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In societies in which literacy is all but universal and language teaching at school begins with reading and writing in the native tongue, one is apt to think of language as a writing system that may be pronounced. In point of fact, language generally begins as a system of spoken communication that may be represented in various ways in writing. The human being has almost certainly been in some sense a speaking animal from early in the emergence of Homo sapiens as a recognizably distinct species. The earliest known systems of writing go back perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 years. This ...(100 of 25352 words)