[dhosek]

I remember in my literary theory class, one of the theorists made the (deliberately) absurd claim that writing preceded speech. Reading this, and I wonder if he was correct (as an aside, I tend to wander into the weeds in language articles on Wikipedia as I find myself increasingly curious about language evolution and I always wonder whether the different language families are “merely” a result of linguistic drift over millennia or whether human speech appeared independently in multiple points of origin).

[jgtrosh]

Your instinctive reaction matches with scientific consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often only capable of encoding broad or imprecise information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech

> vocal languages must have begun diversifying at least 100,000 years ago

[WalterBright]

> Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language.

And, of course, today we are going backwards to icon proto-writing, with all the same shortcomings.

[eucyclos]

I have a theory that song used to communicate emotional states precedes and probably evolved into language as we think of it.

[cenamus]

Whales also communicate by "song". But at that point it's just their language, whether you classify it as song (pleasant for a human to listen to?) or language doesn't really change that it's used for communication

[konfusinomicon]

I like to think that bird song, evolved over millions of years going back to their dinosaur ancestors, is a language that encodes vast amounts of information that our brains can't even begin to understand the complexities of

[nucleardog]

I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand!

If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo

(Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)

[eucyclos]

The old story of the 'language of the birds' suggests that we can make headway. No one's ever complained of time they wasted listening to birdsong.