Read The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Online
Authors: Christine Kenneally
The first perspective has dominated linguistics and cognitive science since the middle of the twentieth century. Since the 1990s, as researchers in different disciplines all over the world have grappled in earnest with language evolution, many have found that they are converging on the second. But instead of flipping entirely from one view to the other, the field is building a less absolute but more satisfying body of knowledge. The David-Goliath clash has not so much been lost or won as transformed into a struggle that is much more complex, though still deeply felt. What is both marvelous and perplexing about this struggle is that the resolution of one mystery often gives rise to another. For example, it now seems true to say that language arose very recently. It is also equally true to say that it did not. It’s reasonable to claim that human language is unique. But it is also useful, interesting, and fair to say that human language lies on a continuum that includes other human abilities and the abilities of nonhuman animals. As you’ll see throughout this book, language itself is one of the biggest obstacles to clarity in the study of language evolution.
After this tour of important historical moments, part 2 asks how language evolved. Or rather, it doesn’t, explaining instead that that question is simply too monumental. What’s more, it is misleading. The word “language” is used to describe too many different phenomena, like the words we speak, the particular language we speak, the universal features all languages have in common, and the suite of inclinations and capacities that enables us to learn the language of our parents. Part 2 outlines and examines the language suite—what abilities you have if you have human language. It takes the sounds we make, the way we string them together, our interactions and the learning in speech, and our gestures, imitation, and genes and explores when each of them appeared in the evolutionary trajectory of human beings.
Even though the comparative, genetic, and linguistic evidence of part 2 demonstrates how various aspects of the language suite evolved so that we were born able to learn the language of our parents, all this amazing research leaves one crucial question unanswered: How did the language of our parents get here in the first place? Part 3 examines this question. It asks how all the pieces of the language suite wound together over time to give us what we have today. It introduces young researchers like Simon Kirby in Edinburgh and Morten Christiansen at Cornell, who use computer models to show that language can evolve all by itself. Kirby and Christiansen argue that one of the most useful ways to think of language is as a virus, one that grows and evolves symbiotically with human beings—meaning that language shifts around and adapts itself in order to develop and survive.
Part 4 looks at what happens next. I wrote earlier that the study of language evolution had boomed since I was a linguistics undergraduate, and in fact the tumult and commotion have increased even more since I started writing this book. The debate about how and why language might have evolved was rejoined ever more loudly in 2002, when Noam Chomsky first published on the topic. Part 4 also ponders the future of language. If language has evolved, where will it head next? And where, for that matter, will we? New scholarship that claims the human species has stopped evolving biologically is discussed.
Part 4 also examines why evolutionary narratives have been so unpopular in the field of language evolution. Finally, the epilogue asks what would happen to language if you shipwrecked a boatload of pre-linguistic babies on the rocky shores of Galápagos.
This book is shaped by the fact that reporting on the life of an idea is a slippery task. If it were simply a matter of trying to render the intangible tangible, it would be hard. But it’s made more difficult by the fact that the abstract doesn’t exist, so to speak, in the abstract. Ideas are frustratingly anchored in the heads of individuals, and each of those individuals has his own version of any one thought. They all agree on some of the implications and none of the others. And everyone has a slightly different set of assumptions, not all of which he is conscious of or willing to admit to.
Additionally, even though ideas come from nowhere but the heads of people, attributing them to individuals is tricky. Most ideas have been around forever in some form or other, yet the tides of thought follow no clear pattern. An idea can lie neglected for a millennium and then suddenly become invigorated by the agenda of a new age. And even when someone does come up with a really novel thought, it’s inevitably the case that someone else across the Atlantic or the Pacific has awoken that very morning with the same bulb flaring above her.
We all want to believe that ideas rise or fall on their own merits, but in the real world they don’t. Both personality and ideology shape the pursuit of knowledge and affect the way an idea gets lost and found over the years. And if this is not just, then perhaps it is natural. After all, what we’re finding is that culture—which at its most basic is an interaction between two individuals—is a great force of evolution. Our personalities, our ideologies, and our ideas all arise from the same place—the intersection between biology and experience. Is it any wonder they are inextricable?
The intent in telling this story is to render the large shifts of history. As much as possible, I try to avoid the hindsight that makes thinkers seem more sophisticated than they probably were at the time. I stay as far away as possible from labels like “behaviorism” and “positivism.” If you use these words precisely, each requires a manifesto of explication and qualification. Alternatively, if you use them but forgo the provisos, they tend to make people and ideas seem like caricatures. (For an intensely subtle history that tweezes apart each word in many historical utterances read
Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky
by Peter Matthews
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or
The Linguistics Wars
by Randy Allen Harris.)
