How Language Began Quotes

“It is no coincidence that the greatest changes and innovations in human physiology, cognition, sociality, communication, technology and culture (dwarfing any of today’s inventions and developments) occurred during the Pleistocene.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“Each human alive enjoys their grammar and society because of the work, the discoveries and the intelligence of Homo erectus.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“Speech sounds, words, sentences, grammatical affixes and tones all emerged from the initial invention of the symbol, with the invention being improved and spreading over time by total societal involvement, just as all other inventions are.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“A serious and war-threatening misunderstanding grew out of two distinct cultural interpretations of this deceptively simple-looking treaty. The indigenes expected one thing. The government expected another. And both were right according to the language.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“It was eventually discovered that Indo-European was the mother of most European languages. And it was then discovered that this was also the mother of non-European languages such as Farsi, Hindi and many others.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“This insight was that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic (German-related languages) and Celtic all traced their origin back to a common ancestor.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“All human behaviour, including language, is the working out of intentions, what our minds are directed towards.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“process of phonation.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“Grammar is symbols used together. Syntax is the arrangement of those symbols as they are used together.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“It is why caution must be exercised before accepting the popular but very misleading idea that the brain is a computer, an artefact very unlike an organ. Indeed, computers lack culture.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“So long as they possessed symbols, ordering of the symbols and meanings partially determined by those components in conjunction with context they had language.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“The current Sahara desert was then non-existent. Instead, all of North Africa was covered in lush forests that stretched across the Middle East and on through Asia. Flora and fauna were rich throughout large swathes of the world that are today barren deserts. This ecological-climatological fecundity dramatically contrasts”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“Ability to think in complex ways must precede talking in complex syntactic constructions”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“But the fact remains that 2 million years ago in Africa, a Homo erectus community began to share information among its members by means of language. They were the first to say, ‘It’s over there,’ or, ‘I am hungry.’ Maybe the first to say, ‘I love you.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Conversations are the apex of linguistic studies and sources of insight particularly because they are potentially open-ended in meaning and form. They are also crucial to understanding the nature of language because of their ‘underdeterminacy’ – saying less than what is intended to be communicated and leaving the unspoken assumptions to be figured out by the hearer in some way. Underdeterminacy has always been part of language.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Contemporary languages are therefore different in their details from those of 2 million years ago. But the fact remains that 2 million years ago in Africa, a Homo erectus community began to share information among its members by means of language. They were the first to say, ‘It’s over there,’ or, ‘I am hungry.’ Maybe the first to say, ‘I love you.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“NOBEL-PRIZE-WINNING economist Herbert Simon introduced the concept of ‘satisficing’ into the science of problem solving. His point was that the solutions preferred by business, throughout human endeavours and by the mind itself are not usually the best ones but the good-enough ones – the ones that ‘satisfice’ the need rather than perfectly satisfy it.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Not everything worth doing is worth doing well. Kenneth L. Pike”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“ceteris paribus,”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“The brain’s three pounds consist of neurons, glial cells and blood vessels. Each plays a vital role in proper brain functioning, intelligence and other cognitive abilities of the species. There are some 100 billion neurons in the average brain. There are also non-neuronal cells of a roughly equal amount. Nearly 20 per cent of all neurons in the brain reside in the cerebral cortex, including white matter found beneath the cortex or ‘subcortical white matter’.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“such as the 250,000-year-old Venus of Berekhat Ram”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Though Olduwan and Acheulean tools overlapped in their use by earlier hominins, Acheulean tools were more advanced. They were carried from Africa to Europe by Homo erectus, with Spain being their earliest European destination, about 900,000 years ago.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Olduwan tools are the earliest known. They were used from roughly 2.6 million years ago.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. The roles, knowledge and values of culture are only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members.1”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Erectus travelled almost the entire world, though based on current evidence never made it to America, Australia or New Zealand. But they made it to many other places. Here is a brief summary of erectus sites and time ranges:”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“At this site, going back at least 790,000 years, there is evidence for Acheulean tools, Levallois tools, evidence of controlled fire, organised village life, huts that housed socially specialised tasks of different kinds and other evidence of culture among Homo erectus. Erectus may have stopped here on the way out of Africa.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the coloring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them. John Lubbock”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

“Symbols are conventional links to what they refer to. They are more complicated than other signs because they need not bear any resemblance to nor any physical connection to what they refer to. They are agreed upon by society. The numeral ‘3’ refers to the cardinality of three objects just as ‘Dan’ refers to someone of that name, not because the word ‘three’ bears a physical connection or resemblance to cardinality, nor because all people named Dan have any physical characteristic in common. This arbitrary, conventional association of form and meaning is exactly what renders symbols the beginning of language and evidence for social norms. Symbols are the original social contract”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“In fact, when we look closely, there is evidence that the earliest species of Homo did in fact have culture and did speak. The solution to”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

“language. This integration transmits and highlights the information that the speaker is telling the hearer about. It represents a crucial, though often ignored, step in the origin of language.”
― Daniel L. Everett, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention