# How was langguage formed? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 26, 2012, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660 "2012-08-26T00:37:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/21 "2012-08-26T19:22:49Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > Well, that’s the point. The OP does not look normal at all. Of all people to misspell “language.” Twice. And “speakar.” The fragmentare “How humans got to be speakars [sic].” It’s enough to make us suspicious that someone is pulling our leg with his account. Compare that to a post like [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=199790&page=2) or [yesterday’s.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15423459&postcount=11) Yeah, it’s enough to cause us to twitch our collective antennae. She deliberately misspelled the words because she’s riffing on the meme. She misspelled them in the same way as the words in the meme are misspelled. Unless you are whooshing me by pretending you didn’t understand my explanation.😕 **Eutychus** and **tapu** got the reference. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/22 "2012-08-26T19:27:43Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > [Know Your Meme: > How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed) > > **Johanna** has made two posts subsequent to this one, both of which look normal to me. I presume she is just joking around. OK. I think some of us were also surprised that she’d be asking that question on this MB since she probably knows as much or more about the subject than anyone posting here. When was the last time you posted a question about bird biology in GQ? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/23 "2012-08-26T19:33:06Z")
It was on the Dope this mroing, a poster in GQ who had confuse her two repply. I am truley sorry for your lots. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/24 "2012-08-26T19:37:01Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > OK. I think some of us were also surprised that she’d be asking that question on this MB since she probably knows as much or more about the subject than anyone posting here. She knows linguistics but perhaps is not current on recent theories on the origin of language. > [@](#): > > When was the last time you posted a question about bird biology in GQ? 🙂 Actually, I could see posting a thread to see if people like **Darwin’s Finch** or **Tamerlane** have come across anything interesting about the origin of birds. I don’t necessarily see all the literature. If someone hacked someone else’s account, it seems more likely that they would do something more mischievous than just asking a question like that in the OP. ---
**Author:** ![Manduck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/manduck/32/256_2.png) [@Manduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Manduck)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/25 "2012-08-26T19:59:58Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > Well, that’s the point. The OP does not look normal at all. Of all people to misspell “language.” Twice. And “speakar.” The fragmentare “How humans got to be speakars [sic].” It’s enough to make us suspicious that someone is pulling our leg with his account. Compare that to a post like [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=199790&page=2) or [yesterday’s.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15423459&postcount=11) Yeah, it’s enough to cause us to twitch our collective antennae. Are you afraid she might have gone instain? ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/26 "2012-08-26T20:10:28Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > She knows linguistics but perhaps is not current on recent theories on the origin of language. Yeah, because linguists themselves try not to show too much interest in the subject lest they be accused of going all woo woo and soft in the head. Wasn’t there an international professional linguistics association many years ago that _banned_ all discussion of language origin theories because they got tired of too much woo and too little data? Which is why I haven’t kept up with it, because the speculations take place more in the realms of anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, while linguists concentrate on _known_ languages. So I thought maybe there’s a chance there’s something new and interesting on the question. Lots of scientific puzzles that were unanswerable in the past have now been solved, like continental drift or Fermat’s last theorem. But when I was growing up, language origin theories didn’t get much respect. Linguistic satirists made up funny names for them like “pooh pooh,” “bow wow,” “ding dong.” ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/27 "2012-08-26T20:14:19Z")
I doubt this will be any news to Johanna, but there is a school of thought that so-called “fully articulate” speech did not evolve until ~ 60K years ago. They correlate that to what seems to be a creative explosion around that time after a long period of relatively stagnant technologic progress. The tools that our H. sapiens ancestors used 100K year ago weren’t much different from what had been used for hundreds of thousands of years. Our tool kit was pretty much the same as that used by Neanderthals. And we don’t see evidence of symbolic thinking (usually manifest as art) until about 60K years ago. It’s in this context that you see the distinction between “anatomically modern humans” and “full modern humans”, because there isn’t anything in our bones that shows any significant change. However, it seems that archeological finds keep pushing the dates of art and expanded tools kits further in time. This is, alas, something we probably won’t know for sure for a very, very long time, if ever. ---
**Author:** ![tapu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/49beb7/32.png) [@tapu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tapu)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/28 "2012-08-26T20:33:14Z")
So… Johanna, were you having a babby or somting hystorical like that? ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 26, 2012, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/29 "2012-08-26T20:43:52Z")
“Hystorical” is indeed closer to the point if by that you mean pertaining to historical linguistics. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/30 "2012-08-27T11:45:15Z")
