How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

by Daniel L. Everett

A syntactician is to language as an ophthalmologist is to the body.

the communication-language threshold.

Culture entails symbolic reasoning and projecting meaning on to the world, meaning that is not about things as they are, but as they are interpreted, used and perceived by members of the community that uses them. Culture transforms ‘things’ into symbols and meaning. And if erectus had symbols, it had language.

by ‘semiosis’ I mean … an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object and its interpretant … Charles Sanders Peirce (1907)

Newspaper headlines, store regulations, movie titles and other unusual forms of modern language are occasionally reminders of how simple language can be.

language works fine when it is underdetermined.

In understanding language or people or cultures, context is crucial.

This view is unusual because we know that languages need not have intricate grammatical structures. Some might instead merely juxtapose words and simple phrases, allowing context to guide their interpretation,

In this case, imagine a picture of a hawk in the sky accompanied by the caption ‘There are hawks here.’ Barring photo-altering software, this picture is pretty good evidence for the caption’s veracity. On the other hand, a picture of a clear sky with the caption ‘There are no hawks near where I live,’ is much more problematic. The latter photo shows only an absence of evidence. It does not show solid evidence of the absence of hawks. It could be nothing more than a coincidence that the photograph failed to capture a hawk in a sky otherwise frequently populated by hawks. What is needed in such a case are more data, such as the lack of flora and fauna that hawks prefer along with the proper climate to sustain hawks.

Planning for communication, like planning in most activities, is helpful.

the fossil record, which makes it clear not only that language, culture and communication were part of the same cluster of socially evolved traits of human cognition but also that there was a slow semiotic progression fuelled by natural selection.

Every animal species uses indexes, which are physical connections to what they represent, such as smells, footprints, broken branches and scat. Indexes are non-arbitrary, largely non-intentional linkages between form and meaning.

In a sense, indexes are a form of metonymical communication with nature, that is the use of the parts of something to perceive the whole (such as deer scat as a stand-in for the whole deer and the footprints of a horse for the horse itself).

These indexes are inseparably connected physically to individual objects or creatures and therefore they lack arbitrariness and intentionality – two crucial components of symbolic language.

But arbitrariness is a later step in the semiotic progression. It is preceded by intentionality.

However, emojis depend on the modern grammars from which they emerge for complexity of interpretation and their organisation.

This manuport indicates that as early as 3 million years ago early hominins recognised iconic properties in objects around them.

Just as one perceives the serpentine iconic properties of tree roots in the Amazon, so the australopithecines of Makapansgat saw iconicity in a rock with two circular indentations above a groove running transverse to them.

If language is nothing more than a computational system, a set of structures embellished by local words, then clearly a phallic cuttlefish bone fails to move humans any closer to such a system.

On the other hand, if language is about meaning and symbols, in which computation is nothing more than an aid to communication, then icons become vital to the reconstruction of the evolution of language.

Art is a visual form with shared meaning, the communication of emotions, of cultural moments, of ideas and so on via shared tacit cultural knowledge.

In discussing tools relative to language, one also looks to the qualities that both language and tools illustrate of culture, shared intentions and the ability to match form and function.

As early hieroglyphic writing systems from different parts of the world show, this use of representations based on resemblance can further evolve so that all resemblance is gone, thus leading from an intentional use to an intentionally arbitrary symbol. As this happens, a drawing changes from an icon to a symbol. And just as this has happened in writing systems, so it is likely that it has happened in spoken systems, with different sound combinations becoming conventions, associated with a particular meaning.

Concepts go looking for forms to serve as cultural exchange.

so on are properties of the

The human brain must be able to follow conversations, use words appropriately, remember and execute pronunciations, decode pronunciations it hears from others, keep track of the stories in the conversations, remember who is being talked about and follow topics through long discussions. And this is only a small list of the ways in which language requires memory. No memory, no language. No memory, no culture.

There are three varieties of sensory memory: echoic, for sounds; iconic, for vision; and haptic, for tactile sensations.

structured cultural knowledge that underlies the development of the psychology of each individual as a cultural being.

Phatic language has long been analysed by linguists and anthropologists as a form of ‘grooming’, that is a recognition of the other as a person you value, however superficially.

To converse normally requires and helps to construct a reasonable command of the grammar of the language in which the conversation is taking place, an understanding of the context of the conversation, the purpose of the conversation, the mental state of the interlocutor(s), cultural background knowledge and general world knowledge.

It ignores Darwinian gradual evolution, having nothing to say about the evolution of icons, symbols, gestures, languages with linear grammars and so on, in favour of a genetic saltation endowing humans with a sudden ability to do recursion.

If static knowledge is knowing the rules for telling a story, dynamic knowledge is telling the story.

All human behaviour, including language, is the working out of intentions, what our minds are directed towards.

Utility explains ubiquity.

With respect to language, this means that human grammars and sound systems are not required to be optimal – in fact, they never are. Language gets the job done just well enough, never perfectly.

Human languages leak. They are not mathematical, perfectly logical codes.

The meaning of what is said is never based merely or even mainly on the words spoken in a conversation.

Check out this quote.

today humans live in the Age of Innovation, the Era of Culture, in the Kingdom of Speech.