THE ORIIGNS AND EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

Michael Corballis
Steven Fry:

 6,000 different languages in the world, impenetrable to any other or to all of the others

The Tower of Babel – the Biblical account

Noam Chomsky:

 how we put language together

 how language evolves:
 Approximately 90,000 years ago a mutation happened in one individual, Prometheus (Tital
who created humanity from clay). From there, it spread to all other people and eventually,
created all the languages of the world: a Biblical story

7,000,000 years of human evolution since we separated from the apes.

We evolved about 200,000 years ago.

According to Chomsky, Language evolved halfway throughout that spam of 200,000 years.

Charles Darwin:

 Language, like anu other organ, must have evolved through successful slight modifications.

Michael Carballis:

He wants to demonstrate that Language didn’t evolve from human chords. It arose from gestures.

One piece of evidence comes from the monkey brain, 30 or 40 million years back. There’s an area, a
circuit, in the monkey brain dedicated to making grasp actions: the mirror system. Because this
system is active whenever the monkey reaches out for something or when it sees another animal or
person even doing the same movement: it maps what the monkey sees into what the monkey can
do. Some people might call it a-monkey-see-monkey do circuit. The equivalent circuit in the human
brain is the language circuit.

The language areas in the brain seem to have a reason from the mirror circuit in the monkey brain.
So, in the course of evolution, that circuit seems to have been taken over or at least used partly to
deal with language.

Apes have been taught to talk through gestures, through the use of sign language, to have a little
conversation. They can make requests, little sentences somewhat generative.

A famous case, Kanzi, a bonobo: He uses a display of symbols. He points to these symbols (they
represent objects and actions). He can ask and have little conversations. That shows that great apes
get closer to language by using either pointing to something or using a form of sign language.

Now, we also know, and it has become a hot topic recently, that if you look back at apes in the
world, they make lots and lots of gestures that seem much more language-like than the vocalizations
are.

Sign language is purely gestural. It’s done silently. It´s done with gestures of the hand and of the
face. That’s a powerful argument and just as effective as speech. Sign language is linguistically
sophisticated: It uses the same brain areas that spoken language does. And there’s a university in the
US –Gallaudet University—that uses only sign language in its classes.

We also gesture as we speak.

Bipedalism: The critical thing that happened between us and apes. Becoming more upright freed the
hands and the face for a gestural kind of communication, and that’s why, I think, it began to become
sophisticated. So we began to be able to create meanings by combining gestures in various ways. I
think it developed into a form of mime, so they began to mime things they wanted to talk about –
either things they say saw on an expedition or hunting together, or what they planned to do next.

This beginning some 6 million years ago, so I’ll try to demonstrate.

Thera are 20 different hominid species there that are beyond the apes, and they’ve all become
extinct, with one exception: the homo sapiens.

There was increasing bipedalism through that period, and we probably became fully bipedal about 2
million years ago. That gave us more canvass to play on if we want to understand how language
came about.

The fact that there was a sudden event that gave origin to language is supported not only by
Chomsky but also by a lot of archeologists. Most biologist think it doesn’t make sense.

Miming then became less iconic and more arbitrary. So language became simplified. It gradually
lost its pictorial component.

It’s easier to use something more conventional and decided by people arbitrarily than it is to try to
make a mimic. There’s more room for variation. So I think people scattered. They came out of Africa
about 90,000 years ago, scattered around the world. The language as they used it, adapted to
geography and culture and religion perhaps.

These things became different because we partly designed language to keep people out, so that
people won’t understand us. So language is not only a means of communicating, it’s a means of
preventing communication. It’s a kind of a fortress that we build around us.

That is a way, the downside of language, and especially speech, where it can be quite arbitrary,
where you decide what sounds would correspond to what things.

Language started with a grasping reflex: a genuinely communicative act by great apes.

Homo erectus probably has a more sophisticated way of signing and probably the beginnings of
grunts that would turn into speech or also the beginning of talks. So I think that as we lost the
manual component, then what happened was we freed our hands a second time. The first freeing
of the hand was bipedalism, but then as language began to develop gesturally, we began to lose the
manual component again and put the thing in the face. The language becomes more dedicated to
the face, which is also a very expressive organ, and eventually we put it into the mouth.

It’s the first example of miniaturization. This frees our hands for doing other things and, particularly,
for making things.

Obviously language didn’t stop at speech. We have developed many more different forms of
language since we decided to speak. And each of those changes has been of enormous importance
to our species. And it’s of growing importance. It starts perhaps with reading and writing, which
adds a dimension, and starts to give language memory. Then it gained distance. We’ve got radio,
telephones. Then you begin to be able to communicate at fast distances. And we go to the internet,
where we can communicate instantly with other people on the other side of the world. And finally,
to the cell phone, which is perhaps the ultimate. It’s got both memory and distance, and
computation.

We’ve got communication as such a level that we’ve almost emptied our minds into
communication systems. In a way, we are also returning to visual language. Writing, of course, is
visual. And the cellphone is visual. Some of you are also using gestures with your thumbs
communicating with your cellphones. Some’ve gone through the cell phones from the wagging of
fingers to the wiggling of thumbs.