Prairie Dragon

Through all the research I have done so far, I have learned a few things about humans, various creatures, and communication. I have not been able to locate the era in which communication among various creatures and humans ended nor when it began. However, what I have found out contains a certain dateless history, a history that seems to precede any human dating system.

Currently, various universities offer entire courses on something called "communication". People attend these courses and earn degrees in this subject. It deals with humans learning various ways of communicating their ideas and thoughts to others of the same species and, more commonly, to those of the same human language as themselves. If humans must learn how to communicate with their own kind, with those who naturally speak the same language, then, in my mind, communication among them must be flailing. It may be flailing only slightly at the moment, but it must be flailing nonetheless.

Looking throughout human history, we can se how often humans have difficulty learning from past examples. The same mistakes, the same behaviour, are repeated over and over. However, the 20th century has acknowledged the existence of this educational downfall among humans. It is through this acknowledgement that some humans try to prevent the recurrence of big and sometimes fatal mistakes. Probably, some of these same people are aware of the breakdown in communication among humans and, feeling this to be yet another occurrence of some repeated history, have decided to provide humans with courses in communication.

Humans speak a wide variety of languages. In fact, there are so many languages there is no one human who can speak and understand all of these languages. To counteract this problem, humans provide courses to other humans to learn their language. In this way, a human can learn more than his own language and communicate with many more humans. Unfortunately, this requires a certain ability that not all humans seem to possess. Also, it is time consuming and requires much practice.

Because humans do offer entire courses on communication, as well as courses on various human languages, I believe these acts are a human attempt to prevent the further loss of some ability and to reintroduce some facet of life that has been forgotten. This facet of life is the common communication among all humans, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, animals, and any other existing and now non-existing creature.

In order to trace when this communication ceased to exist, it is wise to look directly at the beginning of human communication failure. As stated earlier, basic human communication among those of the same common language is failing today, the evidence of which is found with communication courses. A human can even pursue studies of the language he grew up speaking. Language courses for other languages seem to have been around just as long. This makes me think that humans all spoke a common language at one point and they all understood each other. Reading through hoards of literature proves this point. There are many writings stating that somehow during the Babylonian era, or at its onset, humans began speaking a whole collection of languages and could no longer understand one another. This implies all humans used a singular form of language or communication prior to this.

Oddly enough, or maybe it is perfectly logical, during the same era, there are writings describing so-called mythical creatures, such as dragons. How does this fit in? Centuries after Babylonian times, the Norse described dragons. A certain warrior or knight, Sigurd, killed a dragon. He then roasted the dragon’s heart and tasted the dragon’s blood. This he did according to the then-current Norse hunting tradition. However, after doing this, he was able to understand the language of the birds. This implies two things: humans normally did not understand bird language after Babylonian times (this is logical since humans rarely understood each other after Babylonian times due to the ever growing number of human languages); more than likely, dragons, in the very least, understood birds. Being capable of flight, it then becomes probable that dragons were capable of communicating with birds. Therefore, even at this strange time, some form of communication among creatures still existed.

It is unfortunate that we, as humans, have lost this ability to communicate with creatures. Had this not been the case, it may have been possible for us to read the writings of the creatures and learn the forgotten history of how we have come to be in such a mire of communication failure. For now, we must accept that the dates and events for causing this remain fuzzy. More research is required.

I hope to discover before the release of the next newsletter how recently stories have been told about creatures, including humans, communicating with each other. There must be some pattern as to which creature spoke with which long after the beginning of all this horrid history.

Lydia Lavrenik, Editor