Christine Kenneally

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.

The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.

[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.