Earliest Languages question

[pianodave]

Hi Dopers,

I’m big on etymology and finding connections with words. This time I’d like to ask a question regarding the earliest languages.

Logically, is it true that the first “language” that actually had syntax and words was directly preceded by the screeches, yowls, and grunts of our “caveman” (Cro-Magnon) ancestors? Can I assume at some point our gradually increasing intelligence as a species enabled us to point to things and name them, as well as make the most rudimentary of sentences?

So my question is, these earliest words, were they arbitrary?

I know of some words that kind of have a universal onomatopoetic quality…“mama” and all its derivatives bring to mind the suckling noise a baby makes when it wants a breast. “Dada” or “papa” and words like it are also allegedly based on baby noises that are easy for babies to imitate.

But is it true that most of our earliest language just happened to be the way it is because that’s what just happened to happen? (What a mouthful).

I’m curious to see if other factors in the life of our earliest language speakers had any impact on why they gave certain names to certain things. If so, what are they? Are there any characteristics of our ancestors’ lives that caused them to prefer certain sounds or words for certain things or situations?

TLDR version: Did our first speakers of language form the language arbitrarily or was the language informed by other factors? Take fire. If fire could hurt them or was hot, did they form a word for fire that expressed danger or was sibiliant to describe sizzling? If they wanted to talk about play, did the word they chose sound playful? Or am I reading too much into it? I can’t imagine it’s all arbitrary and random, because why wouldn’t they form a word that describes the physical qualities of what they’re trying to describe? Wouldn’t they use all the help they could get to communicate, not having the vocabulary to fully express themselves?

What am I missing here?
Thanks,
Dave

[Wendell_Wagner]

Would it be sufficient for you for us to just say, “Nobody knows”? We can’t trace back words in proto-languages more than about 10,000 years. Language goes back at least 50,000 years. There’s no way we can say what the words were like in languages that long ago.

[Isamu]

@pianodave

What am I missing here?

Language doesn’t have to be verbal. Sign language is one example of a non-verbal language. It is possible that the first ‘languages’ relied heavily on gestures or facial expressions, etc.

In general, looking across all languages, there doesn’t seem to be any consistency (or therefore connection) between what an object is and what it is called in a particular language.
The closest we get is, of course, with onomatopoeia - which is where language tries to mimic the word. But when you look across languages they still vary in terms for the same phenomena.

Does “BOOM!” sound like an explosion? Maybe. Sometimes. It depends.

[dracoi]

I would tend to think that words were essentially arbitrary and random. Whatever a group of people decided to start using, that’s what would be entrenched in the culture as the word.

Think about some modern words. For example, if I just “Googled” something, was that word chosen because it inherently evokes “searching the Internet”? No, it’s because someone decided to name his company that… and his company got very popular… and then we decided that “I searched the web with Google” could be shortened to “Googled.”

Google is itself based on googol. And guess what that etymology is: "1935-40; introduced by U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955), whose nine-year-old nephew allegedly invented it "

So… we’ve taken a child’s nonsense word and named a number using it, then we’ve done a play on words to name a search technology and then we’ve turned a noun for search technology into a verb. All this in just 80 years, when language goes back tens of thousands.

I have to think that this is the model for the vast majority of words. Words like mama appear to be rare exceptions.

[FRDE]

@pianodave

Logically, is it true that the first “language” that actually had syntax and words was directly preceded by the screeches, yowls, and grunts of our “caveman” (Cro-Magnon) ancestors?

You want to be a bit careful about Cro-magnons as ancesters, they were physically as good as the best 21st century, and had larger brains than normal homo sapiens, they might have been an evolutionary spur.

[LSLGuy]

I recall an article I read about the sound-words used around the world to denote the bark of a dog, the low of a cow, etc., for common domesticated animals. e.g. words like the English bow wow, woof woof, mooo, etc.

Certainly the objective noise made by dogs or cows or whatever is consistent worldwide.

But there was almost nothing in common with the words used to stand for these noises. Even allowing for transliteration issues between scripts there was almost nothing in common between the sound-word Chinese use to describe dog barks vs. the sound-word Italians use. etc.

I can’t come up with a site/cite, but it was a legit article, not some Cracked.com click-bait junk.

TLDR: onomatopoeia doesn’t go very far even within domains you’d naively expect it to be highly applicable.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@LSLGuy

I recall an article I read about the sound-words used around the world to denote the bark of a dog, the low of a cow, etc., for common domesticated animals. e.g. words like the English bow wow, woof woof, mooo, etc.

That’s actually called the Bow-Wow theory. Max Müller invented it in 1861. It’s almost completely discredited these days, along with similar notions that language comes from songs or grunts. Nobody should still be sprouting this except in a historical sense the way they would Lamacrkism.

