In The Language Instinct, language maven, Steven Pinkus, says (p. 26), "No mute tribe has ever been discovered, and there is no record that a region has served as a 'cradle' of language from which it spread to previously languageless groups."

Speaking of the richness of language variability, Pinkus says (p. 28), "It is even a bit misleading to to call Standard English a 'language' and these variations 'dialects,' as if there wers some meanginful difference between them. The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

And Pinkus tells a fascinating story about the origination of a language (p. 36): "Until recently there were no sign languages in Nicaragua because its deaf people remained isolated from one another. When the Sandanista goverment took over in 1979 and reformed the educational system, the first schools for the deaf were created. The school focused on drilling the children in lip reading and speech, and as in every case where that is tried. the results were dismal. But it did not matter. On the playgrounds and schoolbuses the children were inventing their own sign system, pooling the makeshift gestures that they used with their families at home. Before long the system congealed into what is now called the Linguaje de Signos Nicaragüene (LSN). Today LSN is used with varyiing degrees of fluency, by young deaf adults, from seventeen to twenty-five, who developed it when they were ten or older."

Via language I put my thoughts into your brain. Via language I radiate the rainbow of my humaness. Without written language, I must do this face to face. And neither of us have time for that. And, even if possible, it would be a one-time thing.

My literacy allows me to hang out my thoughts with a "to-whom-it-may-concern" sign on them. Your literacy allows you to nibble at your leisure and to repeat whenever it pleases you. My thoughts could acquire an "immortality" beyond my occupancy.

I've often said to my students, "Unless you will something written to posterity, how can any one know you once lived upon this earth?"

Language makes us human. Literacy radiates that humanity -- through space and time.

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