cells, etc. every level of organization having new meaning of its own and offering new vistas and possibilities." ^[R]

V. NATURE'S LANGUAGE IS UNIVERSAL

Nature's Language same for man, beast, and physical world: All languages since the beginning of human civilization had the equivalent of, "Rain falls to the earth." "Earth, rain falls to it." "Falls, rain to earth." "To earth, rain falls." There could be a thousand different words for "rain" or "earth" or "fall." But, they'd refer to the same things. The syntax may change, but the meaning of that one action in that one sentence remains the same. In describing this phenomena, the human would be using random sounds formed into generally accepted referent words in a certain syntax. This would be the human interpretation of Nature's Language. Any animal noticing this phenomena would arrive at the same conclusion nonverbally, and the physical world (rain and earth) would, due to gravity, act out Nature's Language.
The first written language in which history was written: The human says that he was the first to use language to record history. However, if what science tells us is true, then actually, the first written historical language is DNA and in each genotype – from which springs some plant or animal – is the history of the universe itself. To begin with, if science had the "right" equipment, we should be able to see the creature unfold and act its life out by viewing the genotype just as seeing a video in a VCR. And, from the genotype, we can even determine which elements came from where at what time: the presence of atoms themselves tell us that their protons were formed within the first second of the big bang. Cave writing did not come first. Today, the greatest scientific minds, those hundreds in the Human Genome Project, are trying to decipher something more complex than hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt: they're trying to decipher the human genome created 10 million years ago. When they discover where wit and humor lie; who will be the lazy kid; who will have the coy smile and twinkling eyes, then they can write with the same hand that wrote their own inquisitiveness into their genes. They will understand the language and grammar of life.

