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

by Daniel L. Everett

English and other European languages use egressive sounds exclusively in normal speech.

‘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.

Humans, except human infants, are the only creatures that cannot eat and vocalise at the same time.

rut

The fundamental frequency, usually written as F0

tone languages, such as Mandarin or Pirahã, among hundreds of others where the tone on the syllable is as important to the meaning of the word as the consonants and vowels.

harmonic frequencies, or formants

unerringly.

Baldwin effect

souped-up

the ‘Adam’s apple’ (which is actually your larynx),

strength, s-t-r-e-n-g-th, which illustrates the pattern C+C+C+V+C+C+C

Human infants begin life much as other primates vocally. The child’s vocal tract anatomy above their larynx (the supralaryngeal vocal tract or SVT) is very much like the anatomy of the corresponding tract in chimps.

This seals off the trachea from the flow of mother’s milk or other things in the newborn’s mouth.

Adults lose this advantage. As they mature, their vocal tract elongates.

the final result of these developments enables us to talk more clearly than Homo erectus. This is because we can make a larger array of speech sounds, especially vowels, like the supervowels ‘i’, ‘a’ and ‘u’, which are found in all languages of the world.

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.

According to evolutionary research, the larynges of all land animals evolved from the same source – the lung valves of ancient fish, in particular as seen in the Protopterus, the Neoceratodus and the Lepidosiren. Fish gave speech as we know it.

human language and speech are part of a continuum seen in several other species. It is not that there is any special gene for language or an unbridgeable gap that appeared suddenly to provide humans with language and speech. Rather, what the evolutionary record shows is that the language gap was formed over millions of years by baby steps.

Homo erectus is the evidence that apes could talk if they had brains large enough. Humans are those apes.

9 Where Grammar Came From

ushered

The information age began nearly 2 million years ago. Homo sapiens have just tweaked it a bit.

Maybe – and this is exciting to think about – some of this represents vestiges of the ways that Homo erectus talked. 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.

Grammars are organised in two ways at once – vertically, also known as paradigmatic organisation, and horizontally, referred to as syntagmatic organisation.

Some of these sounds are louder because they offer minimal impedance to the flow of air out of the mouth (and for many out of the nose). These are vowels. No articulator makes direct contact with a point of articulation in the production of vowels.

consonants generally carry more information than vowels, since there are more of them)

ceteris paribus,

undergone

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.

Romance languages. They are referred to linguistically as ‘inflectional’ languages.

There are only three organisational templates for human syntax.

A linear grammar

(‘I’ and ‘he’ are nominative; ‘me’ and ‘him’ are objective).

Even primates such as Koko the gorilla have been able to master such word order-based structures. It certainly would have been within the capabilities of Homo erectus to master such a language and would have been the first strategy to be used

by and large.

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