The origin of language when, where, why, how?

!Kaggen

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!Kaggen
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Which of these questions can and has science provided some answers for?

Anyone with links to books, papers, studies, ideas etc...
 
Sadly, I don't think anyone can answer that question.

There are even those who doubt that Homo Sapiens had speech from the start. The problem is that with humans not much interesting happens until 40,000 years ago (give or take 10,000) and then it suddenly speeds up. Some see that as tentative evidence that that's when we started really speaking.

Me, I find that idea pretty stupid, but what do I know? :p
 
There's a good book called "Empires of the Word," by Nicholas Ostler. But even he doesn't go that far back. There is a lot of interesting stuff on how languages were spread, though.
 
HansMustermann said:
Sadly, I don't think anyone can answer that question.

There are even those who doubt that Homo Sapiens had speech from the start. The problem is that with humans not much interesting happens until 40,000 years ago (give or take 10,000) and then it suddenly speeds up. Some see that as tentative evidence that that's when we started really speaking.

Me, I find that idea pretty stupid, but what do I know? :p
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It seems like a quite inane argument. Compared to technological advances and societal changes in the 20th Century, not much interesting happened before 1900. Human development has occurred throughout history in an ever increasing pace. Essential in that has been the agricultural revolution: that freed human resources for other than mere survival.
 
Origins of Language

I suggest a book: The Symbolic Species - The co-evolution of language and the brain by Terrence W. Deacon, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997 (in Google Books)

Vocal communication is practiced by just about any animal that can make sounds. The difference between that kind of primitive communication and language is a level of abstract symbolism that only humans seem capable of, though I think some of the people working on symbolic communication with apes may argue that point. But in any case, the extent of abstract symbolism in language is clearly far greater among humans than anything else. Deacon suggests, as the title implies, that there is a necessary connection & feedback, between the evolution of a brain capable of abstract symbolism, and the language that makes use of it. And I think it is only fair to add the human larynx ("voice box") to the mix, as even apes could not make the sounds of human language, even if their brains could fully process the languages(s).

Linguists have named the original first language (or perhaps a family of primitive languages) as the Nostratic Language, and search for clues to its nature by seeking out symbols common across disparate language groups.

While written language seems to date from about 3,000 BCE in either Mesopotamia or Egypt (they both claim to be first), there are older scripts, proto-writing perhaps, as old as 6,000 BCE and maybe older (the Wikipedia writing page refers to them). Since spoken language, unlike writing, leaves no clues, it's hard to know when it began, or how it evolved. But I would assume, just as there are examples of proto-writing, there must have been a proto-spoken language, even before the Nostratic language(s). I note that the oldest archeological signs of civilization (i.e., city building) that I am aware of are in Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, where there are carbon dates as old as about 8,000 BCE or 10,000 years ago (well before written history begins, it's the perfect setting for Conan the Barbarian, though somewhat less grand than fantasy requires). I assume that construction of this complexity can hardly have happened without fully linguistic communication. Then again, there is what appears to be the world's oldest flute, 35,000 years old and found in Germany. If language and music go together (both seem capable of rich symbolism to me) then perhaps this is a clue that language, or at least proto-language, flourished that long ago.
 
The difference between that kind of primitive communication and language is a level of abstract symbolism that only humans seem capable of, though I think some of the people working on symbolic communication with apes may argue that point.
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I've read that certain apes have dialects--apes from various parts of the forest "speek" differently from apes in other parts of the forest. That implies that the communication is at least not instinctive, meaning it's a learned verbal communication. And considering some people I know, it'd be mighty difficult to differentiate between an ape's learned verbal communication and a person's.

Linguists have named the original first language (or perhaps a family of primitive languages) as the Nostratic Language, and search for clues to its nature by seeking out symbols common across disparate language groups.
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Is this really a valid way to look at this, though? I mean, it implies that language evolved once, in one location, and evolved from there. While this MAY be true, it is not NECESSARILY true. What I mean is that humans in several areas may have developed a language (due to similar selective pressures) independently from one another. Though I'll admit this doesn't seem to make sense, given what I said earlier about apes....It could be possible that a protolanguage evolved before humans did, and we inhereted it.

Which of these questions can and has science provided some answers for?
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I'd say none of them, at least not firm answers. As others have said, language as such doesn't leave any traces--and if you don't have the rock, you can't say what happened. We can, however, say what most likely happened. I'm just not a linguist, so I'm coming at this from a completely different angle than most. :)
 
progressquest said:
I can help with the "why". It seems that it probably first originated as a way to signal danger.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/monkey-talk/

As to the "when", language (as we know it) would obviously have happened after splitting from chimps (they don't seem to have the capability to parse complex language).


Interesting question.
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Depends upon how you are defining language.

I suspect that all animal noises are at the root, the beginnings of language, and what we possess probably isn't the end-all of what language can become. The problem comes in trying to draw an arbitrary line and say noises before that point are meaningless noises and noises after that point are significant linguistic utterances.
 
