Living Language
We survived the Ice Age by talking to each other.
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.
— Charles Darwin, 1871
In the previous issue of Well Seen, we did a shallow dive into how humans managed to stay, well, extant during a nasty bate of cold weather. And I’m not talking Minnesota in the winter, I’m talking a global phenomenon that played a role in the extinctions of massive beasts: the Ice Age. We did so by creating viable shelter, clothing, and tools.
There was a fourth key factor, too. I saved its discussion for this issue of Well Worded. Why? Because it’s about words. Not necessarily well worded, but nevertheless the keystone that allowed humans to survive and even thrive: language.
When I was in 6th grade, fellow classmate Benny Baldwin and I were punished for talking too much by being seated together in the back of the classroom. Even at that innocent age, I remember thinking that putting two chatterboxes together at the same table seemed like an unproductive way to solve the problem. But in those days, I didn’t question authority, and we cheerfully carried on our conversation while everybody else went back to whatever was being taught that morning.
Although people have tried to figure out when we began using language for nearly as long as we’ve been around, it wasn’t really until Darwin’s explosive findings in the mid-1800s that serious progress was made. I tell ya, that Darwin and his theory of evolution: It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Nothing much more happened in the research for well over a century. In fact, since there was no way to apply empirical evidence to something so ethereal and so distant in time, the study of the origins of language was banned by a linguistic society in Paris and discouraged in much of Europe around the same time. It wasn’t until the 1990s that new multi-disciplinary approaches unleashed fresh theories.
And boy, did they fly. They ranged everywhere from “It happened relatively late, maybe 70,000 years ago” to “It began about 2 million years ago.” They tussled over whether we were the only species to do it: only us Homo sapiens could possibly be exceptional enough to open our mouths and tell other people what to do. They argued over how migration theories affected it (or didn’t). Our vocal cords. “Clicks.” How we could (or couldn’t) cross oceans with (or without) it. Our diets maybe? (When we expanded outward from continental interiors to their coastal regions, we ate more fish, rich in Omega-3.) Linguists, archeologists, anatomists, paleoanthropologists, psychologists—all got in on the act.
And they all had Opinions.
If you like academic-speak (“From the perspective of signalling theory, the main obstacle to the evolution of language-like communication in nature is not a mechanistic one”), you can find a whole mess of ideas and theories in this Wiki overview. A more accessible article in Discover explores theories focussed on the larynx, levels of intelligence, neurology, and our steady growth in intelligence.
This last bit, and the Discover article in general, is extremely interesting to the writer of this newsletter because ... grammar! (Bolded bit is mine.)
As we got smarter and found more things we wanted to communicate, we ran into what Futrell calls a “simplicity bottleneck.” We couldn’t just keep adding more words.
“Our brains aren’t big enough; our lives aren’t long enough to learn them all,” he says. At that point, linguistic structure was inevitable. This may also, Futrell says, have led to a runaway evolutionary dynamic where an increase in the complexity of culture meant that people who had better communication had more evolutionary success; meanwhile, better communication led to even greater cultural complexity. Before you know it, you have 7,000 languages and mind-twisting conversations about quantum physics.
Regarding when we started speaking to each other, my preferred theory is the one that seems to have taken hold, more or less. As opposed to an earlier theory based largely on phonetics that posited the “only 70,000 years ago” idea, Daniel Everett’s 2018 findings, backed up by subsequent studies as recently as 2023, suggest that we started talking when we were still only lowly Homo erectus, going back 1.9 million years. He bases this on our ability to sail to specific destinations.
“Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores. They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” Professor Everett told the audience.
“They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols, not just grunts.”
...Professor Everett did note that while these early humans could have developed language, it would not have been sophisticated as that used by modern humans.
He described these early attempts as “the Model T Ford of language” compared to the “Tesla form” employed by Homo sapiens.
I am not a scientist but a Liberal Arts major who pretends to be a cynic but is at heart a romantic. Thus, my favorite bit among this survey of ideas is this one, buried in the academic floss cited above in that Wiki overview. It posits that a key factor in our survival is trust. (Again, bold bits added.)
Some scholars view the emergence of language as the consequence of some kind of social transformation that, by generating unprecedented levels of public trust, liberated a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that had previously lain dormant.
...A very specific social structure—one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust—must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on words an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Let’s lean in on that, shall we? Along with love, let’s try trust as a guiding force in our speech and in our hearts.
Lagniappe: When the future 33rd president was born (in Missouri, wink wink), his parents couldn’t decide which of his grandfathers to honor with their son’s middle name. Solomon Young or Anderson Shipp Truman—what to do, what to do? Showing the same hard-headed pragmatism that the future president would rely on, they went with a simple “S,” and Harry S Truman was born.
But The U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual obeyed the tyranny of style, which stated that periods be added to initials in all names “for convenience and consistency”—even if those initials aren’t name abbreviations. Despite Truman’s wishes, the period was burned into history.
What do you think? Does the president have immunity over style manuals?