Even if it could be shown that natural languages are learned, even if it could be that creoles are learned, it cannot be shown that the original human language was learned-for it could not have been learned. Even if one believes that our ancestors were taught by spacemen, then the spacemen weren’t taught, or whoever taught the spacemen wasn’t taught. There is no escape in regress. Somewhere, sometime, somehow, human language began, and it could not have begun through acquisition strategies, or inductive processes, or hypothesis formation, or mother’s home-cooked language lessons. It must have been “invented”.
- Bickerton (1981), a pag.213