"There's a better case for Santa Claus," he grinned.
The revelation so transformed my understanding of humanity that years later, when grad school linguistics profs declared that there are no languages, either, I hardly flinched.
The term "a different language" is so familiar that some flatly refuse to recognise that it's balderdash. A visitor from the far side of the globe makes different sounds, arranged according to different rules, to express himself. We call his utterances "a different language" because it's handier than saying, "he speaks according to rules and traditions that have developed largely independently from our own, rendering his speech mostly unintelligible to us, although it bears certain genetic similarities." The problem is, neither his language nor ours can be defined within the continuum of human language.
The different language model appears sound on the surface, but science insists paradigms be demonstrable at an elemental level. While exceptions to any paradigm inevitably crop up, if it is valid, there aren't many. Yet the different language approach engenders more exception than conformity. To be sure, human verbalisation varies in place and time. Widely separated populations differ immensely. It's placing the dividers that topples the paradigm. Locating exactly where "French" speakers stop and "Spanish" speakers begin in time and place is impossible. In between are a good dozen other languages, or versions of one or both. And the frontiers between those populations aren't clear, either.
To deal with this problem, people invented the concept of dialect, in which "twilight zone" traditions are dismissed as offshoots of a living parent tradition. Low German would be a dialect of High German, Scots a dialect of English. Unfortunately, in its reliance on the existence of definable languages, the dialect model collapses. Human communication simply doesn't evolve in an orderly fashion, like the colour chart of Indo-European languages found in unabridged dictionaries, wherein separate languages beget offspring like individuals in a family tree. Real life language is chaos. Migration and evolution send traditions spinning off on a hundred different tangents; reconstructing the chain of cause and effect is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
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