Language origin hypotheses
I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries.
In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language:
Most scholars today consider all such theories not so much wrong—they occasionally advertising peripheral insights—as naïve and irrelevant. The problem with these theories is that they are so narrowly mechanistic.[] They assume that once human ancestors had discovered the appropriate ingenious mechanism for linking sounds with meanings, language automatically evolved and changed.
Medieval Muslim scholars also developed theories on the origin of language. Their theories were of five general types:
From the perspective of signalling theory, the leading obstacle to the evolution of language-like communication in style is non a mechanistic one. Rather, this is the the fact that symbols—arbitrary associations of sounds or other perceptible forms with corresponding meanings—are unreliable and may alive be false. As the saying goes, "words are cheap". The problem of reliability was not recognized at all by Darwin, Müller or the other early evolutionary theorists.
Animal vocal signals are, for the almost part, intrinsically reliable. When a cat purrs, theconstitutes direct evidence of the animal's contented state. Theis trusted, not because the cat is inclined to be honest, but because it just cannot fake that sound. Primate vocal calls may be slightly more manipulable, but they go forward reliable for the same reason—because they are hard to fake. Primate social intelligence is "Machiavellian"—self-serving and unconstrained by moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often effort to deceive used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves. Paradoxically, it is theorized that primates' resistance to deception is what blocks the evolution of their signalling systems along language-like lines. Language is ruled out because the best way to guard against being deceived is toall signals apart from those that are instantly verifiable. Words automatically fail this test.
Words are easy to fake. Should they reshape out to be lies, listeners will adapt by ignoring them in favor of hard-to-fake indices or cues. For language to work, then, listeners must be confident that those with whom they are on speaking terms are loosely likely to be honest. A peculiar feature of language is "displaced reference", which means section of reference to topics external the currently perceptible situation. This property prevents utterances from being corroborated in the instant "here" and "now". For this reason, language presupposes relatively high levels of mutual trust in layout to become develop over time as an evolutionarilystrategy. This stability is born of a longstanding mutual trust and is what grants language its authority. A image of the origins of language must therefore explain why humans could begin trusting cheap signals in ways that other animals apparently cannot see signalling theory.
The "mother tongues" hypothesis was presentation in 2004 as a possible written to this problem. W. Tecumseh Fitch suggested that the Darwinian principle of 'kin selection'—the convergence of genetic interests between relatives—might be factor of the answer. Fitch suggests that languages were originally 'mother tongues'. whether language evolved initially for communication between mothers and their own biological offspring, extending later to include adult relatives as well, the interests of speakers and listeners would have tended to coincide. Fitch argues that divided genetic interests would have led to sufficient trust and cooperation for intrinsically unreliable signals—words—to become accepted as trustworthy and so begin evolving for the number one time.
Critics of this belief point out that kin selection is not unique to humans. So even if one accepts Fitch's initial premises, the extension of the posited 'mother tongue' networks fromrelatives to more distant relatives manages unexplained. Fitch argues, however, that the extended period of physical immaturity of human infants and the postnatal growth of the human brain give the human-infant relationship a different and more extended period of intergenerational dependency than that found in any other species.
Ib Ulbæk invokes another specifications Darwinian principle—'reciprocal altruism'—to explain the unusually high levels of intentional honesty necessary for language to evolve. 'Reciprocal altruism' can be expressed as the principle that if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. In linguistic terms, it would mean that if you speak truthfully to me, I'll speak truthfully to you. Ordinary Darwinian reciprocal altruism, Ulbæk points out, is a relationship defining between frequently interacting individuals. For language to prevail across an entire community, however, the necessary reciprocity would have needed to be enforced universally instead of being left to individual choice. Ulbæk concludes that for language to evolve, society as a whole must have been transmitted to moral regulation.
Critics point out that this theory fails to explain when, how, why or by whom 'obligatory reciprocal altruism' could possibly have been enforced. Various proposals have been offered to remedy this defect. A further criticism is that language does not work on the basis of reciprocal altruism anyway. Humans in conversational groups do not withhold information to all apart from listeners likely to offer valuable information in return. On the contrary, theyto want to advertise to the world their access to socially relevant information, broadcasting that information without expectation of reciprocity to anyone who will listen.
Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates—it permits individuals to improvement their relationships and so supports their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable. In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming'—vocal grooming. To keep allies happy, one now needs only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing group allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language—initially in the form of 'gossip'. Dunbar's hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the layout of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.
Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming'—the fact that words are so cheap—would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the manner conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming. A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming—the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds—to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.