The study of language evolution has been enacted by a cast of hundreds. If you try to isolate the really gifted ones and the ones who represent a particular idea and the ones who’ll give you great quotations, there are still too many people to describe. This book focuses on the individuals that it does because they have made an idea their own in a striking and significant way. Perhaps, like Steven Pinker, they have combined a genius for cognitive science with a genius for timing. Or like Simon Kirby, they occupy a historically unique spot. Kirby, a young professor of language evolution at the University of Edinburgh, is not only spearheading research into the digital modeling of language; he was the first student to ever take an undergraduate and a graduate degree majoring in the evolution of language.
Some events in this book are retold by just one individual; some are recounted by more. Other happenings and thoughts have been bequeathed to a kind of large, collective memory. As much as possible, I have tried to be clear about who is doing the remembering and whose lens is providing the viewpoint.
Noam Chomsky stands out in this book as a hugely influential figure. He is also an abominably difficult subject. His theories and terminology have changed many times since the 1960s, and there are no complete and reliable road maps to these shifts. This drives academics as crazy as it does writers.
Every interview I conducted for this book left me excited and always leaning toward the particular theory of whomever I had just spoken to. Everyone I interviewed was dynamic and engaged; a few were modest as well as intelligent. While all of them believe in science as the pursuit of truth, they also treat science as a competition. This eclectic group of psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists (and the hundreds of people who are here but unnamed) are reaching into the deep past to crack open a mystery more than six million years in the making. Keep in mind that some of them will turn out to be completely wrong.
Naturally, everyone thinks he has the right solution. At the time I wrote this introduction, pretty much every one of the main characters in this book, and a slew of others, was writing his own book to present at greater length his particular version of how language evolved.
Why does language evolution matter? Because the story of language evolution underlies every other story that has ever existed and every story that ever will. Without this one tale, there are simply no such things as beginnings, middles, and ends. Only because the evolutionary plot unfolded in the way it did do we have yarns, fables, and parables, tragedies, farces, and thrillers, news reports, urban legends, and embarrassing anecdotes from childhood. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
T
he Panthéon in Paris sits on a hill, and when you stand on its roof and look out from each corner, the City of Light stretches beneath you. To the northwest the Eiffel Tower stands on the skyline, enormous but light. The Panthéon, in contrast, is massive. Its main chamber is supported by huge stone columns, and one floor below it lies the crypt. It’s damp and dark, and among its many graves is the one belonging to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died in 1778.
Although he is best known for his political philosophy, Rousseau spent considerable time thinking about where language came from and what humans were like before they acquired it. He imagined a primeval forest where people wandered alone. If males and females crossed paths, they’d pause for sex, then go on their separate ways. Mothers and children abandoned one another as soon as possible, and because proximity was the only way they could tell they were related, a brief period apart soon rendered them unable to recognize their own kin.
In his
Essay on the Origin of Languages,
Rousseau wrote that when these roving, isolated creatures did communicate, they used crude cries and gestures that imitated animal vocalizations. A barking sound, for example, meant “dog.” Eventually, the bark came to represent the animal, and as humans expanded their repertoire of animal mimicry, they created the first words.
This primal lexicon was limited by the range of sounds that could be mimicked, so Rousseau suggested that the original language was mostly gestural. Hand and body movements didn’t just supplement meaning; they formed an imprecise kind of sign language that worked in tandem with the vocal pantomime. Rousseau believed that language originally burst forth in times of crisis: “Man’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature…wrested from him only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions, to implore for help in great dangers or relief in violent ills.”
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We eventually lost this body language, theorized Rousseau, because gestures aren’t as versatile as the spoken word. Hand movements can’t be seen at night or if the line of sight is somehow blocked.
The eighteenth century was a time of energetic conjecture about the evolution of language, and Rousseau was heavily influenced by thinkers like the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder and Étienne Bonnot, the abbé de Condillac, who wrote a number of treatises on the nature and origins of language. Herder believed that humans first mimicked animal sounds to communicate. He also thought they imitated other sounds of nature, like the rustling of the wind or the babble of water.
