ABSTRACT
Human curiosity begins early, perhaps as soon as the infant begins to reach for something that comes into view, and certainly well before it first attempts speech. Curiosity about language, however, can begin only after there already exist languages to be curious about, and to speculate with. Thus, in the creation myths of many cultures, a benevolent totem animal or spirit or god speaks with the first humans, or leaves it to them to bestow names on the earth’s flora and fauna. Such myths are naïve but natural. In a sense they are also logical: the naïve observer can only think of language in terms of the words one knows. The observer therefore supposes that humans must have been given language, just as infants always have been, by a benign other who already knows which spoken words mean what.
