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Encyclopedia entry: language
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to the Body
- Author:
Copyright© The Oxford Companion to the Body 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001. (Hide copyright information)
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language
may be the most appropriate trait by which to classify humans within the order of nature, even more so than rationality (
Homo sapiens
) or technology (
Homo faber
) — and not only because language is less honorific than rationality and more intrinsic than technology. In a sense
Homo loquens
trumps all other terms, since the very act of definition is itself a move within language. Speculation that all three species-specific capacities — reasoning, tool use, and language — were bound together in an evolutionary nexus is supported by recent paleoanthropological evidence that the beginnings of language were linked to the sociability of hominids and the growth of ...