WE SAY, THEREFORE, WE BELIEVE
Even till nowadays, the origin of language has still remained one of the ultimate puzzles for science to solve.
Sciences in general, and the Theory of Evolution in particular, have, so far, been proved particularly powerless in solving the puzzle that is the origin of language. Some time ago, the scientists, with some shocking cluelessness, had made the claim that the ancestors of humans started with snarls, growls and calls before ‘eventually, somehow’ evolved into the era of language. But then of course, that explanation brought new problems, like how long was that ‘eventually’ and which way was that ‘somehow’? Because the birds are still tweeting, the chickens are still clucking and crowing and they have stayed that way ever since they emerged as a species. The same is true for our primate relatives as well, whose use of the same growls and calls predates even the coming-into-existence of humans: why is language not developed among any of these species or any other species in the world, leaving human the sole proprietor of the treasure that is language?
The widespread popularity of this overblown and yet largely under-evidenced view had even led the Linguistic Society of Paris to enact a permanent prohibition on any kind of discussion over it ever since 1866 [1].
1. The origin of language, and how it was formed.
Even till nowadays, the origin of language has still remained one of the ultimate puzzles for science to solve. It would be such a difficulty trying to identify the point of time when the ancestors of humans began to use speech, because it simply cannot be represented by reclaimable relics. The skull structure cannot give us a precise idea on the thinking capacity of the ancient brains, and the jaw structure cannot concretely depict a link with the capacity for pronunciation either. And for that reason, all theories have to be evidenced by other major, observable events.
For example, a few linguists stated their view that the emergence of language was like a Big Bang in the process of evolution, as they based this claim on the homo sapiens’ somehow outlasting their greatly physically advantaged relatives — the Neanderthals, and also their later inhabiting every possible part of planet even when they had spent such a long time inhabiting only in Africa. The emergence of language had, most likely, become the key for humans to unlock their capacity for large-scale, intensive mutual assistance, causing the physically disadvantaged humans to develop stronger bonds among themselves. As Noam Chomsky, one of the most remarkable linguists of modern science, argued: the birth of language was a result of emergence birthed by the robust evolution of the human brain that was taking place at the time. The argument that emergence had caused the birth of language shared great similarities with many other modern biological theories where life was thought to be born from the combination of non-living materials.
Given that logic, a reasonable timeline for the emergence of language would be 200.000–60.000 years ago, simultaneous with the homo sapiens’ great migration out of Africa. However, this still has not managed to extend a hypothesis[2].
*[There are two major mainstreams when among the theories on emergence of language (1) one claiming it was a gradual process based on evolution of prelingual functions, and (2) the other claiming it was a sudden outburst in midst of the evolution process].
Many other hypotheses had also been proposed, such as the ‘Putting the baby down’ hypothesis, which argued that the development of language stemmed from the reality that humans’ evolution away from their ancestor’s thick hair coat had also stripped away those natural clinging objects for the babies to stay on their mothers’ back (as popularly utilized by our primate relatives), hence the necessity for the development of a communication method between the mothers and the babies behind their back so the mothers would know when the babies somehow fell off from their back; and it was this need that had led to the development of language [3]. Another rather similar hypothesis suggested that as the babies’ cries did not always show extreme emotions like starvation and the like, but instead could sometimes be the signs of affection or for some much more trivial demands, it began to dawn to the ancient parents that their babies had different types of cries. The discrepancy between the message the babies wished to convey through their cries and the capacity of the parents to decode that message had become the incentive for development of language [4].
Some other hypotheses suggested than language was specifically created by humans to facilitate the requirements of a more communal lifestyle, or from the materials readily available in gesture language … but for most of these alternative hypotheses were discarded as all full of holes. As some critics said, they were not too bizarre to be true: they were simply either too naïve, too deprived of creativity or too unsupported by evidence to deserve better consideration.
On the other end, religions for long had come up with a rather short answer for themselves, to the question of what language had actually originated from. They believed that language was also the creation of the gods or some other supernatural power. For example, according to the Bible, God had, since the beginning, been the creator of absolutely everything, and Adam gave them names [Genesis 2:19]. After the Great Flood, in order to tamper with the construction of the Tower of Babel, God had granted different languages to each of the builder who was working on the tower so that they could no longer understand each other, thus causing them to give up on the construction and then separate from each other to come to live in different lands — and that was reason for the diversity of language [Genesis 11:1–9]. The Arabic alphabets and language was also, as recorded, a creation of God, which was then bestowed on Adam.
