Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon

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      We all make our marks in various ways. Humans are experts at creating and manipulating marks or symbols. Language is just one of these systems of symbols. We also use mathematics and spatial orientation. Humans can think in music or even with kinesthetic intelligence, a sort of muscle memory that might be used to choreograph a ballet or map a strategy for winning a football game. All of these are called semiotic systems, semiotics being the study of how humans represent things, how we assign symbols as stand-ins for much more complex ideas.

      Humans are very good at symbols, much better than gorillas, for example. The most famous gorilla to use symbols was named Koko, who was taught to recognize and employ more than a thousand, even becoming proficient enough to name a kitten she had acquired for a pet. Koko named it All Ball, perhaps referring to the fact that the cat was an excellent playmate. But even if you buy the supposition that Koko truly understood what she was doing, with a thousand symbols she was working at about the level of a three-year-old human child.

      The point is that humans tend to think in a variety of semiotic systems, representing things with symbols — topographical lines on a map, a percentage sign, holding up our middle finger at the guy who cuts us off in traffic — but the most powerful, most efficient, most versatile of these semiotic systems is undoubtedly language.

      For one thing languages constantly change. They always evolve to meet our needs. Anyone can see the difference between Shakespearean English and our modern version. We’ve lost thou and thee, but that’s four hundred years of change and easy to see.

      The fact is that no matter what the various protectors of grammar say, languages relentlessly mutate. They borrow words and ideas from other languages. They change their pronunciation, and over time they even lose bits and pieces of their grammar. I suspect, for instance, that the adverb suffix ly will disappear from English in another fifty years. As shocking as it might appear to English teachers, sentences like “I tried to get there quick” will become perfectly grammatical.

      Yes, languages are as organic as we are. And so Latin got old and eventually fossilized. It remains with us in a jumble of scientific phylums, though it rarely escapes the bonds of the written page any longer. The spoken variations, however, continue to grow and move and spring up into new dialects. Latin has already spawned not only Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, but also Catalan, Provençal, and even far-off Romanian.

      Language can get very complicated. The mythical lines between actual tongues and their dialects become blurry and confused. In Italy, for example, so many dialects came out of Latin that it wasn’t until 1979 that what we commonly refer to as Italian, the Tuscan dialect, became the one spoken at home by more than 50 percent of all Italians. And, like many other countries, there are still pockets of other dialects spoken across Italy, including Sicilian, Umbrian, and Corsican.

      That’s how the Tower of Babel works. New dialects continually emerge from a mother tongue, usually the language of an empire. They blossom into dozens of other tongues, often leaving the host language a mere museum piece. They form families with all manner of odd uncles and drunken cousins.

      Perhaps this is strange to us in North America where you can travel for hundreds and even thousands of kilometres without hearing any major differences in speech patterns. But we are the anomaly. That situation exists nowhere else in the world.