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The rise of language

This section is a personal view. However it reflects my reading over some 15 years. And I’m sure that many scientists will have sympathy with it.

The dawn of language

spread of modern languages World language

Language as we understand it requires a sophisticated voice box, and other specialised adaptations, which I think scientists believe only appeared with Homo sapiens, a couple of hundred thousand years ago.

But you don’t need this high tech kit to be able to communicate. A family of foxes occasionally visits our garden. And they make a quite a wide range of different sounds as they play – including clucking like a demented hen. I’m sure that most animals can communicate far better than we give them credit for. I don’t see how any social species could rub along together without a bit of communication. Neither do I see how pack animals could hunt effectively without it. It’s no longer good enough to attribute it all to ‘instinct’.

I think that Goodall and others have shown the chimps can communicate quite well.

We don’t actually stem from chimps (more). But I believe that our early ancestors will have come down from the trees with limited communication skills already well honed. Even our foxes’ sounds could surely be developed into quite a useful little ‘language’ if the brainpower was available. Each time our brain size increased, some of this extra processing power will surely have been used for improving these skills.

Modern chimps can make a wide range of different sounds. Even if Homo erectus only had a similar repertoire, they will certainly have been able to pack far more meaning into the sounds that they could make. And we mustn’t under-estimate the importance of gestures, facial expressions and body language in communication.

So I would put the dawn of language way back into the mists of time. And I would reckon its evolution to have been slow and progressive, over millions of years. There may have been spurts at various times. There probably were. But that’s the way evolution goes.

Somewhere around 20-30 thousand years ago, we modern humans began to develop culture and symbolic thought. I’m not too clear exactly what either of these mean (more). But they will both have needed dramatic increases in the complexity and power of our various languages. Which came first is anybody’s guess. I would argue that they almost certainly evolved together.

The spread of modern languages

Until the great post ice-age flood (more) few people probably moved far. I’ve read that, in modern hunter-gatherer societies, each village often has its own language. So we must imagine there being a huge number of different languages spread around the world.

This thought stems from the fact that languages tend to proliferate. The three Scandinavian languages are almost identical. Not very long ago they must have been a single language. Spanish and Italian are similar too. My Italian stepfather got on very well in Spain, without a word of actual Spanish (until he asked for some butter in a restaurant. The word he used means ‘donkey’ in Spanish!). When I was young, we knew that English had similarities with its neighbouring languages. But we were gob smacked when we got mysterious hints that it was also similar to Indian.

In fact the ‘Indo-European’ group of languages appears to have originated with the Kurgan horsemen of the Russian steppes, or possibly with the early farmers of Anatolia (now part of Turkey) – or possibly with different people, somewhere else. It originated some 6 thousand years ago, or possibly 9 thousand. It comprises 87 different languages, or possibly 144. Confused? So am I. The languages range from Irish to Gujarati.

Opinions differ over how the new language ‘system’ spread so widely. Genetics don’t seem to support the idea that a group of people swept westwards, bringing their language with them. So we have to imagine that somehow new ideas were adopted by the existing people, together with the language that went with them. Maybe farming was the big new idea (more).

Whatever the reason, the new language didn’t reach the Basque region, Finland, Estonia or Korea. These languages are each utterly unique. I’ve read that Hungarian is a one-off too. One can understand the others, but why Hungarian? Hungary is right in the middle of everything. Maybe it had a particularly powerful leader at the time, who kept all foreign influences out.

Of course, new languages straightaway started to separate out. The linguists reckon that they can tell how long ago a language, or group of languages, split off. They do it by counting the words that are similar; and by considering how long ago the word will have been coined. Words for ‘water’ for example will have been around ever since the crudest languages emerged. But ‘wheel’ can’t have been coined until round-and-round things were invented. I wish I could tell you when that was (more).

Around the world, linguists have identified 200-300 language ‘trees’. Some like Indo-European have dozens of branches. Some have only a few. Some, as we’ve seen, have only one.

Studying just the words can only take you so far back. Johanna Nichols, of the University of California, prefers to work on sentence construction. We Europeans are all familiar with the differences between English, French, German and so on.

But we have probably never heard of ‘ergativity’. Whatever it is, it appears to be common to languages around the Pacific rim and south-west Asia. (I have a comment in my notes, plus Basque? The mind boggles.)

Nichols has identified a group of languages that contain certain features (which again I don’t understand). They surround the Pacific rim, but never penetrate inland. She reckons that these languages reached New Guinea, for example, around 11 thousand years ago. An earlier wave, incorporating another feature, must have occurred earlier, because the feature has penetrated into several hinterlands.

The ergativity feature occurs only in the hinterlands. It doesn’t appear on the coasts at all. So must be older still. It also appears in America. According to Nichols, this puts the first colonisation of America very early indeed.

Be warned however. Other scientists reckon that Nichols is pushing her luck with all this.

World Language

Over the last 50 years or so, we have acquired a World language, and it will be fascinating to chart the effect that this has. We are told that, despite its many faults, English is actually a very good language. In particular it contains more words than any other on the planet. This enables you to express a wider range of thoughts.

I once had a Norwegian friend who came to England and became fluent in English. He returned to Norway, and was like a fish out of water. He hadn’t forgotten any Norwegian. It was just that Norwegian didn’t have words for the thoughts and ideas that he had got used to being able to express.

French is a great language, and a favourite of poets. Yet ‘aimer’ seems to mean both to ‘like’ and to ‘love’. How do they cope? The Welsh word ‘hiraeth’ means a kind of intense longing that we English can never express. How do we cope? We couldn’t express the German ‘hoffentlich’ until we coined ‘hopefully’, which hopefully means the same thing. (I remember it coming in. I hated it, but now I use it all the time.)

There are dangers in getting too hooked on a single language. Many less-used languages will no doubt die. Others will be supported tenaciously as symbols of national identity. In one sense this is great, because it enables diverse cultures to survive. But if people are put off learning the world language on this account, then they are condemning themselves to living on the periphery of the global village.

A world language is also a priceless asset. Japanese people can talk to Koreans. Chinese can talk to Indians. Scientists from all round the world can read each other’s published work. Politicians can talk directly to each other, instead of through interpreters. And so on. Tourists benefit too. I was in Norway a while back, and I heard an Italian backpacker on the phone to a landlady trying to book a room. No prizes for guessing which language they were using!