I have been asking several questions as to what goes on inside my cat's head. Obviously the cat is less intelligent than people, but he does display on occasion some quite sophisticated thought patterns and even appears to try to manipulate his owners to get fed.
Among one of the thoughts that I've had (and have had lengthy discussions on) is the question of how does the cat actually think. Being an English speaker, nominally most of my thoughts are composed in English, though I will admit that having learnt elementary Japanese and a small amount of French and Latin, occasionally I will think in those languages as well.
What then of the cat? Is it possible to conduct sophisticated thought without the use of a cognisant language. How do you hang ideas in any framework without a language to tie them altogether? Is this also true for deaf people? If you were born deaf, and never ever heard language, then how would you compose ideas and thoughts?
Then I asked the question "Is there some default language which all people latently have?" Perhaps the answer to this might explain my above conundrum.
Merritt Ruhlen in his book "The Origin of Language" suggest that in fact, all modern languages share a common origin. By using a series of arguments based on reconstruction, the known proto-languages, a series of classification and by testing with known common roots, he's able to build quite a compelling argument for this theory.
The idea is consistent with the rest of science. If you create orders and super-families Eurasiatic (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Eskimo/Aleut), Dene-Caucasian (Basque, Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene), and Amerind (Native American languages from the US to South America), and then compare these to the isolated groups of Dravidian etc Austronesian etc, then by extrapolation, it all leads back to only one language.
Take a simple word such as aq'wa (water). It appears in what seemingly looks like totally unrelated languages all over the world. How is it possible for instance that Indo-European languages share more in common with Eskimo/Aleut languages than Semitic languages which immediately neighbour it?
There is a relatively simple way to describe what's going on though:
"Now the whole world had one language and a common speech." - Genesis 11:1
"The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel (confusion) — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world." Genesis 11:6-9
If science seemingly confers with the Bible that there was indeed only one root language, does this mean that this is a set of default settings? Do deaf people have this language as some sort of default?
What about my cat? In Genesis 3:1 we read this:
"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?""
My cat is certainly crafty, but what I find conspicuous by its absence is the issue that Eve throughout this discussion isn't surprised that the serpent could talk. Was it a commonplace thing to do before the fall? Does my cat still have the default pre-Babel language locked inside his head?
It's an interesting question. Of less interest is what the cat would actually say if he could talk. I'm 99% sure of what that would be.
Feed me.
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