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Likely first there was the upright gait which lead to neotany which led to a period of accelerated brain development.

Homo sapeins sapiens, modern gracile form is at least 60,000 years old, somewhere before then. Modern language groups are more recent.
 
progressquest said:
As to the "when", language (as we know it) would obviously have happened after splitting from chimps (they don't seem to have the capability to parse complex language).
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The big problem is really how you define "language". While homo sapiens appears to be the only animal with such complex language, virtually all of them use some kind of communication of varying complexity. Hell, even plants and bacteria communicate to some extent. Some, such as dolphins, are really quite complex even if not quite to the same level as us. It seems pretty clear that human language must have evolved out of the more basic communication used by our ancestors, so the "when?" depends entirely on where you draw the line.

That also really answers the "why?". Obviously communication is extremely useful, even in less social species. So much so that there are very few, if any, species that don't communicate at all. So it's not really a question of why it happened at all, but just one about the exact details of the costs and benefits of evolving more advanced language in the specific environment our ancestors lived in.
 
Most organisms can communicate with one another in some form or another. Language is simply the evolutionarily-developed version of that.
 
First off, brains at almost any level of life do one thing, they sort of match information from the senses.

So pattern matching is part and parcel of perception.
 
Professor Yaffle said:
Google is God, and I am merely his messenger:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14662184
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
http://blog.case.edu/singham/2008/06/25/when_did_language_originate
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/lang/overview.php
http://machineslikeus.com/news/when-did-language-originate
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After drilling down through some of those links for a couple of hours, I found some fascinating 'facts':

* Primates who have been taught human 'languages' (sign language, push-button languages) never ask any questions even though they will answer questions put to them.

* All human languages -- without a single known exception -- voice that same intonation indicated by the "?" character at the end of the question.

What do it mean?

ETA: I wish I had book-marked that second claim. My bad.
 
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What I find interesting is that humans are the only species on earth with fully developed language and that there are no intermediate levels of language among other species. We know that there are a few species that are capable of rudimentary communication (that many linguists argue is not truly language), but then there is a huge gap between those species and the fully developed systematic use of symbols, syntax and grammar that defines human language. Why are there no intermediate forms of language? Did our ancestors wipe out any other primates that demonstrated language skills?
 
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!Kaggen said:
Which of these questions can and has science provided some answers for?
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why require any information from anyone else to prove anything, use common sense, observe a child, observe nature

Anyone with links to books, papers, studies, ideas etc...
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just ask yourself a question; did mankind create all words?

did you require mom to feed you your first meal?

mankind became conscious of itself, then began to identify its surroundings.

If you are seeking magic, miracles or perhaps the explanation of gabby angels, then nothing in the world but your own integrity can answer the inquiry.
 
Without question, the best (and most accessable) book I've read on the subject is:

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutsher.

Modern language, it seems, is built upon a foundation of dead metaphor. I don't know what it means, but it's cool.
 
A slightly more specific set of questions is addressed in a book I just mentioned on another thread, Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene.

Examining the neurology of reading, it seems that there are brain structures that seem perfectly suited to the tasks of reading. Yet reading and writing is a relatively recent development, far too recent for the brain to have evolved by the adaptive advantage of reading. It really looks like our brains were designed for reading.

In fact, he finds some of these functions are present even in monkey brains (that have nothing like reading). So the conclusion is that reading and writing evolved suited to take advantage of existing brain structures/functions.

There is also a certain degree of developmental flexibility in human brains (so as we learn to read, we get some slight tweaking of brain organization, just as seeing is essential for organization of the visual cortex) within genetically assigned limits (Daheane calls them "biases" in favor of certain brain organizations--that is, if the preferred and most efficient structure is unavailable, the next in line is what handles that function).
 
Perpetual Student said:
What I find interesting is that humans are the only species on earth with fully developed language and that there are no intermediate levels of language among other species. We know that there are a few species that are capable of rudimentary communication (that many linguists argue is not truly language), but then there is a huge gap between those species and the fully developed systematic use of symbols, syntax and grammar that defines human language. Why are there no intermediate forms of language?
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You seem to contradict yourself. There are in fact proto-language elements in other species.

The huge gap between them and fully-formed human language is probably the result of the fact that other members of our closest clade are all extinct. I think we can safely assume that Neanderthals had language, and some of the other now-extinct hominids in our once bushier family tree probably had some of the missing links.

We can easily understand that each improvement from the warning calls of vervet monkeys to fully-formed human language (including the huge advantage to extra-somatic memory that writing gives us) was adaptive, so I don't think there's any great mystery.

Did our ancestors wipe out any other primates that demonstrated language skills?
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I'd say it depends on how you define "wipe out". The huge radiation of modern humans definitely supplanted and out-competed all other hominids, but I don't think there's any reason to think we wiped them out by warfare, for example. Successive waves of hominids came out of Africa, but our ancestors were the ones who really filled the planet.

But I do think you've got the right idea. I don't think language happened *after* we became the hugely successful species.
 
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