Language as an evolutionary map

I love it when fiction merges with non-fiction, and a book that was recently passed on to me by a friend in Beijing is a prime example of this.  Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a hyperlinked mesh of references to science, mythology and linguistics.  

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 the language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.

Stephenson, Neal.  (1992) Snow Crash.  Bantam Dell: New York. p.275

A Martian's-eye-view of language

Chomsky's claim that from a Martian's-eye-view all humans speak a single language is based on the discovery that the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world's languages. Linguists have long known that the basic design features of language are found everywhere. Many were documented in 1960 by the non-Chomskyan linguist C. F. Hockett in a comparison between human languages and animal communication systems (Hockett was not acquainted with Martian). Languages use the mouth-to-ear channel as long as the users have intact hearing (manual and facial gestures, of course, are the substitute channel used by the deaf). A common grammatical code, neutral between production and comprehension, allows speakers to produce any linguistic message they can understand, and vice versa. Words have stable meanings, linked to them by arbitrary convention. Speech sounds are treated discontinuously; a sound that is acoustically halfway between bat and pat does not meaning something halfway between batting and patting. Languages can convey meanings that are abstract and remote in time or space from the speaker. Linguistic forms are infinite in number, because they are created by a discrete combinatorial system. Languages all show a duality of patterning in which one rule system is used to order phonemes within morphemes, independent of meaning, and another is used to order morphemes within words and phrases, specifying their meaning.

Pinker, Steven. (1994) "The Language Instinct." HarperCollins, New York. p. 237