How did language begin?
If we want to know when humans started making fire, or cultivating plants, or domesticating
animals we can look for the things they left behind when doing those things.
But what if we want to know how language began?
Language disappears on the air as soon as it is produced.
It doesn't get left behind.
We will never dig up the first word, or discover a fossilized sentence.
That hasn't stopped people from speculating about how that first word came about.
For centuries, people have put forth theories on it.
There's the bow-wow theory, that language started from imitation of sounds that things
make.
There's the Pooh-Pooh theory, that it came from automatic vocal responses to fear, pain,
surprise or other emotions.
There's the Yo-He-Ho theory, that it came from rhythmic grunts or chants used to coordinate
actions when working on big projects together.
There's the La-La theory, that it emerged from the sounds of inspired playfulness, poetic
sensibility and song.
This one is lovely, but no more likely than any of the others.
By the late 19th century so much fruitless speculation about the origin of language was
going around that the Paris Linguistic Society banned all discussion of the topic in its
bylaws.
It was fed up scholars who gave the theories those silly nicknames.
But even though language itself doesn't leave a trace we can tell from fossils when we had
the brains and other physical parts that make speech possible.
For instance, we can tell when the voice box moved into its current position.
Chimps, our closest relatives, have their voice boxes in a different place, so they
can't produce the sounds we can, but they also can't choke on food.
We have speech, but we can choke.
Evolutionarily speaking, it must have been really worth it to have the lower voice box.
So the physical pieces were were falling into place 100,000 years ago, when we became homo
sapiens.
Did we have language then?
Maybe.
Maybe we first needed to develop better memory, or more complex social structures, or other
abilities.
By the time we were building things that required a lot of coordination, language was probably
happening.
If we had the ability to think symbolically enough to make cave paintings, language was
probably happening.
Maybe it was first a sort of rudimentary toddler-like language.
Maybe it started with gestures.
Yes, that's a lot of maybes.
Which should give you some sense of how much people still disagree about this.
Humans are the only beings that have language, but we are not the only ones that communicate.
Why didn't it develop in other species?
Some people think there was a genetic mutation that created an innate language ability.
Others think you don't need to assume a sudden mutation, but the right accumulation of other
skills -- good working memory, fine motor control, skill for pattern recognition and
imitation, the ability to imagine other people's minds and make assumptions about what they
understand, an impulse toward social cooperation, a long period where the young stay with adults
as their brains are still developing, -- some animals have some of these things, but humans
have all of them, and maybe, if you have all those things together at a certain level,
you get language for free on top of that.
So how did language begin?
We don't know, but some time between, oh, 100,000 and 10,000 years ago we started to
share our thoughts with each other in words and sentences.
Then we immediately started using it to criticize teenagers for how they were ruining our language.
That's what I think anyway.
I'm calling it the tsk-tsk theory.