Of all the fields of study to which human beings have devoted themselves, linguistics could lay claim to being the most conservative. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Panini began it by describing an individual human language, and describing individual languages is what the majority of linguists are still doing. Even during the last couple of decades, in which linguists have begun to be interested in some of the larger issues that language involves, the main thrust toward clarifying those issues has involved making more and more detailed and ingenious descriptions of currently existing natural languages. In consequence, little headway has been made toward answering the really important questions which language raises, such as: how is language acquired by the individual, and how was it acquired by the species?