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I can see how different grunts could come to mean “bear”, “deer” or “run”. But how do grammatically complex languages get their cases and declensions?
Paul Seedhouse
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK This can best be answered from a broader perspective on the evolution of complex life and by understanding languages as complex, life-related systems.
All life on Earth began with our last universal common ancestor (LUCA), an organism similar to extant bacteria. Once life started, it evolved to become ever more diverse and complex, eventually developing the human brain, the most complex object ever found on Earth. The human…
