One of the great unsolved
problems is the problem sometimes called the problem of the origin of language.
But to use that term is actually to oversimplify the problem. It is
better to refer to the problem as the problem of the origin of
language and linguistic biology. What needs to be explained are two
different things:
- How what is it that any language was ever able to originate?
- How was it that humans were ever able to acquire particular biological features used in speaking and understanding language?
There is a kind of “which
came first, the chicken or the egg” problem involved here. Let us
imagine a certain time thousands of years ago when human ancestors
had a primitive larynx and pharynx. At such a time it would not have
been possible to speak words with any clarity. Trying to speak words
would have been like trying to say “the rain in Spain stays mainly
on the plain” while keeping your tongue on the bottom of your mouth
(or like trying to speak with your mouth filled with rocks). It
seems that language could not have got started under such conditions,
because spoken language would have been too ineffective as a
communication tool. But if language never could get started under
such conditions, how could there ever have been any reward-propelled evolution of
speaking ability that resulted in humans able to speak like we can
speak?
Then there's the problem
of how some particular language ever could have been invented and
spread about to achieve any following greater than that of just being the custom
of a single little tribe. If there was some bright and domineering tribe member
determined to teach language, we can imagine him teaching a few words to his fellow cave men
(such as words for cave, bear, hunt, day, night, cook, and eat). But
how could the first language teacher ever have thought up a grammar?
And how could such a teacher ever have taught a grammar or abstract
non-noun words to those who had no language?
Imagine you arrive by
boat on some remote island in the Pacific consisting of people who don't speak English. You'd be able
to teach them quite a few noun words, and a few verb words. But how
could you possibly teach rules of grammar to such people? And how
could you possibly teach abstract words such as “soon,”
“possibly,” “tomorrow,” “went,” “hope,” “try,”
“almost,” “towards,” “beyond,” “until,” and a
thousand other words that you couldn't teach by using gestures?
And even if some teacher
might get a language to be adapted by some little tribe, how could
such a language possibly spread beyond that little tribe? It would
seem that the only way a language could get a decent following would
be if it were mandated or encouraged by some little form of
government or some organization greater than a tribe. But such a form
of government or organization could never get started, it would seem,
until there was already some type of language existing. So we have
another “which came first, the chicken or the egg” problem.
These very great problems
are ignored by two recent books on the origin of language. The first
is a book called The Truth About Language: What It Is and Where It
Came From by Michael C. Corballis. In Chapter 2 of this book,
Corballis attacks the thinking of language theorist Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky has suggested that language arose rather suddenly, perhaps
about 60,000 years ago when somehow humans acquired an ability to create a
“universal grammar” that he thinks is the key to the origin of
language.
Chomsky's theory deserves
to be attacked, as it offers no real explanation for the problems
discussed above. But Corballis doesn't offer a better theory. He
merely advances the idea that language arose from bodily gesture. His
theory is that before there was a spoken language there was a gesture
language. This is an idea that has never made sense because of the
impossibility of giving a plausible explanation as to how humans
might have made a transition from a hand gesture language to a spoken
language. A gesture language would not be a stepping stone to a
spoken language, so the idea of a gesture language that preceded
spoken language has no explanatory value.
The “first a gesture
language, then a spoken language” theory of Corballis is attacked
on page 241 of the book How Language Began by Daniel L.
Everett. Everett states, “Gestures could not have been the initial
form of language.” The language theorist Everett attacks both the
theory of the language theorist Corballis and the language theorist
Chomsky. So we see that the modern circle of origin-of-language theorists is
kind of like a circular firing squad, with no consensus and lots
of volleys being fired back and forth. This may suggest that we should
have no confidence that anyone has any credible explanation for the
origin of language.
Everett's book offers no real
explanation for the origin of language. His book should have been
entitled When Did Language Begin? rather than How Language
Began, for rather than offering
any substantive attempt to explain the origin of language, his book
is mainly devoted to defending the claim that language first appeared
in the species Homo erectus.
We can make a good guess as to why Everett has advanced this strange
idea: probably in order to make the origin of language seem like
nothing very impressive and miraculous. If we can believe that dumb
Homo erectus used
language, then we might think that the origin of language was not
very astonishing.
But
the idea that Homo erectus
invented language is an extremely unbelievable claim. On page 129
Everett says that Homo erectus
had a brain size “roughly two-thirds the size of a modern human's.”
Explaining the appearance of language in a species with the brain
size of a human's is hard enough, and you are compounding the
difficulties if you try to suggest language originated in some
species with a brain much smaller than ours.
Everett
admits on page 5 that “few linguists claim that Homo
erectus had language.” Everett
tries to support his claim by making the strange claim on page 16
that grammar “really is at best only a small part of any language,”
an erroneous claim he repeats on page 105 with the weird claim that
“there are several reasons to reject the idea that grammar is
central to language.” He apparently wants us to think that Homo
erectus organisms too dumb for
grammar might have still had a language.
