There is a famous Chinese poem, composed about 1,000 years ago, about the difficulty of trying to visualize a mountain while you are on it. As you go up a slope or around a bend, the mountain keeps changing with each new perspective. So it is also with trying to understand language. We are embedded in a world of nouns, verbs and adjectives; it is largely from these linguistic objects that our mental life is built. Surely, a good part of the challenge in understanding language lies in the fact that the only means we have for discussing language is language itself.

The theme of this volume, the emergence of language, draws from many specializations. The biologists examine how human language is related to other forms of animal communication and how learning to communicate differs across several species. The archaeologists tell us how language, written as well as spoken can radiate from a small focal area to cover large regions of the globe over the course of many centuries. The linguists discuss just what is acquired when children learn a language and how they create a new language when society does not provide a consistent model for them to follow. The psychologists probe the cognitive and physiological mechanisms language involves, either inherited or learned, and discuss the impairments that result when these mechanisms become dysfunctional.

As we explore the language mountain (to maintain the poetic image), we see that each specialization offers us a new perspective, another piece of understanding. We begin to realize that language is made of all these pieces, and many more, and that an interdisciplinary approach, such as that taken in this volume, is the only viable way toward ultimately knowing what language is, how it came about millenia ago and how it is recreated each time a child learns to talk. The answers to these questions on the nature of language will shed such light on the nature of humanity--- for as much as we have fashioned language to our needs, language has made us who we are.

It is a delight to work with articles from Scientific American, a magazine that has no equal in nourishing the public mind with the most recent advancements in knowledge. My hope in putting together this volume is that it will help stimulate general interest in language, and thereby enhance progress in this most important area of study.

William S –Y. Wang