Meeting Notes of the Société de Linguistique de Paris
(c. 100,000 BCE)

Avery Iger Professor-of-Linguistics-at-the-University-of-Oxford
(Unaffiliated Researcher)¹

Author’s note: This is a translation of stone tablets at the Museum of Artifacts You Can Only See After You’ve Finished All of Your Teaching, Research, and Other Tasks. (I worked as a janitor at MAYCOSAYFAYTROT after I finished my PhD and studied them discreetly. We never had a single visitor anyway.) I had the stone inscription radiometrically dated to 100,000 BCE (±500 ka). I didn’t recognize the writing system, but I was able to decipher it, and it strongly reminds me of a certain Indo-European language I can’t quite put my finger on, with some modern-day French sprinkled in. At the top, it says the following, so I figured now was the right time to send it in to this esteemed journal.

(1)

⸎〛
EXH.FOC

᠃⳹
read.IMP

᳀᙮
DEM.PROX

𖭄᭟
COMP.COND

᨟꧉։𖫵።𖩯᯿
DET.DEF

‽꛳𑁈៕
speculate-ADJZ

෴᚜꩞
grammar-AGT.NMLZ

๛
COP.PRES.IND.3SG

꫟𑈹
IMM.FUT

꘎꩟
end.INF

Z
PUNCT

The remainder is my own translation. All mistakes are my own. You can’t have them, they’re mine!

Oog: This meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris shall come to order! I am not sure why I said our name like that, what or where Paris is, or why we decided to travel deep into Neanderthal territory to have this meeting, but it sounds fancy and important. Zug, can you read the minutes from last year’s meeting?

Zug: Yes, well, it was mostly various grunts, hoots, and howls. There was considerable confusion, since we are a society for the study of human language, but uh… there is no such thing as human language yet. We considered that maybe the paintings we make in caves are language, but we don’t want to step on the Royal Society of Arts’ toes. We also considered if the grunts we make are language, but if so, we’d have to invite Neanderthals into the society, and, well, no one wanted that. So, we resolved to come back next year with something to be a linguistics society for.

Oog: And what progress we’ve made!

(Hoots and hollers of approval from the society.)

Oog: Hey now, those better not be grunts I hear!

(Contentful lexical items of approval from the society.)

Oog: That’s better. Let’s go around and give some updates. Agog, start us off.

Agog: Well, I was looking for inspiration. I wandered fields for days on end. By the end, I was really starving and needed some bread. I saw a bright, shining tunnel of light, and it came to me: bekos.

(Murmurs of recognition from the society.)

Agog: And then bam, I was speaking the complete language I am today!

Oog: Fascinating. It’s a good thing we all speak the same language, or I’d be worried something really crazy happened to you! Anyway, Bow-wow, what about you?

Bow-wow: (Doing a killer Oog impression) Bow-wow, what about you?

(Riotous laughter from the society.)

Zug: Haha, classic Oog.

Bow-wow: In all seriousness, you know how I love to imitate animals. Used to just do it for fun or when we’re hunting. But I started listening more, and animals actually have words for all kinds of things. Chickens have words for other animals, crows have all kinds of words for food. (Weirdly, bread is also bekos, now that I think about it.) Prairie dogs have adjectives, bees have verbs and locations.

(Various animals turn their heads when Bow-wow says different words. A crow here, a cat there, a common click beetle there.)

Bow-wow: When I put it all together, it’s like I’m imitating a whole forest! Only downside is it drives the animals nuts when I go on like this. I am very much using their words in the wrong contexts.

Moog: Isn’t that so beautiful? The sounds of the wilderness, doesn’t that just make you ♫ want to sing? My language comes from music, and ♫–

Oog: Yes, thank you Moog, thanks that’s quite enough. You used to sing all the time, and now that you have language you can sing… a lot… more I guess. Moving on, Ugh, I’ve heard you’ve had a pretty bad year?

Ugh: Ugh! Don’t even get me going. Things are always happening to me. A small rock falls on my toe—Ouch! A medium rock falls on my toe—Yeow! I started to realize there’s a different word for each accident. Slap! Slurp! A loaf of bread hits me in the face—Bekos! So many specific accidents happened, those words became whole sentences, and here I am.

Oog: You just said a whole paragraph. Was this a long, elaborate, painful experience for you and that was your cry of pain?