Everybody today agrees that the subject is much more complex than these simplistic, reductive notions. In some ways, the discussion is similar to the one asking how the universe was formed. There is a range of commentary, from we can never know to various hypotheses based on what the later evolution can tell us. The Wikipedia article Origin of language goes through bunches of these and is a good place to start just to see what modern researchers are talking about. And it’s not Bow-Wow, La-La, or Ta-Ta.

[John_Mace]

@pianodave

Logically, is it true that the first “language” that actually had syntax and words was directly preceded by the screeches, yowls, and grunts of our “caveman” (Cro-Magnon) ancestors?

“Cro-Magnon” just means early H. sapiens in Europe (~40K years ago). That’s us. There is no doubt they looked and acted and talked just like us.

Generally speaking, linguists see nothing but darkness when they get to about 10,000 years in the past. There are no written records, and that’s about the farthest back most linguist dare to extrapolate based on what we know now. There are some who will claim to be able to extrapolate, on a very limited basis, back 100,000 years, but that’s very controversial.

At any rate, we have no idea when language began or how it began. We have hypothesis, but none that can be tested.

[RivkahChaya]

@Isamu

Language doesn’t have to be verbal. Sign language is one example of a non-verbal language. It is possible that the first ‘languages’ relied heavily on gestures or facial expressions, etc.

In general, looking across all languages, there doesn’t seem to be any consistency (or therefore connection) between what an object is and what it is called in a particular language.
The closest we get is, of course, with onomatopoeia - which is where language tries to mimic the word. But when you look across languages they still vary in terms for the same phenomena.

Does “BOOM!” sound like an explosion? Maybe. Sometimes. It depends.

Sign languages are non-oral/aural. They are not non-verbal. They still have lexical items.

And, there are often consistencies within languages that many words to describe things which share qualities also share phonemes. In English, small things have “ee” and long and short “I” sounds: tiny, kitten, diminutive, minute, baby. The short “U” sound is often in words that are insults, swear words, and pejorative words, like “ugly,” and I’ll leave the rest to you. It’s not absolute. “Puppy” has a U. There are other things meaning = sound associations, like obstruents with things that are actually physically hard, or make loud noises, and some of these things seem to work across language families, but we can’t reconstruct an Ur-language from this, because we are too far removed from it.

There’s also the possibility that language didn’t arise in one place.

Sometimes the potential for a function exists for a long time before it’s fully exploited, and we don’t know whether language existed in one group of hominids, and this group took over, because language was such an advantage, or the brain capacity to form language appeared before it was fully exploited, and appeared first as a recessive trait, before it became so useful that no one without it left any descendants, but for a brief period there were hominid groups with some members who were skilled talkers, and others who could use only rudimentary language.

A language can appear in a generation. When deaf children are denied exposure to the larger sign language of their community, as long as there are at least two of them together, they will invent a sign language, and it will be more than just vocabulary items-- it will have syntax.

If the OP wants to get a Ph.D in linguistics, there’s a topic: have a bunch of children make up words for novel items (they don’t have to be real things that have a function-- the less they look like something real, the better), and see how often they choose the same phonemes, how often they choose the same number of syllables, etc. for each item. If there is consistency among English-speaking children that seems better than chance, then get children whose native language isn’t English, and see what words they choose.

[LSLGuy]

@Exapno_Mapcase

That’s actually called the Bow-Wow theory. Max Müller invented it in 1861. It’s almost completely discredited these days, along with similar notions that language comes from songs or grunts. Nobody should still be sprouting this except in a historical sense the way they would Lamacrkism.

Everybody today agrees that the subject is much more complex than these simplistic, reductive notions. In some ways, the discussion is similar to the one asking how the universe was formed. There is a range of commentary, from we can never know to various hypotheses based on what the later evolution can tell us. The Wikipedia article Origin of language goes through bunches of these and is a good place to start just to see what modern researchers are talking about. And it’s not Bow-Wow, La-La, or Ta-Ta.

My point was precisely that language did *not *originate from onomatopoeia. We have clear evidence of common natural sounds producing wildly different words in different languages. The OP posited naively that onomatopoeia was a likely starting point for all language. I was offering contrary evidence. Or at least trying to.

Or perhaps I misunderstood your point?

[get_lives]

I’ve read that the older the language is, the more clicks it has. Some African languages use a lot of clicks, although I don’t know if any outside of Africa do.

[John_Mace]

@get_lives

I’ve read that the older the language is, the more clicks it has. Some African languages use a lot of clicks, although I don’t know if any outside of Africa do.

Relatively few languages in Africa have clicks. I think you are misremembering what you read. It would be best if you went back and quoted the source rather than relying on your memory.

The idea is that speakers of so-called click languages represent some of the oldest populations of our species, and so it is postulated that clicks go very far back, possibly to the earliest languages. Languages that don’t have clicks don’t have them because they lost them. This is a hypothesis by some linguists, but not a consensus view.

