on the origin of language – nature over culture?
what think??
So, as someone who has been a language teacher for a fair proportion of my working life, I’m naturally interested in exploring this remarkable activity and ability that separates us from other primates, and indeed from all other species, certainly in terms of range, variety and flexibility.
First, there are structural and anatomical developments, in brain and body, that have enabled us to turn sound into speech. The hyoid bone, a sort of free-floating (well, not quite) horse-shoe shaped bone that sits near the top of the throat, above the larynx (aka the voice-box) and below the tongue, is one of many structural elements facilitating speech, though it serves other functions and is present in many other mammals. The pyramid-shaped larynx… well I’ll quote Wikipedia:
The larynx houses the vocal cords, and manipulates pitch and volume, which is essential for phonation. It is situated just below where the tract of the pharynx splits into the trachea and the esophagus.
The human larynx, hyoid bone and lower jawbone are apparently morphologically unique in the way they ‘move apart together and are interlocked via the muscles, while pulled into a vertical position from the cranium’. I’m guessing – I should say hypothesising, much more impressive – that these morphological developments came in tandem with neurological developments connecting sounds to meanings, if you’ll excuse my amateurish way of putting things. But before exploring language in terms of neurology, it’s important to be very clear about the anatomical differences between humans and other primates re these structures. Here’s a summary from a hopefully reliable website, linked below:
In adult primates the hyoid is a horseshoe shaped bone, located in the neck, just below the mandible and above the thyroid cartilage. In humans, the hyoid body is flat and bar-shaped and lies below the inferior margin of the mandibular body, just below the tongue root. However, in great apes the hyoid is placed superior to the inferior margin of the mandibular body and lies behind the tongue root.
In chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas there is a cup-shaped extension of the hyoid bone called the hyoid bulla, which is believed to keep open the connection between the vocal tract and pharyngeal air sacs. Modern humans lack this hyoid bulla. Fossil evidence tracks the loss to somewhere between Australopithecus afarensis (~3.3 million years old), which shares the Great ape hyoid bulla morphology, and a ~530 thousand year old Homo species ancestral to Neanderthals (sometimes included in Homo heidelbergensis) which shares the modern human hyoid shape. This loss is proposed to be adaptive for human speech development due to pharyngeal air sac impediment of forming easily perceptible speech sounds.
Much of this is still speculative I think, but the extraordinary range of human speech sounds, together with our ability to connect that variety of sounds to meanings, whether linguistic or paralinguistic, suggests that neurological and anatomical developments are interconnected in giving birth to speech and language.
Speech sounds are one thing, but the varieties of language and meaning, the complex structures and connections that we appear to effortlessly form into the thousands of languages that we know to exist, that’s something else. Over the years there’s been a lot of argument about whether this seemingly endless variety of languages can be explained in terms of one particular type of neurologically determined, evolutionarily developed, ordering system. Noam Chomsky was one of the first to propose that there are common and unifying characteristics to all languages, and it seems to me that the fascinating evidence of how new creole languages can develop out of pidgin languages really strikes a blow for a natural selection basis to all human language. To be definitionally clear: ‘A creole is a pidgin language that has become the native language of the children of adult pidgin speakers’. While pidgin is a makeshift, make-do language, with limited fixity, creole, the creation of which takes a mere generation or two, is as fully-fledged as any other established language.
Most languages have no written form, but there is no culture that we know of, either today or throughout the history that we can be clear about, going back some thousands of years, that lacks language. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) recognises more than 250 indigenous languages, including around 800 dialects, and it’s impossible to pinpoint their origins in time. Most children have learned much of their native language by the age of three, with almost no tuition. Clearly there’s something going on here at the ‘unconscious’, that’s to say, neurological, level.
Daniel Everett, and many others, make the claim that Homo Erectus was the first user of full-fledged language, but we certainly can’t prove this via neurology, and we lack clear evidence of the above-mentioned anatomical structures required for modern speech. So, if Homo Erectus had ‘language’, did she have it in much the same way as H Sapiens? Does the term ‘proto-language’ have any clear meaning? This is a problem, as natural selection is generally seen as a gradual process. An opponent of this gradualist theory of language development, the linguist Liz Bates, puts this objection:
What protoform can we possibly envision that could have given birth to constraints on the extraction of noun phrases from an embedded clause? What could it conceivably mean for an organism to possess half a symbol, or three quarters of a rule? … monadic symbols, absolute rules and modular systems must be acquired as a whole, on a yes or no basis – a process that cries out for a Creationist explanation.
(in Gazzaniga, p80)
I’m presuming she doesn’t mean Creationist in the religious sense, but who knows? But just as the human brain, including its regions for processing language, evolved slowly – and this is hardly a controversial claim – it surely follows that language too, evolved in complexity over time.
Today we know of a number of brain regions that are key to language production, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, as well as language reception – the primary and secondary auditory areas. We also know that, after surgically dividing the two brain hemispheres, ‘only the left hemisphere is capable of using syntax to aid comprehension’ (Gazzaniga). Syntax and word order, and case markers such as genitive, nominative and accusative, are all expressed and or implied in different ways in different languages, but Chomsky and others have argued for an underlying or deep structure which is neurologically determined. Whether this is entirely provable – or has in fact been proven – is still a burning question, but it seems to me that the emergence of creoles – fully fledged languages – without deliberation, and the development, in regions like Australia and New Guinea, of hundreds of individual, essentially untaught languages separated by vast distances or impenetrable mountains and jungles, supports the claim for nature over culture.
References
When we first talked, PBS Eons video
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
Michael Gazzaniga, Nature’s Mind (esp. Chapter 4 ‘Language and selection theory’), 1992
https://aeon.co/essays/tools-and-voyages-suggest-that-homo-erectus-invented-language
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