Norse mythologies also gave all credits to the Gods for the creation of language, and Odin was said to be the creator of the runic alphabets. In Indian mythologies, the god Indra was said to be the inventor of speech.
As for my part, I believe that even to accept that there are still a lot of areas that science has yet been able to explained would still be a lot more noble course of action than to accept the speckless explanation that is the miracle bestowed by one supernatural being or another according to different regions, evidenced one old piece of record or another. Because, as it naturally should be, a reasoning that explains everything would, at the same time, explain nothing at all. “It’s the work of God” is one of those explanations: It couldn’t be seen as wrong but then again it doesn’t really give any answer to anything either.
Nowadays, the studies on languages are mostly done by linguists. As it may shock those who imagined it to be something rather similar to literature studies, linguistics is, in fact, a heavily technical field of studies: It perform lots and lots thorough and in-depth analyses in its sub-disciplines like phonetics and phonology, semantics and pragmatics, syntax and morphology, historical linguistics (the studies origin and formation of language, the branching of language and the language intersection between major cultural regions, and the changes of language over time)… [5].
The continuous development of linguistics is expected to help us understand better the nature of language and the social structure of any age within the time, because the social context in which a sentence was communicated should always be studied in course of the studies on the sentence itself. The hope for a hypothesis to be born in the future, that can resolve the mystery that is the origin and formation of language, similar to the way how the Theory of Evolution has managed to solve the origin of species and of us humans, is certainly looking promising. But even when it is proven impossible in the end, the pursuit itself may as well bring us many other answers to many other problems we don’t know it would resolve.
But the marvel of language doesn’t really lie with how hard the world of academics with so many of its greatest minds have been working on it over many centuries, but in the fact that it is pretty much used by virtually anyone, anywhere and at any time.
2. The marvel of language.
One of the few things that made language so tricky to be resolved by evolution is the fact that it always has the potential to be deceptive. According to evolutionary biology, specifically to the signaling theory, the individuals (of same species or different species) tend to evolve to become better at communicating and receiving signals from each other; this comes in hand with the need to maintain the genuineness of signals and the proficiency at recognizing deceptive signals [6].
For example, your dog can never pretend like he’s happy and you would always know that his reaction is genuine. But your trust for the dog is not due to the fact that you believe he is truthful, but instead to the fact that he is incapable of faking the state of happiness. The same is true for other animal species, as they are incapable of intentionally creating deceptive signals, and whatever they show are most often times genuine.
Some hypotheses suggested that it was the need to ensure genuineness in communication had prevented the development of language among animal species [7]. Because if the goal was to eliminate the risk of deception in communication, language would virtually be the worst option for communication, and would not even be needed in the first place.
Because, contrary to the other simple and yet precise system of signals in the animal kingdom, the words of men that much more of a fertile ground for the seeds of deception and impracticality. We can use language to talk about a point in space or time different from where we are currently at (the capacity for reference), and, in a similar manner, can certainly speak of a lot of other things that cannot be verified immediately. For example, when a person said he used to keep a pet elephant, there would be virtually no way to immediately tell whether that did or did not happen. Or about the text which recorded that God had created everything in the dawn of the world, it is precisely the fact that the statement could never be verified that has kept the controversy to continue even till nowadays.
And therefore, for language to actually function, it’s required for humans to retain a certain level of trust toward whatever the person on the other end has to say, otherwise none of conversation can last to become anything meaningful. And for that reason, basically we are perhaps one of the most trustful animal species on the planet, as we trained ourselves to trust one of the most unreliable types of signal in the living world — that is the speech of humans. Because when there’s too much skepticism, for example if you, from the very beginning, had already closed off the window of possibility for your friend’s statement of himself keeping a pet elephant at some point, then the only option remaining would be for the conversation to end and for the next topic to be introduced. But no matter which topic is brought up, there would always be lots and lots of unverifiable clauses involved in the speech and humans would not be able to develop any conversation if they couldn’t learn to either ignore or accept that uncertainty.
Language by itself has always been a highly unreliable of signals, which is susceptible to fakery on many different level (fake news or knowledge, fake emotions, fake authority, etc.); however, we do have other systems in place to curb the deceptive use of language, namely the morals, the law or the system for rational fact-checking. In terms of moral, it doesn’t stop with public criticism against the deceptive or boastful individuals, it’s also the disgust and the discomfort each person felt when attempting deception that curb such deceptive acts. Science, as well, can be a reliable tool to verify the credibility of hypotheses and claims, as it employs an uniform set of predetermined standards and principles.
