Is language an artifact?

LLMs revealed something astonishing: language is not a symbolic pointing system, a set of labels attached to things in the world. It is an autogenerative structure: self-sustaining, recursive, generated purely from its own internal relations. Predict the next token from distributional structure alone, and you get reasoning, composition, generalization. And somehow, in running this process, it coordinates human behavior across minds and time.

An autopoietic operating system. Of us.

Which puts the standard model of language origins under uncomfortable stress. Are we really to believe something this elaborately structured emerged organically from proto-humans coordinating their hunting and gathering?

Our oldest stories hint at a different origin. Babel. Vāc. Enki. A before and an after. Something was imposed from outside.

Suddenly the question becomes real: by whom. Or what.