VI. INEFFICIENCIES IN THE HUMAN LANGUAGE

In truth, Nature does not need the exercise human science has undertaken and truth exists whether or not the human perceives truth. Hermite once said, "Although the truth is not yet known to us, it preexists."^[S] Science has value to the human species alone. Science does nothing more than attempt to articulate what Nature has done and does in silence. The goal of science is to fathom and put to words what Nature has been doing with ease since the beginning of time. Einstein wrote, "[Natural law] reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."^[T]
Science has not scratched the surface of the ability to form things from natural law considering that the human being is but one species of millions. If the same millions-of-years expense of intellect, money, and effort had been given to using science and technology to fashion a comfortable home for the buffalo or butterfly as it has for the human, scientific law and natural materials would have been put to a use 180⁰ different. We'd live in a completely different world and one we wouldn't recognize. Given a million different kinds of animal life, we could have lived in a million different kinds of worlds if science, technology, and earthly materials were devoted to any given species rather than the human. Thus, the human language, having discerned just a certain type of reality is greatly crippled in its ability to account for all of reality and possibility.
How efficient is human language in describing experience? In a noisy garden barbecue, there are a dozen conversations, dozens of sights, smells, tastes, and textures coming to the body each second. • The sight of people and the clothes they wear, flowers, lawns, running children. • The smells of spare ribs, charcoal smoke, sizzling hot dogs, perhaps a fresh-cut lawn. • The taste of rolls, mustard, ketchup, onions, spare ribs, salt, barbecue sauce. • The feel of sandals on feet, grass under sandals, pants on legs, plate in hand, fork in mouth, breeze blowing over face. • The sound of beer cans popping open, barking dogs, conversations going back-and-forth. • The mind is a blend of all the preceding and maintains in addition, a half-a-dozen thoughts, impressions, and feelings slightly changing with each word, nuance, and sensation entering the mind.
If we experience half-a-dozen different things in each above category of sound, sight, touch, taste, smell, thought, and feeling, 42 things are happening in any given second and we can only explain one of the 42 at a time making language expression linear. With seven features (sight, etc.) verbally, we can only discuss one sense at a time of the seven we feel. Words are not only linear: they are comparatively speaking, flat and one-dimensional. In fact, we cannot explain the present moment for two reasons: First, the second we begin to explain it, that moment has already passed. Secondly, the blend of emotion changes by the second and explanation, again, can only explain the seconds past and never the second experienced. So, language has the shortcoming that it cannot explain experience. We can never describe the experience we experience in words. We may intuit – but words do not have the richness of the inner thought, vision, feeling, and so forth. Goleman writes, "The realm of the emotions extends beyond the reach of language and cognition."^[U]
Many have expressed frustration over the impotency of human language. Schopenhauer writes, "Thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words." And, truth can be known in a sudden wordless flash, but the written proof take hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Such occurred with • Mendeleev's periodic table of elements received in dream. • Einstein's vision of a person falling from a building who was both in motion and stationary as his inspiration of the General Theory of Relativity. • Kekulé's dream of a snake biting its tail as the key to understanding the benzene carbon ring. • Archimede's sitting in a tub of displaced water realizing two forms of matter cannot be in the same place at the same time. • Isaac Newton with an apple falling upon his head "discovering" gravity. • Poincarι received the idea of Fuschian functions as he stepped on a microbus. He was perfectly certain it was correct but it took months to work it out on paper. • Guth received the idea of inflation in a sudden flash at a lecture, but it was not until month's later that he had it written out on paper. • Mozart received his compositions in one whole piece but the writing took months.
Francis Galton said his thought is never accompanied by words.^[V] • The mathematician, Jacques Hadamard, writes, "I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think." • Ferrol, the calculator, also received mathematical inspiration, but not in words: "The intuitive conception which, curiously enough, has never been shaken with error."^[W] • William Hamilton said, "Ideas must necessarily precede words." ^[X] • Roger Penrose writes, "That is not to say that I do not sometimes think in words, it is just that I find words almost useless for mathematical thinking ... Rigorous argument is usually the last step."^[Y] • Albert Einstein himself said, "The elements [of thinking] in my case, are of the visual nature. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage."^[Z]
We should note that as these men are scientists and mathematicians who receive wordless thought. There is nothing with more precision than mathematics and science. Yet, these things are best first experienced (in the view of the above persons) without the interference of words. Nature's Language, i.e. subject-verb-object (and other parts of speech) in spatio-temporal relationship expressed syntactically is more powerful than words. I would ask the reader to please click the following to see of the manner in which one famous calculator received non-verbal mathematical truth. Ferrol told Möbius: 'It often seems to me, especially when I am alone, that I find myself in another world. Ideas of numbers seem to live. Suddenly, questions of any kind rise before my eyes with their answers." (To read whole letter click).
A playful thought is to realize that Mohammed received the Koran from Allah and Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan in his sleep not completing it for someone knocked on his door and broke his spell. These rhymed or were poetic in their own languages. Keats wrote, "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth." The playful thought is, "Is God also a poet?" and does He (or She) first learn the languages that humans themselves devise and then communicate with those who are spiritually sensitive in their own languages? Is God a multilinguist? Does He/She write poetry in His/Her spare time? Is poetry one of God's hobbies? Did God write a commentary on human nature through William Shakespeare?

VII. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, while the human may well have a language skill that is genetically determined, it would appear to be a reflective understanding and articulation of Nature's Language that undergirds all subjects and objects in nature in an interactive state with one another. Human language is but one of many languages used in the biological world and while sufficient to the human's needs, not necessarily qualitatively superior to that of any other biological language – a mixture of verbal and non-verbal. Human language would appear to be inadequate to express the fullness of thought and feeling experienced at any given moment, or ever. Many of our most significant thinkers have expressed their own experience of the limitations of human language to express ideas that they understand fully but can which only be explained in words at great pain and the expense of time. Finally, even though language cannot be dispensed with and serves mankind well, the idea that human language is some monument towering above the accomplishments of Nature seems to be a misinformed human thought.

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