Grabs the sides of the podium, "I'll answer that."
This is way off topic, but it is an interesting story I appreciate, being trained as an Accountant.
The evolution of modern civilization is not due to language, but to mathematics.
The oldest profession is the hunter. Then the prostitute came along, and traded services for hides. Then, the farmer evolved, and raised the hides instead of hunting them.
Then civilization began, when the farmer had too many animals to count on two hands. He had to find a way to keep track of all his beasts, and the accountant was born.
The oldest accountants used knots on a string, but eventually began using clay tablets called cunieform. Cunieform rapidly evolved into more than accounting however, as more then just 10 cows, 3 bulls was needed to be kept track of. What if the farmer had sheep, or which wife had claim on which bull?
So, a rudimentary alphabet evolved. At first, it was symbolic, but some really smart phonecian decided to make up a letter for each sound used in language.
After we had written language, it was possible to communicate immutalbe law from the king down to the people. From law arouse states of more than one city, and eventually countries.
So, if it hadn't been for accountants, we would all still be hacking away at dirt with stone tools.
To answer your question, mathematics would have had to be invented. It is only a system of logical interelations, and not an actual process. BUT, it is a uniform universal truth. However, the reason we put instructions on the Voyager probes in binary, was because only binary is believed to be the only univeral comprehensible mathematics. |