[get_lives]

@John_Mace

Relatively few languages in Africa have clicks. I think you are misremembering what you read. It would be best if you went back and quoted the source rather than relying on your memory.

The idea is that speakers of so-called click languages represent some of the oldest populations of our species, and so it is postulated that clicks go very far back, possibly to the earliest languages. Languages that don’t have clicks don’t have them because they lost them. This is a hypothesis by some linguists, but not a consensus view.

If Africa and closely related areas/populations are the only ones with clicks, that would lend support, though.

[John_Mace]

@get_lives

If Africa and closely related areas/populations are the only ones with clicks, that would lend support, though.

It’s almost certain that language originated in Africa. But it would be a mistake to assume that something is “oldest” just because it exists only in Africa. Languages change very fast, and as I said upthread, few linguists consider extrapolations past 10,000 years to be credible. Most linguists actually think clicks are a relatively new innovation in the languages where they exist.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@LSLGuy

My point was precisely that language did *not *originate from onomatopoeia. We have clear evidence of common natural sounds producing wildly different words in different languages. The OP posited naively that onomatopoeia was a likely starting point for all language. I was offering contrary evidence. Or at least trying to.

Or perhaps I misunderstood your point?

I should have been clearer, since I didn’t mean to attack you. Rather I’m incensed that these ridiculous 19th century notions are still being cited in articles that purport to be serious, even though no modern day linguist gives them a second’s worth of time. Even bringing them up second-hand sets me off. This nonsense should be dead and buried. You didn’t defend it so I should have made sure the criticism was better directed. Sorry if you took it personally.

[get_lives]

@John_Mace

It’s almost certain that language originated in Africa. But it would be a mistake to assume that something is “oldest” just because it exists only in Africa. Languages change very fast, and as I said upthread, few linguists consider extrapolations past 10,000 years to be credible. Most linguists actually think clicks are a relatively new innovation in the languages where they exist.

I can get behind that theory, possibly, but what’s the evidence that clicks are recent? The fact that they are basically non-existent in Autralian aboriginal languages?

[LSLGuy]

@Exapno_Mapcase

I should have been clearer, since I didn’t mean to attack you. Rather I’m incensed that these ridiculous 19th century notions are still being cited in articles that purport to be serious, even though no modern day linguist gives them a second’s worth of time. Even bringing them up second-hand sets me off. This nonsense should be dead and buried. You didn’t defend it so I should have made sure the criticism was better directed. Sorry if you took it personally.

No sweat. It just sounded like one of us had failed to communicate somehow. I *hate *it when I do that, so I tend to dig for clarification. It’s all good.

[Don_t_Panic]

@Exapno_Mapcase

In some ways, the discussion is similar to the one asking how the universe was formed.

Not really a fair comparison. We know a lot more about the beginning of the universe than about how language got started.

[RivkahChaya]

Just to throw something else into the mix, I mentioned to my mother, and there’s a theory (my mother has a Ph.D in linguistics, and taught for years at the university level) that rather than onomatopoeia, there was a sort of sound/mouth-feel correlation, which I guess is what I was trying to point out earlier-- if you have to restrict your mouth to make a sound, that sound represents small things; if you have to open your mouth wide, it represents big things. Obstruents are quick, nasals are slow, and so forth. It still leads to a lot of variations, including synonyms in the same language, like “large,” and “enormous,” but when people say that a word “sounds like it ought to mean such-and-such,” that gut feeling about sounds having meanings is hard-wired. Or at least intuitive.

I mean, “desultory” always sounded exactly like what it means, but “pugilistic” never sounded right to me, because it sounds dull and slow.

[John_Mace]

@RivkahChaya

Just to throw something else into the mix, I mentioned to my mother, and there’s a theory (my mother has a Ph.D in linguistics, and taught for years at the university level) that rather than onomatopoeia, there was a sort of sound/mouth-feel correlation, which I guess is what I was trying to point out earlier-- if you have to restrict your mouth to make a sound, that sound represents small things; if you have to open your mouth wide, it represents big things. Obstruents are quick, nasals are slow, and so forth. It still leads to a lot of variations, including synonyms in the same language, like “large,” and “enormous,” but when people say that a word “sounds like it ought to mean such-and-such,” that gut feeling about sounds having meanings is hard-wired. Or at least intuitive.

I mean, “desultory” always sounded exactly like what it means, but “pugilistic” never sounded right to me, because it sounds dull and slow.

Why would you compare a modern word to what it derived from 10s of thousands of years ago?, when language first evolved? We know sounds change dramatically over relatively short periods of time, so our word “small” might have come from a word that was “cretolonesis” 50,000 years ago. And I totally made that last word up.