Can’t help but notice that the more I play with language, the more intrigued I am with its origins and evolution.

In one sense, language itself is metaphor. Words are symbols and not the things themselves – which brings to mind an example often offered by Campbell and his friends, Alan Watts and Buckminster Fuller: “the menu is not the meal.”

Language wasn’t invented on the first Tuesday in April of 232,000 B.C. as a complete set of abstract sounds with fixed meanings – though that seems sometimes how we view it today.

So where does language come from?

As a child, we all learned to talk without having to take classes on syntax, sentence structure, and the eight parts of speech. As infants we laughed and cried and made baby sounds – googahs and gawgaws and such, often mimicking the sounds surrounding us – such as the sounds animals make.

Our first recognizable word with clear meaning is often “mama.” Babies seem to naturally make a “mmm” sound when content and happy and safe and sound, which happens most often when Mom is in the vicinity, since love and all good things flow from her.

An easy association to make – things that feel good – suckling and hugging and napping, “mmmm, mmmm, good … ” – and She-Who-is-the-Whole-World to me, also “mmmm, mmmm, good …” – an example of pre-literate, even pre-conscious, metaphorical thinking?

Theorists such as David Abrams (whose elegant volume, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World, is an enchanting, delightful brain-spinning read) suggest language developed from humanity’s interactions with the natural world – the plants and animals and breezes and waters and such all around one. (To give a totally simplistic analogy using onomatopeia, “splash” and “gush” are English words that echo the sound water makes when it’s splashing and gushing – so it’s no surprise to us that the word splash refers to the sound water makes when it splashes or is splashed … yet the word splash is not the splash itself, but represents it – again, a metaphorical relationship of sorts; not the best example of the actual dynamic at work, but maybe gets across the gist of what I’m trying to say).

Spoken language, then, appears to have emerged from human experience and interplay with the natural world, creating a set of collective metaphors that, over time, have become more abstract and removed from the natural world … and written language as well, as it developed, also emerged out of metaphor.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, don’t just represent abstract sounds (though over millennia hieroglyphs changed, especially in response to the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet throughout the Mediterranean world, so over time moved away from image and more towards abstract symbol). The hieroglyph for “bee,” for example, represented the sound a bee makes – zit zit – but also included the image of a bee, and referred as well to the land of milk and honey.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are both images and sounds.

The ancient texts are full of double meanings and hidden clues. The name of the lion, for example, was ra-ra, an onomatopoeic word in imitation of the sound of the lion’s roar. Is it an wonder, then, that we find the sun god Ra appearing as a lion, or that the lion runs beside the chariot of the pharaoh Rameses II as a direct sign that Rameses ( Ra-mose) is the son of the sun god Ra and the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet? …

The pictorial aspect of the hieroglyph contains total meaning. The hieroglyph of the giraffe, for example, means “to foretell,” because the long neck of the giraffe allowed it to see farther into the distance. The picture of a wall falling down carries the message of something overthrown, and the hieroglyph for a jackal means ‘to digest.’

In modern Western languages writing is used in an abstract, linear fashion. If we read the word “jackal,” for instance, the mind conveys memorized sound and visual associations. Hieroglyphic writing and thinking works in a circular fashion. The hieroglyphic image – jackal – is there before our eyes and can expand, evoking within the prepared viewer a whole complex of qualities and associations from abstract, intuitive notions or states of being to relationships and understandings that cannot be defined but must be experienced on many levels.

A jackal, for example, buries its kill until the natural elements have digested it. It knows the right moment to dig up the carrion and finish the eating and digestive process. The jackal-headed god Anubis was not only the neter [god/image] for the human digestive system, but also the one who knew just the right moment to lead the newly dead person before Osiris and the forty-two Assessors, who test the spirit for worthiness to enter the Immortal Realms. Jackal thus represented readiness, timing, preparation, digestion, and immortality: these are some of the images and knowings that would be evoked in the mind of an ordinary Egyptian when seeing the hieroglyph for the jackal.

Jean Houston, The Passion of Isis & Osiris, p. 120

Over time, the Phoenician alphabet morphs from natural image to abstract sign: the letter A, for example, originally depicted an ox or bull, but gradually adopted the de-animated form it has today. (Abrams and others argue that as writing developed and became more abstract, this created distance between the reader and the natural world, creating space for a reflective ego to emerge – but that’s another story.)

As far as a specific language today that relies almost exclusively on metaphor, there are the Dine’ – aka the Navaho – whose poetic use of image made their language the ideal “code” that the Japanese couldn’t break in WWII: hence the term “windtalkers” to describe the role of the Dine’ who transmitted classified messages for the military during the war.

Excuse my rambling as I wander far afield – but seems the relationship between language and metaphor – and how myth appears intertwined with the emergence of language – merits further discussion.