Ugh: Was it that obvious?

Oog: Yikes. Ok, who’s next. Er… Dug?

Dug: Me? I mean… I just gave a word to each sign in the gesture-based communication system we had already developed from mimicking tools and tool use, but you know if we want to be exclusionary and not call gestures ‘language’ for some reason, shrug.

(Embarrassed silence from the Society.)

Oog: Oh. I’m so sorry.

Dug: I mean, no yeah prairie dog adjectives, cool stuff.

Oog: Who else... Jared, are you here? What happened to you this past year?

Jared: Sure am, dude! Right on, well I was totally walking along the beach one day and I thought, ‘This ape should get aquatic!’ So I just got in the water all day. I rode all these tubular waves, saw all these rad fish, lost all my body hair—it was like whoa!

Oog: But how did you learn language specific– and you’re walking away, never mind. Ok, I think we have one more–

Nog: Correct, that would be me. All of the stories so far have been naïve and circumstantial at best. They miss the core generalization that at some point (last year) we humans were able to do something that other animals could not, namely Merge(α,β), resulting in infinite recursion. I mean, could you imagine if a Neanderthal tried to say ‘Zug writes that Oog believed that the crow Bow-wow imitated cawed’, and not only that but to comprehend the ungrammaticality of ‘*Bow-wowi, Zug writes that Oog believed that the crow __i imitated cawed’, haha I think not!

(Confused murmurs from the Society.)

Nog: Hence, I initially sought to explain these changes via genetic mutations that led to delayed development of the pre-frontal cortex (Chogsky -100,000a), then focused on mirror neurons (Chogsky -100,000b-c), but I now believe the answer lies in a mechanism involving the FOXP2 gene (Chogsky, et al. -100,000d-x, et seq.), leading to the development of a system of physical action mimicry and understanding–

Jared: Dude, you’re harshing the vibe!

Dug: (That’s still the gesture thing…)

Moog: ♫ Zug wrote Oog believed crow cawed ♫–

Ugh: Ugh.

Bow-wow: (Talking to a robin) Wait, you have clitics? What even are clitics?

Oog: Attention everyone, please! Now Jared, you never said. Where did you get language from?

Jared: Oh yeah! I ate a bunch of these mushrooms, right? Then I started smelling colors, and I looked at a piece of bread and I was like, duuuuuuuude, bekos.

Oog: Riveting.

Dug: So… what about you two, Oog and Zug?

Oog: Oh right! I suppose we got language as well. I have to say, as the leader of numerous different societies, we have lots of rituals and ceremonies that all need incantations. That built up a language really quick.

Zug: And I obsessively write everything down! I guess I just picked it up from everyone else.

Oog: Ok, it is time to wrap things up. At the end of the day we’re all very different people with very different interests, maybe even obsessions, yet we all somehow arrived at the same human language in different ways. What is the origin of language? It’s all of us! Now, we can finally begin to be a society of linguistics, and I’m sure we’ll come up with all kinds of interesting, wacky theories of language. And even though we might argue with each other, deep down we might all be a little bit correct! Er… most of us, anyway.

Zug: Good thing I wrote it all down! I will be a real help to future scholars to understand exactly what the origin of language was!

Oog: Wait… No. We should keep it a secret.

(Gasps from the society.)

Oog: Think about it. If everyone already knows the answer, that wouldn’t be very much fun now, would it? And people don’t need to know exactly what happened this past year to understand how language really works. We should hold onto this for as long as possible. Let future linguistics societies try to figure it out on their own. And if anyone gets too close to the right answer, we as the Société de Linguistique de Paris will officially ban the search for the origin of language and come up with some excuse such as how it’s unprovable and there are too many theories or something. Then we can let even more generations of scholars go on wild goose chases. And only once the well has run dry and the study of language seems to be ending, only then do we reveal our little piece of history to the world!

Society: Hear, hear!

Oog: This meeting is adjourned! I expect to see each of you next year with a different theory.

Jared: Cool, so is there a reception or anything? All this talk about bekos has made me hungry!

	The Joke’s on Us! Part I—Hugh Merrous, Joe King, and Belle E. Laffgh
	The Adventure of the Bandicoot Delivery—John Watson, M.D.
	SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 1 Contents