> I can't think of another linguistic feature in history
Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak.
> Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings.
There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.
Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak.
> Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings.
There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.