The philosophy of symbolic forms Book

Maybe the best book of the 20th century. Cassirer predates neurolinguistics with a wry, devastating summary of linguistics, philosophy and anthropology, essentially restarting all three fields as a singular probe into human consciousness. filled with notation and depth, Cassirer gracefully follows procedure (comparative linguistics) with theorem and proof. His central thesis is that language is merely a cover language for a more attuned one we can't use yet in our heads, and its flaws are mostly hidden from us. some even in our unconscious. his citations are the peak of the early 20th century german academies, as well as earlier minds like Grimm (linguist and brother of the team), Kant, Seler, Meinhof. Cassirer's theoretical leaps are not the stuff of meaning (like semiotics) but of gesture, integrations, hierarchies. The stuff of advanced, future languages. When he reaches polysynthetic languages like Quechua and Maya, he quickly describes their shift in structure, an advancement of verb isolation and dominance. The science of the mind appears to be evolving with our linguistic skills. If you piece together his jigsaw, you can see where language goes next.