  Kumārila can be said in this regard to share Wittgenstein’s famously expressed intuition about the problem with Augustine’s account of language-acquisition. With regard to Augustine’s contention that language-learning is explicable in terms of foundational moments of deictic usage, Wittgenstein says that “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ would here mean something like ‘talk to itself’.” (Wittgenstein 1958, §32) Kumārila can be taken similarly to have urged, in pressing his case for the eternality of language, that we can only imagine thinking to consist in “talking to oneself”—and that to understand that is to understand something more than just what things are called. What Kumārila challenges his Nyāya and Buddhist opponents to explain, then, is where we get the very idea of meaning  something, and in what that consists.