But even then, as language itself contains loopholes for deception (which, as explained by some hypotheses, were also the reason for its flourishing development), the deception in communication of information even till nowadays still a grave issue for humankind, which we have yet been able to address.
Perhaps it is precisely the greatly lax standard by which language is used that helps it to become an incredibly powerful tool that facilitates human’s endeavors to explore the world both within and around ourselves. The potential held by language seems so close to limitless that it virtually feels impossible for us to predict how it will evolve and what it will become able to depict in the future.
Theoretically, the language’s capacity for world combination is virtually limitless. I can write a sentence that no other person has ever written before, and with relative ease at that. With language, we can also craft and understand concepts that haven’t existed previously. Thanks to these characteristics, language can be used to express even the most abstract and/or sophisticated concepts, and even more marvelously so, can be used by us to communicate such concepts to many other people in a way that they can also understand. And with that, community wisdom can be utilized to develop those into even more sophisticated contents.
In other words, the marvel does not exist only in your enjoying a view of the Milky Way in a clear moonless night on top of a grassy hill in a faraway nowhere, with gentle breezes papering every inches of your skin, it’s also in the fact that you can convey a depiction of the scenery and the experience itself to another person, via a series of decoded signals for images and sounds.
While it’s true that you cannot really expect the listener to understand everything you described precisely like you meant for them to, and thus, even more so, you cannot hope for them to understand precisely the firsthand experience you had (given that the limited command of the language certainly can prevent a 100%-precise verbal depiction of your experience), the errors are also a controllable factor. For example, even when each of us owns an entirely unique voice [6] (which explains why you are always capable of recognizing your own voice on the phone, or that of Benedict Cumberbatch when he voices an animated characters) and no one can entirely mimic the way another person pronounce the word “I”, that has never become a problem for you when it comes to understanding something spoken your mother tongue. Because once you have become fluent in a language, the brain will know how to quickly recognize the word “I” even when it might be said differently by each person.
Not only that, the marvel in the brain’s receiving lingual signals doesn’t stop with just letters, it also extends to other types of character as well for example my not adding any column or dot in this long sentence would not cause you any difficulty or getting your mind overloaded when reading it, even without you reading it out loud.
And what’s more is the ability for it to recognize the break between words when we speak or write.
Like
how
this
line
breaking
can
be
just as effective as a spacebar at signaling to you the break between words. Or during speech, even when the speaking comes in a virtually uninterrupted flow, you would still be able to distinguish between words, and identify the interruption between each of the words if it is spoken in your mother tongue.
There are still tons of fascinating things ahead when it comes to the story of the brain and language, about each of which we will look to elaborate in our upcoming articles.
What we mostly hope to achieve with this article is for it to become a great preamble, to help you realize how something so mundane as the language we speak in our everyday life can be absolutely fascinating and incredible, and that it wouldn’t be surprise at all if he are still unable to identify what its origin was and how it was formed, given how much of marvel it is. It exists as the proof that ‘there are still things science hasn’t been able to explain’, just as some people have always said.
But even then, in perhaps virtually any case whatsoever, it would be better for us to quest for answers the way science does, rather than accepting one same answer for virtually any question they way the said people do.
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References:
[1] M. D. Hauser et al., “The mystery of language evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, May 2014, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401.
[2] “N. Chomsky, “Three Factors in Language Design,” Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–22, Jan. 2005, doi: 10.1162/0024389052993655.
[3] D. Falk, “Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 491–503, Aug. 2004, doi: 10.1017/s0140525x04000111.
[4] O. Poliva, “From Mimicry to Language: A Neuroanatomically Based Evolutionary Model of the Emergence of Vocal Language,” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 10, Jun. 2016, doi: 10.3389/fnins.2016.00307.
[5] “Linguistics | science | Britannica,” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2021, Accessed: Feb. 16, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics.
[6], [7] J. Maynard. Smith, “Must reliable signals always be costly?,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 1115–1120, May 1994, doi: 10.1006/anbe.1994.1149.
[8] C. McGettigan and N. Lavan, “Human voices are unique — but our study shows we’re not that good at recognising them,” The Conversation, Jun. 16, 2017. https://theconversation.com/human-voices-are-unique-but... (accessed Feb. 16, 2021).
- Further Reading:
Language: https://www.britannica.com/topic/language
Linguistics: https://www.britannica.com/science/linguistics
How Did Language Begin? https://www.linguisticsociety.org/.../how-did-language-begin
Origin of language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
