Language goes full circle
Modern ways to connect with others hark back to first human communications
Language is widely believed to be unique to humans. There is no sense other animals can tell what they did yesterday or what they might do tomorrow, or tell stories and gossip about each other. Their communications seem to have no grammar, and highly limited repertoires.
In contrast, human language is infinitely diverse — there seems no limit to the utterances we can generate. The capacity for language is universal among our species, yet there are some 6000 different languages in the world, each more or less impenetrable to the others, and any child could learn any one of them, if exposed early enough. These remarkable properties encourage the belief that language is a miracle, perhaps a gift from God.
The Old Testament says language was a gift to Adam. The people then built the Tower of Babel, but the
Lord thought they had grown arrogant and smashed the tower, scattering the people, who went on to create multiple languages. This is remarkably similar to the account given by Noam Chomsky, regarded by some as the foremost intellect of our time, who proposed that language emerged in a single step, even in a single individual, within the last 100,000 years. Chomsky calls this promiscuous individual Prometheus, rather than Adam. Nevertheless, his account seems to echo the biblical story, although he does not refer to a deity.
According to Darwin, complex functions like language must have evolved in small steps. The miraculous scenarios painted by the Bible, or by Chomsky, also overlook the fact that our common ancestry with the great apes goes back some six million years, which is plenty of time for gradual, stepwise evolution. Sadly, all our hominin forebears are no longer with us, so we have to make educated guesses as to how language might have emerged.
One scenario, which is evolutionfriendly and does not imply a miracle, is that language evolved from bodily gestures. We now know that great apes, our closest living nonhuman relatives, communicate in more language-like ways using gestures than in making sounds.
Their calls tend to be fixed and inflexible compared with their bodily movements. There has been no success in teaching chimpanzees, bonobos or gorillas to talk, but they can learn to communicate in language-like fashion using simplified sign language, or pointing to symbols on a specially designed keyboard.
Our hominin forebears probably developed a form of pantomime, especially as they moved from forested environment and adapted to hunter-gatherer and migratory patterns of living.
Pantomime seems a natural way to share information and probably co-evolved with the upright, bipedal stance, freeing the arms and upper body for greater variety of expression. I think we all resort to pantomime when we visit a foreign country and don’t know the lingo.
But pantomime can be clumsy and inefficient, and over time probably became simplified and “conventionalised,” gradually losing its pictorial or iconic character. Sign languages have all the sophistication of spoken languages but they too become more arbitrary over time, carried by social convention rather than resemblance to what is conveyed.
Speech can be seen as the end product of this progression toward conventionalisation and arbitrariness. Like the hands, the mouth is also flexible and capable of generating voluntary signals, and requires much less energy than pantomime. The mouth also includes internal parts that are invisible, but mouthed signals can be made perceptually accessible through adding sound, which is modulated by internal gestures to create distinctive sound patterns. This is speech, itself a gestural system, tucked into the mouth, with the added advantage that it frees the hands for other things, like making and using tools, or carrying things. Speech is an early example of miniaturisation.
The move toward arbitrariness also means that language becomes a barrier to communication as well as a vehicle for it. Different cultures create different languages to maintain communication within, but deny it to outsiders. Language is at once a facilitator and a barricade.
The argument for the gestural origins was boosted by the discovery of a network in the monkey brain that was active, both when the monkey made a grasping movement and also when it watched another individual making the same movement.
I think we all resort to pantomime when we don’t know the lingo.
This “monkey see, monkey do” system is known as the mirror system, and seems to form a natural platform for the later evolution of language. It does not respond to voiced sounds in the monkey, which supports the idea that language started as a gestural system.
Brain imaging shows that humans also house a mirror system, and our own work suggests it is divided into at least three different networks. One remains dedicated to simple gestures, as in monkeys, one is associated with hand preference and probably adapted to tool use, and the third courses through auditory regions and is activated by speech. The last two are biased toward the left brain in most people.
Pictorial representation in communication, such as cave drawings, may have followed when speech freed the hands, and then advanced with writing. And today, where we have fingers flicking over small keyboards, we are seeing something of a resurgence of gesture and bodily movements in our modern forms of human communication.
is Emeritus Professor at the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology. This article reflects the opinion of the author and not the views of the
University of Auckland.