Humanese is Our Linguistic Wiring

About this poem

The genetic universal language of Humanese is our linguistic wiring, the linguistic wiring of Homo Sapiens. Key to our humanity as Homo Sapiens is language which, despite its rich varieties and its multilingual capacity that displays indisputable surface structure differences, maintains, asserts, and affirms the universal structural, phrasal sentence features of Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase, or of Subject and Predicate. Stated differently, linguistic mapping of world languages reveals the universal linguistic construct that the common structure of all natural human languages at the basic structural formulaic level of language to be S=NP+VP or that in all human languages a sentence is constructed by the copulation of a Noun Phrase with a Verb Phrase. It is this common and mandatory universal linguistic feature that I refer to as “Humanese.” At our deepest, subterranean, basal (archetypal) level of human communication and behavior as Homo Sapiens, we speak, read, write, and even sign Humanese. As human primates, Humanese is our linguistic wiring. This two-stanza Tanka poem, “Humanese is Our Linguistic Wiring,” highlights the universal commonalities of human languages and human behaviors. more »