All of these ideas had a lasting impact on the way we think about language evolution, and in some form they’re still taught in many classrooms today. They are explained, and caricatured, as the “bow-wow” theory of evolution. The theory goes like this: If you told a stranger on the street, “There’s a mad dog a block away,” these few words should be enough to save him from a possibly dangerous encounter. If you discovered the stranger spoke another language, your warning might take longer to convey, but you’d still try, and you’d probably be successful. Waving hands and rolling eyes might do it, and a natural flair for the dramatic would help. But to really sell the message, you should bark like a dog while jabbing your finger in the correct direction.
The ease with which humans produce and understand such signals when words don’t work—the combination of gesture and auditory mimicry—feels innate. Proponents of such a theory would argue that not only is it innate but it’s how we communicated before we had language and it was, in fact, crucial to the evolution of language.
Other general ideas about how language evolved that have been bandied about for ages—and, like the bow-wow theory, actually explain very little—include the “yo-he-ho” and “pooh-pooh” theories. “Yo-he-ho” stands for the rhythmic grunts and chanting of people working together, and according to the theory it is from such social cooperation that language arose. The “pooh-pooh” theory proposes that language originated in cries of emotion. (Perhaps it would more accurately be called the “ouch” theory of language evolution.)
Rousseau is a key representative of an important period in language evolution, standing at the brink of modern thought and theorizing. But his era was not the first in which men began to question where words came from. Several millennia before Rousseau was born, the Pharaoh Psammetichus believed that one single language must have been the source of all subsequent human languages. In search of that first tongue, the ancient Egyptian king isolated two babies in a mountain hut. He sent a shepherd to feed and clothe the children but forbade the man to speak to them.
It was thought that with no exposure to speech, the original human language would emerge from the children’s mouths as naturally as their hair would grow and their limbs would lengthen. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the children eventually uttered the word
bekos,
which is Phrygian for bread, which led Psammetichus to deduce that Phrygian was the first human language, even though it was not his own.
The quest for humanity’s mother tongue spans centuries and cultures. Seekers believed there once existed a “monolinguistic golden age.” Rediscovering the first ancient tongue was considered a way to re-create this time, a chance to attain perfect expression by conveying one’s thoughts and intentions without ambiguity.
The pharaoh’s test was repeated at least twice: The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, a soldier, diplomat, and scholar who was said to be fluent in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and Greek, likewise confined two children to silence in the early Middle Ages. His subjects died before articulating a word. Two hundred years later, King James IV of Scotland imprisoned two Scottish children who in the end, apparently, “spak very guid Ebrew.”
The Church held for centuries that Hebrew was the first language, but scholars proposed many other contenders. In the fifteenth century, the architect and scholar John Webb argued for the supremacy of Chinese, claiming that the biblical Noah had washed up in China after the flood. Chinese remained a popular candidate for a few centuries, with Joseph Edkins writing in 1887 in
The Evolution of the Chinese Language
that it had to be the world’s primeval language simply because of its age. Noah Webster proposed in 1830 that the primordial language was Aramaic, another Semitic language and the native tongue of Jesus.
Inseparable from the notion of a single tongue that united all humanity is the idea that language is exclusively a property of human beings and one that originated with the source of all life. Before the Darwinian revolution, it was thought that there was no prehuman existence and no pre-linguistic human experience. Consequently the first acts or expressions of language were universally said to be divinely inspired. In other cultures and times, the Egyptians believed the god Thoth was the progenitor of language, while the Babylonians attributed it to Nabu. For the Hindus, Sarasvati, wife of Brahma (creator of the universe), gave language to humanity.
When Rousseau and his fellow thinkers imagined a world before words, they pictured an extended period of language genesis. Instead of being a magical property of humanity, language was something our species acquired over time. This new model of evolution shifted the focus from a perfect first language from which all varieties descended to language as undergoing a developmental stage that resembled the communication systems of other animals. Even though Rousseau is well known as a believer in the unbridgeable line between humans and the rest of creation, this shift left the sharp division between us and the rest of the animal world a little blurred.
Proposing the existence of more than one stage of language development immediately raises the issues of how and why people moved from one stage to the next. What forces drove us to speak in the first place? What passions shaped the way language was formed?
Although Darwin mentioned language very little in
On the Origin of Species,
the book is a keystone for every discussion about language evolution that has followed it. In fact, all debate about who we are and how we came to be on this planet can be divided into conversations that took place before publication of
Origin
and those that have taken place after it.
