ABSTRACT
When speculating about the origins of language we do well to remind ourselves just what we are pondering the origins of: For some, a language is something so general that just about every form of human activity qualifies: music, dance, even emotional expression (Agawu, 1991; Goodman, 1968; Pribram, 1971). For others, it is a very specific and complex mental organ that allows us to produce and recognize grammatically correct sentences (Chomsky, 1980). I would like to take a third road and consider language to be only that form of human activity that is intertranslatable with English (or any other language) plus whatever mental capacity one must have in order to produce and understand it. The intertranslatability criterion, however, although rather powerful, is still too vague and general. So let me add that one of the principal features of language is that it allows us to categorize the world and its parts in what appears to be an infinity of different ways, among them, possibly, a way that comes close to the way the world really is.
