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Language Development
The First Word
The Search for the Origins of Language
Penguin Books, 2008
For most of the twentieth century, a majority of professionals in the linguistics field opposed the idea of language evolution as wild speculation. Their opposition had its roots in a decision made by two influential linguistics societies in the last third of the nineteenth century not long after Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution. Christine Kenneally describes in clear terms the resurgence of interest in language evolution that began in the 1990s within the field of linguistics and the contributions of researchers in various fields outside linguistics who are establishing the study of language evolution as a solid science.
Every one who has language is connected and lives in two worlds, the physical realm and the abstract realm of language. In the physical realm, our body connects with the world around us by means of the physical senses. In the language realm, we endlessly arrange symbols in particular patterns. Each realm is enormously complex, but the physical world has a certain primacy as the indispensable platform for the symbolic world. Language is articulated with the same throat, tongue, and lips that are used to eat, breathe and taste, and the vibration of vocal cords with the spoken word resonates through all the bones in the body. Because the two realms overlap so much, people can interact not only with other beings in the physical world but also within the matrix of language they share with others in the abstract world.
When people access the global network of computers called the Internet, they can travel the world, find information, and interact with other people in a way never before possible. The creation of the Internet was an astonishing leap forward in the evolution of technology, but the Internet is shadowing something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, and the descriptive power of oral or written language creates virtual worlds for all of us. Language is the worldwide web and everyone is logged on.
INTRODUCTION
For a long time, the scientific account of language evolution was told only in broad strokes to explain how the complex somehow arose from the simple. Some researchers thought that prior to the current remarkable facility of Homo sapiens with words there was a protolanguage, a clever form of communication that distinguished us from our fellow primates. But how did the protolanguage and the systems that followed arise? Did a single genetic mutation shape the destiny of humankind or was it a very slow change over numberless generations? Of all the obstacles to solving this mystery, the first lies in the nature of the spoken word.
In spite of its power to affect others in numerous ways, speech is little more than breaths of air that exit the body and dissipate quickly into the atmosphere, leaving no fossils behind. On the evolutionary time scale fossil bone can last long enough to leave an impression. Writing, which is also a type of fossil, can provide information about the languages recorded since writing was invented. Writing, however, is only 6,000 years old and is static because it is structured by the conventions of punctuation and use of space. The complex sentences that occur in writing are only indirectly related to the more free-flowing structures of speech. Unlike speech, written sentences lack a means to avoid ambiguity, whereas speech often avoids ambiguity through the additional means of bodily gestures, facial expressions, and voice intonations.
The story of language evolution matters, Kenneally emphasizes, because it underlies every other story that has ever existed and ever will. Without this one tale, there would be no beginnings, middles, and ends. Only because the evolutionary plot unfolded the way it did do we have yarns, tales, fables, parables, tragedies, farces, thrillers, news reports, urban legends and anecdotes from our childhood. What follows are 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.