Acquiring a language requires associating sounds and meanings according to the phonological (patterns of speech sounds) and syntactic rules of a particular (human) language (de Boysson-Bardies 1999:40). Most studies and theories of language origin focus upon specific language 'areas' of the brain which appear to control grammar and syntax.

Research indicates that the left hemisphere is specialized for most aspects of language. The left frontal area shows specialization for expressive language (Broca's hypothesis), and the left temporal area appears to be specialized for receptive language (Wernicki's hypothesis) (Loritz 1999). The right hemsphere appears to regulate the comprehension and production of humor, metaphor, and idioms and seems to control the cohension and coherence in narratives (SIT:TOL).

Stephenson writes about relativists and universalists and mentions briefly Noam Chomsky. After reading all of the language theories and how the brain processes language I am still no closer to understanding how language originated. Somewhere in our brain there must be a gene that controls language learning working in conjunction with eyes, ears, voice, and gestures are humans able to communicate fully.

Neal Stephenson wrote:

"There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself." (257)

"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you find that all of them have certain traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits." (257)

"They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable." (258)

"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same-" (258)

"Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English-or any other languages-must share certain traits that have their roots in the 'deep structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner paraphases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually leas to the actual patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time, 'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysical channels." (258)