Legend holds that our language was buried fully-formed from the desert sands. Our ancestors sank to their knees, plunged their hands deep into the sand, and found the first word. It sparkled in the sunlight - blinding if you held it at a particular angle. This was the word for 'dig'.
The language wasn't a flat object, nor was it buried too close to the surface. Its veins and tendrils snaked in every direction, forming a cage that contained nothing but tonnes and tonnes of sand.
To uncover it, our ancestors started digging. With their bare hands, they dug into the sand until they could uncover more and more of this language left to them as an inheritance. Wood, metal, shovel, pickaxe, love, camaraderie, curiosity, endeavour, all these words entered the virtual lexicon.
As they uncovered more and more of the language, our ancestors learnt about more and more things. Ideas that existed in a time before they arrived in the desert, tools and implements, and of course, violence and weapons. There was conflict, and collateral damage. Many words were smashed to pieces, lost forever in a jumble of shining syllables or crumbled into dust that became one with the sand.
The hole in the desert grew wide and deep. Our ancestors learnt about things that they had not, could not have conceived of. With the wealth of other words they had uncovered, they began working their way towards making those inconceivable words conceivable. They worked to make the hypothetical real.
Away from the hole where new words were mined, an entirely new occupation coalesced. The words uncovered from the hole were processed, their properties determined and re-arranged, so that our ancestors could do something unprecedented. They created new words.
These words could be purer, bigger, shinier. You could use them in ways heretofore unimagined.
A rift was formed between those who created and used these artificial words, and those who worshipped the words in the desert. After all, if the language was fully-formed, there was no need to create new words. The right words only have to be found. They would occur naturally.
Further problems emerged as artificial words were passed off as natural discoveries. One perpetrator of such fraud was unrepentant about his actions. "This word, when found, will be of the exact same composition as the artificial word. So what difference does it make if we use it now, before it has been uncovered?"
No one knew the true extent of the language. Did it stretch across the entirety of the desert, or perhaps comprise the entire sphere that formed the planet? These thoughts, which could not have been put to words once, were now on the lips of every citizen.
These speculations eventually caused the digging to slow down. Did we really need more words? The sand reclaimed the hole. And now, the language lies buried so deep, that if you were to start digging now, it would take years to find the first new word.
amandla
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2087
