A humorous take on hunters' tales and the origin of language

A text titled "Hunters' Tales", published in the Saturday edition of the Latvian newspaper Diena, takes an ironic look at the idea that human language may have arisen because of hunters' stories. The piece is the author's humorous observation, not a scientific study, and the excerpt offers the following view.

Language as a decoration for stories

The author writes that several linguists consider hunters' tales to be older than language itself. He then claims, with exaggeration, that language emerged to make such stories more vivid. In his version, it was hard to show without words how fast a deer ran or how tall a mammoth was. People therefore had to build piles of stones along a cave wall. These were unstable, because cement had not yet been invented, and sometimes the person pointing was himself struck down by the collapsing stones.

Hunting and present-day arguments

The text then moves to the present. The author argues that hunters' tales are needed to preserve the Latvian language. He notes that few fields see changes discussed as passionately as hunting. As examples of the range of categorical statements, he cites remarks from "everything is going downhill" to "they are to blame themselves" and "proper order is finally taking shape".

There is also a joke about Latvian being poor in swear words. Otherwise, the author says, many hunters would long ago have been buried under the "stones" of their own thick vocabulary. In his view, an outsider to hunting who tries to grasp the essence of things usually errs. He forgets that hunters created language not to establish the truth, which is settled with firearms, but to make their stories more vivid.

The source excerpt is short and does not name any specific changes in hunting.