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

by Daniel L. Everett

Speech followed language.

that they lacked fully modern speech, for physiological reasons, and that their information flow was slower – they didn’t have as much to talk about as we do today, nor do they seem to have had sufficient brain power to process and produce information as quickly as modern sapiens.

They claim instead that the vocal apparatus is much older than the fifty millennia proposed by Lieberman – so old, in fact, that it is found in macaque monkeys.

Finally and most importantly, is the fact that language does not require speech as we know it. Languages can be whistled, hummed, or spoken with a single vowel with or without a consonant. It is the confluence of culture and the Homo brain that gives us language. Our modern speech is a nice, functional add-on.

One thing that every researcher into the evolution of speech agrees upon is the idea that our speech production evolved in tandem with our speech perception. Or, as Crelin puts it in his pioneering work, ‘there tends to be a precise match between the broadcast bandwidth and the tuning of perceptual acuity’.

one says that all sounds of English are ‘pulmonic’ sounds. But there are two other major air initiators that many languages of the world use, the glottis (the opening in the larynx, for glottalic sounds) and the tongue (for lingual sounds). These are also not sounds of English.

I remember practising ejectives and implosives constantly for several days, since the Tzeltales

The main differences between the erectus vocal apparatus and the sapiens apparatus were in the hyoid bone and pre-Homo vestiges, such as air sacs in the centre of the larynx. Tecumseh Fitch was one of the first biologists to point out the relevance of air sacs to human vocalisation. Their effect would have been to render many sounds emitted less clear than they are in sapiens. The evidence that they had air sacs is based on luck in finding fossils of erectus hyoid bones.

So different are the vocal apparatuses of erectus and sapiens that Crelin concludes: ‘I judge that the vocal tract was basically apelike.’

There is no way that erectus, therefore, could have produced the same kind or quality of speech, in terms of ability to clearly discriminate the same range of speech sounds in perception or production, as modern humans.

Erectus had sufficient memory to retain a large number of symbols, at least in the thousands – after all, dogs can remember hundreds – and would have been able, in the use of context and culture, to disambiguate symbols that were insufficiently distinct in their formants, due to the lesser articulatory capacity of erectus.

Baldwin ...

This is why linguists recognise that language is distinct from speech. Sapiens quite possibly speak more clearly, with sounds that are easier to hear. But this only means, again, that erectus drove a Model T language. Sapiens drive the Tesla. But both the Model T and the Tesla are cars. The Model T is not a ‘protocar’.

English provides an example of complex syllable structure, seen in words like strength, s-t-r-e-n-g-th, which illustrates the pattern C+C+C+V+C+C+C (with ‘th’ representing a single sound). But what I find interesting is that in the majority of languages C+V is either the only syllable or by far the most common.

Sign languages also have much to teach us about our neural cognitive-cerebral platform. Native users of sign languages can communicate as quickly and effectively as speakers using the vocal apparatus.

Thus human babies can eat and breathe without choking, just like a chimp.

These are the easiest vowels to perceive. We’re the only species that can make them well. Moreover, the vowel ‘i’ is of special interest. It enables the hearer to judge the length of the speaker’s vocal tract and thus determine the relative size as well as the gender of the speaker and to ‘normalise’ the expectations for recognising that speaker’s voice.

To state the obvious, chimpanzees are unable to talk. But this is not, as some claim, because of their vocal tract. A chimp’s vocal tract certainly could produce enough distinct sounds to support a language of some sort. Chimps do not talk, rather, because of their brains – they are not intelligent enough to support the kind of grammars that humans use

apical

These phrases should not be interrupted, which is why one cannot place yesterday after the word ‘in’ or after the word ‘the’. Grammatical phrases are forms of ‘chunking’ for short-term memory. They aid recall and interpretation.

Maybe humans passed a lot of grammar down by example, from millennium to millennium as the species continued to evolve. It is possible that modern languages have maintained 2-million-year-old solutions to information transfer first invented by Homo erectus. This possibility cannot be dismissed.

All of this was first explained by linguist Charles Hockett in 1960.1 He called the combination of meaningless elements to make meaningful ones ‘duality of patterning’. And once a people have symbols plus duality of patterning, then they extend duality to get the syntagmatic and paradigmatic organisation in the chart above.

Again, the syllable is based upon a simple idea: ‘chunk sounds so as to make them easier to hear and to remember’.

hear. If so, then this means that erectus would have had grammar practically given to them on a platter as soon as they used syllables.

Though language can exist without well-developed speech abilities (many modern languages can be whistled, hummed, or signed), there can be no speech without language. Neanderthalensis did not have speech capabilities like those of sapiens. But they most certainly could have had a working language without a sapiens vocal apparatus. The inability of neanderthalensis to produce /i/, /a/ and /u/ (at least according to Philip Lieberman) would be a handicap for speech, but these ‘cardinal’ or ‘quantal’ vowels are neither necessary nor sufficient for language (not necessary because of signed languages, not sufficient because parrots can produce them).

