There was language long before there was writing, a fact that we literate investigators tend to underestimate. Today we are building the information superhighway, and for several millennia the written word has been a primary medium of cultural transmission, but for at least a thousand millennia before that, the main medium of information transfer from generation to generation was the well-beaten path of word of mouth. Language was already a highly refined biological product, complete with all its modern appurtenances, long before writing was invented.

LRB 23 June 1994 | PDF Download