The say of the land

Is language produced by the mind? Romantic theory has it otherwise: words emerge from the cosmos, expressing its soul.

Delighted that my essay on the origins of language has been published at Aeon.

“Rather, language is one of those phenomena that arose when human beings engaged with life not so as to survive but so as to participate in the great rush of it that they felt teeming around them. Human beings do not live on bread alone.”

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