The Origin and Diversification of Language

by Nina G. Jablonski (Editor)

Language gives human beings the gift of amazing behavioral flexibility, and yet much remains to be known about how we developed the sophisticated linguistic skills that we take for granted. In this volume, a range of distinguished scientists from disciplines as diverse as primatology, archaeology, neurobiology, and linguistics present the latest evidence on the origin, spread and diversification of language.

The ability of human beings to communicate practical and symbolic information of great complexity to one another through the medium of articulate speech is one of the hallmarks of our species. But as with many other key innovations in human evolution, the beginnings of language did not leave direct traces in the fossil record. The exploration of various kinds of indirect evidence has thus proven essential. Making use of the most recent theoretical developments and technological breakthroughs, the contributors to this volume bring a new perspective to questions of language origins and diversification.

Distributed for the California Academy of Sciences

Genres: Linguistics

Paperback

First published September 30, 1998

About the author

Nina G. Jablonski is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University. She edited The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World and The Origin and Diversification of Language (both UC Press), among other books. Her research on human skin has been featured in National Geographic, Scientific American, and other publications.

Reviews

[Kelly]

Very interesting collection of papers on the evolution of language. Although a bit dated, there are some interesting papers looking into animal communication, archaeology, historical linguistic analysis and other aspects to get a better idea of how and why language came to be.

There were some interesting facts here. One here by Pinker blows my mind a little bit :

"Another remarkable feature of speech comprehension is the rate at which information can be conveyed. A rapid talker can convey about 40 phonemes per second, and even a more leisurely talker can reach 10 to 20 phonemes per second. Twenty cycles per second is the lower limit of pitch perception oh humans. We hear 20 beats per second not as 20 rapid events but as a low tony or a buzz. Clearly, when we are listening to speech at 25 phonemes per second we are not registering 25 separate auditory events because that is neurologically impossible. There must be some sort of multiplexing or compression of the information, in which the phonemes are superimposed in the process of speaking and the brain has to unpack them in the process of understanding."

Wow. Just a little fun fact about how little we know about how are hardware packs and unpacks language from mouth to ear...