These enhancements are ignored often by native speakers when they produce speech because such enhancements are simply ‘add-ons’ and not part of the target sound. This is why native speakers of English do not normally hear a difference between the [p] of ‘spa’ and the [ph] of ‘paper’, where the raised ‘h’ following a consonant indicates aspiration.

The syllable is thus a hierarchical, non-recursive structuring of speech sounds. It functions to enhance the perceptibility of phones and often works in languages as the basic rhythmic unit. Once again, one can imagine that, given their extremely useful contributions to speech perception, syllables began to appear early on in the linking of sounds to meaning in language.

The first is the environment. Sound structures can be significantly constrained by the environmental conditions in which the language arose – average temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure and so on. Linguists missed these connections for most of the history of language, though more recent research has now established them clearly. Thus, to understand the evolution of a specific language, one must know something about both its original culture and its ecological circumstances. No language is an island.

Thus from natural processes linking sound and meaning in utterances, there is an easy path via gestures, intonation, duration and amplitude to decomposing an initially unstructured whole into parts and from there recomposing parts into wholes. And this is the birth of all grammars. No special genes required.

Yet while Chomsky’s work is insightful and has been used for decades by computer scientists, psychologists and linguists, it denies that language is a system for communication. Therefore, in spite of its influence, it is ignored here in order to discuss a less complicated but arguably more effective way of looking at grammar’s place in the evolution of language as a communicative

There are only three organisational templates for human syntax. In principle, this is not excessively difficult.

On the contrary, the data suggest that every bit of grammar evolves to aid short-term memory and the understanding of utterances.

One common strategy of linking related words is to place words closer to words whose meaning they most affect.

One way to keep track of which words are most closely related is to mark them with case or agreement.

All of these sentences are grammatical in Greek. All are regularly found. The Greek language, like Latin and many other languages, allows freer word order than, say, English, because the cases, such as ‘nominative’ and ‘accusative’ distinguish the object from the subject.

One researcher, Fred Karlsson, claims that most European languages have hierarchy but not recursion.

The difference between embedding (which is common in languages that, according to researchers like Karlsson, have hierarchical structures without recursion) and recursion is simply that there is no bound on recursion, it can keep on going.

These kinds of clauses are rare, though, because they are so hard to understand. In fact, some claim that they exist only in the mind of the linguist, though I think that is too strong.

However, the fact remains that no language has been documented in which any sentence is endless. There may be theoretical reasons for claiming that recursion underwrites all modern human languages, but it simply does not match the facts of either modern or prehistoric languages or our understanding of the evolution of languages.

It should ultimately be no surprise that Homo erectus was capable of language, nor that a G1 language would have been capable of taking them across the open sea or leading them around the world. We are not the only animals that think, after all. And the more we can understand and appreciate what non-human animals are mentally capable of, the more we can respect our own Homo erectus ancestors.

Among humans, however, as we have seen, there is evidence that both Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis used symbols.

And with symbols plus linear order we have language.

All human languages are full-blown languages.

Searle concludes, ‘It is important to emphasize how peculiar and eccentric Chomsky’s overall approach to language is.’

Chomsky has staked out his claims to originality clearly over the years, reiterating them in his new work on evolution, namely that ‘language’ is a computational system, not a communication system.§§

To more fully illustrate the need for a single theory of culture and language, indeed all human behaviour, one might contemplate a scene like the following. Two men are watching other men move some heavy furniture down the stairs in their apartment building. One man passing on the stairway landing is huffing and puffing and concentrating solely on his heavy load. His wallet is hanging loosely from his back pocket, about to fall out. He clearly wouldn’t notice if someone relieved him of this burden. The first observer looks at the second observer with raised eyebrows, looking at the wallet. The second one sees him and simply shakes his head to indicate ‘No’. What happened here? Is this language? It is a form of communication that is parallel to language. Certainly shared culture and conventions are necessary for this kind of exchange. Just about anything two members of a culture wish to exploit can be used to communicate.

Although later parts of the book orthogonally attacked Nazi-science, the book was a breakthrough.

In our discussion of language evolution, it is very important to keep in mind the most salient feature of gesture-based languages. That is that sign languages neither enhance nor interact with spoken language. In fact, sign languages repel speech, to use one of McNeill’s phrases. This is why many researchers believe that spoken languages did not and could not have begun as sign languages.

The bedrock concept here, developed in McNeill’s research, is called the ‘growth point’. The growth point is the moment in an utterance where gesture and speech coincide. It is where four things happen. First, speech and gesture synchronise, each communicating different yet related information simultaneously.

In short, gesture studies leave us with no alternative but to see language not as a memorised set of grammar rules but as a process of communication. Language is not static, only following rigid grammatical specifications of form and meaning, but it is dynamic, bringing together pitch, gestures, speech and grammar on the fly for effective communication.