Joseph Wilson, a linguist and journalist who has done considerable work with oral languages (languages not yet written down), offers some thoughts on claims that chatbots like Blake Lemoine's LaMDA, really speak like human persons. But this excludes all unwritten forms of communication: sign language, oral histories, body language, tone of voice, and the broader cultural context in which people find themselves speaking. In other words, it leaves out much of the interesting stuff that makes nuanced communication between people possible. We really don't know how old spoken language is (Wilson suggests 50,000 years) but written language can be traced only as far back as about 5400 years ago. And only about half of all languages (he estimates 7100 currently) have ever been written down.