Original human grunts and snorts

Aha’s and Grrr’s

somehow evolved into fine languages

coherent, often recorded

in various scripts, glyphs and alphabets

in every land and age.

Some got stuck, or actually died

but most flexed and morphed

alongwith migrations and displacements

of people.

Some became seen as sacred, immutable

while others played around, survived,

mixed and mongrel-matched

sticking on ment’s, able’s, ed’s and ly’s

or prefixing dis, mis or un

adding or detracting l’s, gh’s and ph’s

and even keeping some, but silenced

by way of asserting classical origins,

partisan cultural roots

or for privy elitist communication.

 

Over long periods of familiarity and use

slurring, cutting corners, abbreviations

and through sheer laziness or haste

dialects and tongues shifted, changed

so v becomes f and k, ch!

Rules and complexity became law

grown out of illogic, chance, repetition

and forgetting.

Through it all, the body-speke

hand and facial movements

 -  universal mammalian instinctive responses

underlying and inter-penetrating speech

whether an infants gurgling babble

or expressions and sounds of emotion:

rage, pleasure, fear,

all articulated, via tongue, lips, palate

and the left cortex

into shaped sound

mostly for societal, familial purpose

 - talking in sleep or to themselves

an option!

And then into song...hallelujah!