I would like to offer my warmest congratulations for the l0th anniversary of the Journal of Linguistic Sciences.It's a memorable occasion in the history of the growing disciplines of neurolinguistics,biolinguistics and related areas. A great deal has been learned in these years about the nature of language,and also about the basic questions of those fields of biolinguistics,the questions about the neural representation of language,the way it develops in the child,and even about its likely evolution,though it's worth bearing in mind that in this domain the evidence is so slight that little can be said with any confidence.There's no time to review here many new insights and ideas that have appeared,but there are some that seem to me quite far-reaching in their implications.One example is that recent studies have shown quite remarkable similarities between sign and speech at all levels,including neural representation that suggests a number of things,one is that externalization of language is very likely independent of modality,and also is probably a secondary aspect of language.