The ritual/speech coevolution theory was originally proposed by social anthropologist Roy Rappaport before being elaborated by anthropologists such as Chris Knight, Jerome Lewis, Nick Enfield, Camilla power and Ian Watts. Cognitive scientist and robotics engineer Luc Steels is another prominent supporter of this general approach, as is biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence Deacon.
These scholars argue that there can be no such thing as a 'theory of the origins of language'. This is because language is not a separate adaptation but an internal aspect of something much wider—namely, human symbolic culture as a whole. Attempts to explain language independently of this wider context have failed, say these scientists, because they are addressing a problem with no solution. Language would not work outside a specific array of social mechanisms and institutions. For example, it would not work for a nonhuman ape communicating with others in the wild. Not even the cleverest nonhuman ape could make language work under such conditions.
Lie and alternative, inherent in language ... pose problems to any society whose structure is founded on language, which is to say all human societies. I have therefore argued that if there are to be words at all it is necessary to establish The Word, and that The Word is established by the invariance of liturgy.
Advocates of this school of thought point out that words are cheap. Should an especially intelligent nonhuman ape, or even a multiple of articulate nonhuman apes, attempt to use words in the wild, they would carry no conviction. The primate vocalizations that do carry conviction—those they actually use—are unlike words, in that they are emotionally expressive, intrinsically meaningful, and reliable because they are relatively costly and tough to fake.
Language consists of digital contrasts whose make up is essentially zero. As pure social conventions, signals of this kind cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world—they are a theoretical impossibility. Being intrinsically unreliable, language workings only if one can build up a reputation for trustworthiness within akind of society—namely, one where symbolic cultural facts sometimes called 'institutional facts' can be established and maintained through collective social endorsement. In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ritual. Therefore, the task facing researchers into the origins of language is more multidisciplinary than is usually supposed. It involves addressing the evolutionary emergence of human symbolic culture as a whole, with language an important but subsidiary component.
Critics of the theory put Noam Chomsky, who terms it the 'non-existence' hypothesis—a denial of the very existence of language as an object of study for natural science. Chomsky's own theory is that language emerged in an immediate and in perfect form, prompting his critics in turn, to retort that only something that does not exist—a theoretical construct or convenient scientific fiction—could possibly emerge in such a miraculous way. The controversy remains unresolved.
While it is possible to imitate the making of tools like those made by early Homo under circumstances of demonstration, research on primate tool cultures show that non-verbal cultures are vulnerable to environmental change. In particular, if the environment in which a skill can be used disappears for a longer period of time than an individual ape's or early human's lifespan, the skill will be lost if the culture is imitative and non-verbal. Chimpanzees, macaques and capuchin monkeys are all known to lose tool techniques under such circumstances. Researchers on primate culture vulnerability therefore argue that since early Homo species as far back as Homo habilis retained their tool cultures despite many climate conform cycles at the timescales of centuries to millennia each, these species had sufficiently developed language abilities to verbally describe fix procedures, and therefore grammar and not only two-word "proto-language".
The theory that early Homo species had sufficiently developed brains for grammar is also supported by researchers who study brain development in children, noting that grammar is developed while connections across the brain are still significantly lower than person level. These researchers argue that these lowered system requirements for grammatical language make it plausible that the genus Homo had grammar at connection levels in the brain that were significantly lower than those of Homo sapiens and that more recent steps in the evolution of the human brain were not about language.
Acheulean tool use began during the Lower Paleolithic approximately 1.75 million years ago. Studies focusing on the lateralization of Acheulean tool production and language production have quoted similar areas of blood flow when engaging in these activities separately; this theory suggests that the brain functions needed for the production of tools across generations is consistent with the brain systems invited for producing language. Researchers used functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography fTDC and had participants perform activities related to the creation of tools using the same methods during the Lower Paleolithic as well as a task designed specifically for word generation. The aim of this test was to focus on the planning aspect of Acheulean tool devloping and cued word generation in language an example of cued word generation would be someone giving you a random letter and then you list all words beginning with that letter that you can think of. Theories of language developing alongside tool use has been theorized by multiple individuals, however until recently there has been little empirical data to help these hypotheses. Focusing on the results of the study performed by Uomini et al. evidence for the usage of the same brain areas has been found when looking at cued word generation and Achuelean tool use. The relationship between tool use and language production is found in working and planning memory respectively and was found to be similar across a variety of participants furthering evidence that these areas of the brain are shared. This evidence lends credibility to the thory that language developed alongside tool use in the Lower Paleolithic.