July 28, 2022
I am in search of a brief article by Noam Chomsky where he argues for the Promethean theory of language.
Language could only reasonable have originated from some individual who had an inner capacity for organizing thought into some form that it could be expressed outwardly. When this inner and inherent capacity for language was turned on or acquired by some individual, then language could be outwardly expressed - although there is no absolute equality between what this inner capacity for language is and what its outer expression is like. But it must be, because language is unique only to human bings among all the other animals, even the smart ones, and it is such a unique state of mind that leads to the production of language in speech, that it must be an even more complex state of cognition that leads to language, and, most importantly of all, it must have been some revolutionary development in human thought that led to language. And since it is so unique of a cognitive state, and so revolutionary a development that must have occurred to lead to that cognitive state, it stands to reason that it must have happened only in one individual at first.
The details can't be hashed out because it happened so long ago, before civilization and collective memory: because these were things that language created. But reason shows that it must have happened that way, and hence, Prometheus and the Promethean theory of language.
Parts of this may have been in Why Only Us? (2016) but I'm looking for a very short article maybe for private distribution, that disappeared from the Internet shortly after 2019 or so...
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