Origin
was printed six times during Darwin’s lifetime, and many times since. Not only did it introduce the concept of evolution (truly the most superlative-laden theory in science; Jared Diamond’s evaluation—“the most profound and powerful idea to have been conceived in the last two centuries”
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—is typical), but it initiated the modern study of evolutionary biology. The flow of books published about Darwin every year seems endless.
Darwin focused more on language in
The Descent of Man
(1871) than in
Origin
. Language was not a conscious invention, he said, but “it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.”
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At the same time, he noted, humans don’t speak unless they are taught to do so. Psammetichus’s experiment could never have worked, because language is “not a true instinct.”
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Darwin believed that language was half art, half instinct, and he made the case that using sound to express thoughts and be understood by others was not an activity unique to humans. He cited the examples of monkeys that uttered at least six different cries, of dogs that barked in four or five different tones, and of domesticated fowl that had “at least a dozen significant sounds.” He noted that parrots can sound exactly like humans and described a South American parrot that was the only living creature that could utter the words of an extinct tribe.
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Darwin included gesture and facial expressions under the rubric of language: “The movements of the features and gestures of monkeys are understood by us, and they partly understand ours.”
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He also considered animals’ abilities of comprehension and cognition. “As everyone knows,” he wrote, “dogs understand many words and sentences.” He likened them to small babies who comprehend a great deal of speech but can’t utter it themselves. Darwin quoted his fellow scholar Leslie Stephen: “A dog frames a general concept of cats or sheep, and knows the corresponding words as well as a philosopher [does].”
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Darwin also pointed out compelling parallels between human language and birdsong. All birds, like all humans, utter spontaneous cries of emotion that are very similar. And both also learn how to arrange sound in particular ways from their parents. “The instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” said Darwin, “is not peculiar to man.”
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Where humans differ from other animals, Darwin believed, is simply in our greater capacity to put together sounds with ideas, which is a function of our higher mental powers. What got us to that level was love, jealousy, triumph—sex. Before we used language as we know it today, we sang, producing “true musical cadences” in courtship.
On the Origin of Species
and, in more detail,
The Descent of Man
also discuss similarities in the way that languages, like animals, change over time. Just as species split off from one another to form new groups, languages split to form dialects and entirely new languages. From the common ancestor of all mammals, many different species arose, like the manatee, the horse, and the gorilla. Likewise, Latin branched over time to give rise to the modern Romance languages, including Italian, French, and Spanish.
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Darwin’s theory of language change was embraced most enthusiastically by scholars of language. Evolutionary theory turned out to be a perfect analogy for language phenomena that they had observed but were unable to account for in any systematic way. Linguists of the nineteenth century (known as philologists) are often described as having been overly preoccupied with their status as genuine scientists, and their newfound ability to explain language change in terms of biology and natural history gave them a greatly desired sense of credibility.
Biological evolution proved to be an excellent analogy for language change, and linguists took up the evolutionary analogy with such enthusiasm that they began to treat natural selection as a literal account of language change rather than as a helpful analogy, applying the idea of survival of the fittest to such phenomena as the ways that speech sounds change over long periods of time (how, for example, a distinct sound like
f
might become
s
). Ironically, linguists still regarded speculating on the origins of language to be an unscientific problem, and it remained controversial to adopt Darwin’s theory for that purpose. So while Darwin himself freely considered the origins of language, linguists did anything but.
The distaste for speculation about language origins culminated in an extraordinary move by the Société de Linguistique of Paris in the nineteenth century: it banned any discussion of the subject, even though it was attracting more and more attention. Its pronouncement read: “The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language.”
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In 1872 the London Philological Society followed suit.
This act of academic censorship had remarkably long-reaching consequences. Despite the occasional flare of interest, language evolution was considered a disreputable pursuit for more than a century. In 1970 a meeting of the American Anthropological Association presented a number of papers on language evolution, many of which were later collected in the book
Language Origins
. Even then, a contributing anthropologist wrote that scholars who studied the subject did so either apologetically or with reluctance.
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In 1976 the New York Academy of Sciences collected another series of conference papers on the topic in a volume called
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech,
and in 1988 proceedings from a NATO summer institute organized by Philip Lieberman were published. The volume was called
Language Origin: A Multidisciplinary Approach
.
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Yet despite the widespread interest that these collections suggest, the field remained marginal. This changed in the 1990s with the publication of one article about language evolution that drew together commentary from researchers with dramatically different ideas of what language is. Since then, tensions between the types of research, and researcher, have energized the topic, causing it to finally flourish.