Learning to talk

The little one showing us her eyes, one of her first words.

Watching our children learn to speak is an awe inspiring experience. Conquering all of the details and complexities of the spoken language is an incredible accomplishment. Of course first there has to be the realization that the sounds made by the people around them have meaning. In order to interpret their meaning, even of a single word or phrase, babies have to first recognize where the set of sounds that holds a specific meaning begins and ends out of a whole string of sounds (as a word in a sentence). Then there is the meaning of different patterns of pitch and tone that indicate whether we are stating or asking or demanding or exclaiming. And once they learn meanings of individual words, they must learn how words fit together grammatically and how they combine to create different meanings. And all the while they must also figure out how to create those sounds with their mouth, which is also an extraordinary task, as anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language knows. It is just incredible that tiny children who are born absolutely helpless can master so much of that complexity in a matter of two or three years and can come to understand so much in less than that. And they learn all of this without specific training. Their minds sort through the jumble of sound and find the meaning on their own.

I have been thinking about language as an evidence of our Divine Creator. I think of all of the amazing creatures on this earth in all of their wonder and diversity which also testify of Him. And yet, none of them comes remotely close to us in their ability to communicate. How can that be accounted for if not as an evidence of our divine origin and nature as something planted in us as children of our Heavenly Father? How else could language exist in all of its own diversity and complexity? And how else could a tiny, otherwise helpless child learn so much so quickly on their own?