Lithic Language: The Discovery of Stone Age Meanings (Paperback)

This is a serious book examining the original sounds and meanings of languages right back to the Stone Age - up until now believed to be impossible. But it can also be seen as tracing the overwhelming sexual orientation of human thinking for the last six hundred thousand years or more - when we were only hominids, squatting round the camp fires at the mouths of our caves - to keep the sabre toothed tigers out. It was here that our original bare bottomed language committees first got to grips with meanings and their audible representation. The committees were convened as a result of the taming of fire, the high tech of the day. It was a cosy environment in a cold and hostile world, and the unaccustomed warmth led to an outburst of amorous inclinations, and the need to express them in words. Ka they thought echoic of the strike of flint on flint, and so striking, and so the tenderising of raw meat for which they had already been making "hand axes" for at least half a million years. It is from ka-ka for tenderising with a hand axe that our cooking comes! The flame did it for you. Flint knapping left a lot of "debetage" or waste flakes, whence ka-ka also came to mean waste - including today human waste. Metaphor led to odd bedfellows. All this evidence is decoded from an exhaustive forty year research into over a hundred languages, many of them dead ones, where like flies in amber our original Lithic (Stone Age) language roots are still embedded. There is nothing salacious in the tale. It simply tells it as it is and was, and it is not going to go away. This short version is abstracted from a major work of over 600 pages, and there is nothing in it which the ordinary man in the street (and his sister) can not easily follow. It ranks quite highly in the order of useless information, but it has its indirect usage. If you understand how all our languages have actually come about - the product of human whimsy - you will be that much less likely to believe some of the sillier alternative views put forward by ideologically inclined placemen. Lastly, how has Lithic Language been cracked? The answer lies in "semantic triangulation". Believe it or not, all our languages today (over 6000) bear traces of the original meanings given to the sounds as we first learned to articulate them, and it is possible to work backwards using the current meanings in numerous languages to home in on the original source meanings which are common to the current ones. Then we can see if they make sense as a first guess by our Stone Age (hominid) forebears of what they thought of as the "natural" meanings of the sounds. They didn't do thinking very much. That is how they all guessed the same, or nearly the same. So we are probably on the right track: language was all spun by human whimsy, (over a few hundred millennia), from only a baker's dozen original articulated sounds. The English language alone reached a million words last year.