I handed him the spoon, then realized what had happened. He used a word for a noun – the spoon – but conveyed the action with a gesture. If he had only said spoon without the finger motion, I wouldn’t have known what he wanted; and if he had just crooked his finger without telling which object he was referring to, I wouldn’t have been able to understand him.
“A bit later, these symbols were broken down into sounds,” he continued, “things we call syllables that could be infinitely rearranged to create new words. And this led to a further breaking down of the syllables into individual letters, again with infinite possible reconstructions.
“This deconstruction and reassembly of the sounds they made with their vocal cords allowed the evolution of a more detailed spoken language, but it was c