On
page 88 Everett makes the claim that “there is nothing in the body
dedicated to language,” but on page 174 he completely contradicts
this claim by giving us the real truth:
The creation of speech
requires precise control of more than one hundred muscles of the
larynx, the respiratory muscles, the diaphragm, and the muscles
between our ribs – our “intercostal muscles”-- and muscles of
our mouth and face – our orofacial muscles. The muscle movement
required of all these parts during speech is mind-bogglingly complex.
Exactly, and the specialized biology required for speech also includes substantial brain biology (as we know from some stroke victims who may lose the ability to speak but not to understand speech, and other stroke victims who lose part of their ability to understand speech). Because Homo erectus didn't have a great deal of this
specialized biology, that is a good reason for thinking that Homo
erectus should not have been able to speak.
Everett
tries to get us to believe that Homo erectus
had language by arguing that Homo erectus used symbols, and “symbols
are just a short hop away from language” (as he states on page
106). The idea that we can assume some creatures had language because
they had symbols is not sound, and Everett is only able to produce
very weak evidence that Homo erectus
used symbols. He refers us to a sea-shell with some scratches on it,
and includes a picture of a 300,000-year-old bone that looks rather like a penis. Hardly very convincing
evidence of symbolism. The wikipedia.org article on the bone in question (called the Erfourd manuport) says no evidence of carving or shaping has been detected in it. Everett also wants us to think that spears are
evidence of symbol use. On page 94 he says, “For their original
owners these would have elicited thoughts of, thus symbolized,
hunting, of bravery, of caring for their families, and of death.”
This is strained reasoning indeed – spears are not evidence of
symbolic thinking. There is, in fact, no substantive evidence that
symbolic thinking appeared in Homo erectus.
One
huge difficulty in any theory of Homo erectus
using language is that such an organism would have lacked the complex
vocal biology to produce speaking. Everett has an answer to this
objection – an extremely lame answer. He states the following on
page 188:
In fact, computers show
that a language can work just fine with only two symbols, 0 and 1.
All computers communicate by means of these two symbols....All the
novels, treatises, PhD dissertations, love letters and so on in the
history of the world can ...be translated into sequences of 0 and 1.
So if erectus could
have made just a few sounds, more or less consistently, they could be
in the language game, right there with [Homo]
sapiens.
This
is completely fallacious reasoning. Let us consider the dependencies
that are involved when something like a novel or a marketing plan is
stored on a computer system. The first dependency is the existence of
a particular language – if you imagine a dictionary, you can
visualize that dependency. Then there is the dependency of a
particular alphabet. Then there is the dependency of the ASCII
system, a complex table used to map alphabetic letters to decimal
numbers. Then there is the dependency of there existing an algorithm
to translate decimal numbers into binary numbers. This ends up being
a huge set of symbolic dependencies vastly more complicated than the
simplicity of 0 and 1. So you
cannot at all argue from the simplicity of binary numbers in binary
computers that some organism would “be in the language game” if
it merely “could have made just a few sounds.” No organism would
ever be able to understand a complex meaning when it heard another
organism use some “two sound” language with sentences such as
“oh-ah-ah-oh-oh-ah-ah-ah-oh-ah-oh.” There has never been a
natural spoken language that used only a few sounds.
And,
of course, trying to argue that sub-human organisms would have been
capable of something because computers are capable of such a thing
makes no sense, and is like arguing that a human or sub-human could
sort 20,000 words in 30 seconds because a computer can do that.
On
page 106 Everett summarizes his evidence that Homo erectus
used language:
The evidence thus
strongly supports the claim that Homo erectus possessed language:
evidence of culture – values, knowledge structures and social
organization; tool use and improvement (however slowly, compared to
Homo sapiens); exploration of the land and sea, going beyond what
could be seen to what could be imagined; and symbols – in the forms
of decorations and tools.
Some
of these claims are dubious or debatable, and even if all of these claims were
true, none of them would be evidence of language use. Everett
completely fails to substantiate his very implausible claim that Homo
erectus invented language.
As for
the claim of Corballis that a gesture language preceded spoken
language, such an idea does nothing to explain the origin of spoken
language. To the contrary, there is a very strong reason why the
possibility of a gesture language makes the origin of spoken language
very much harder to explain. I will discuss this reason in my next post.
Postscript: In this article Chomsky states the following:
There is little evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic behavior altogether, before the emergence of modern humans. That leads us to expect that the faculty of language emerged along with modern humans or not long after, a very brief moment in evolutionary time.
This is very much at odds with the claims of Everett.
Postscript: In this article Chomsky states the following:
There is little evidence of anything like human language, or symbolic behavior altogether, before the emergence of modern humans. That leads us to expect that the faculty of language emerged along with modern humans or not long after, a very brief moment in evolutionary time.
This is very much at odds with the claims of Everett.
No comments:
Post a Comment