I’ve read and pondered on the matter of PIE Homeland and believe the evidence and argument favoring a Gimbutas “Kurgan” Theory is overwhelming. I’ve thought this might be a fun debate for the GD forum. Gray-Atkinson rely heavily on calibrating the rate of language change from historical data. I think language changed faster in prehistoric times. I even posed this as a linguistics question here a year ago or so; unfortunately that thread got sidetracked into irrelevancy. We’d need a major thread to do the PIE Homeland debate justice. For now I’ll just note that the map of Gray, Atkinson et al shows Indo-Iranian migrating to India via a southerly route – I think even Renfrew now agrees Indo-Aryan came from the steppes, e.g. via Andronovo. (The relative closeness of Baltic and Sanskrit languages are another of many many details which “make sense” in Gimbutas’ theory, but inexplicable in Gray’s model.) ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/31 "2012-08-27T13:22:57Z")
I don’t know how to take this thread. If a professional linguist asks a question about her own field and then misspells some of the words, that is a mystery. But I will take the opportunity to mention one origin theory whose author makes a fascinating case. “From Hand to Mouth” by Michael Corballis hypothesizes, as it title suggests, that some kind of gestural language preceded spoken language. I cannot do justice to the theory in a few lines, but he points out that manual dexterity evolved much earlier than buccal dexterity (and remember, no other mammal can make the sounds we do). So he assumes that under the evolutionary pressure to maximize cooperation, our brain structures grew to accommodate all the complex sentence structure that we are capable (and that is still expressed in sign). Then we began to vocalize (perhaps because it carried over distance, around corners, didn’t take your eyes away from something else) and eventually, the mouth structures evolved to accommodate speech. Other evidence: People without a common language attempt communication through gestures. Apparently, infants can learn a primitive sign earlier than speech. And we all accompany our speech with gestures (my mother-in-law used to joke that the way to render my wife speechless was to tie down her hands) including gestures with the mouth. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/32 "2012-08-27T14:37:22Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > It’s in this context that you see the distinction between “anatomically modern humans” and “full modern humans”, because there isn’t anything in our bones that shows any significant change. I know it as the distinction between anatomically and _behaviourally_ modern humans, FWIW. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/33 "2012-08-27T16:26:08Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I know it as the distinction between anatomically and _behaviourally_ modern humans, FWIW. Yeah, that’s probably a better descriptor. Speaking of **MrDibble** , there is a hypothesis that so-called “click” languages are at the root of the language tree and that all living languages derive from a “click” language, but most have lost that feature. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/34 "2012-08-27T16:31:49Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > [Know Your Meme: > How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed) And [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=660186&highlight=babby), too. (If it hasn’t already been noted in this thread.) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/35 "2012-08-27T20:07:54Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Speaking of **MrDibble** , there is a hypothesis that so-called “click” languages are at the root of the language tree and that all living languages derive from a “click” language, but most have lost that feature. Well, the genetics of the Hadza and San peoples are today’s closest match to the genetic rootstock of all humanity. Those peoples are closest to the top of the human family tree. They happen to speak click languages. That the earliest language clicked is one possible logical conclusion that can be drawn from the data we have. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/36 "2012-08-27T20:12:13Z")
> [@Eutychus](#): > > Same way as babby. So glad I wasn’t the only one, even though I’m late. ---
**Author:** ![Spud](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spud/32/347_2.png) [@Spud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spud)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/37 "2012-08-27T22:00:28Z")
I’m pretty sure most lang gauges are are formed as cast aluminum. Some for specialty applications may be another alloy to better suit that specific application. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/38 "2012-08-27T22:19:57Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Well, the genetics of the Hadza and San peoples are today’s closest match to the genetic rootstock of all humanity. Those peoples are closest to the top of the human family tree. They happen to speak click languages. That the earliest language clicked is one possible logical conclusion that can be drawn from the data we have. Yes, but the original claims was made by analyzing the number of phonemes in various languages around the world. It was found that, generally, the farther the language speakers were from Africa, the fewer phonemes the languages had. And the click languages had the most phonemes of all. The idea is that phonemes tend to be lost as new populations split off from older ones. Of course it was noted that this ties in with the genetic data you pointed out. It sis important to note that this doesn’t mean language started at some place with the ancestors of those particular people, but that all the extant languages derive from that place. Earlier languages might have died out with the populations which spoke them. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/39 "2012-08-27T22:41:49Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > There are also people who argue for an Anatolian origin of PIE on the basis that wheat originated there (in this theory, obviously, PIE would have spread with agriculture). Well obviously you can’t have PIE before you have wheat. How else would you make the pastry? Mmmmmm, pie… Seriously, though the question of the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language has virtually nothing to do with the question of the origin of language itself, which undoubtedly happened very much earlier. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/40 "2012-08-27T23:34:46Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > [Know Your Meme: > How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed) > > **Johanna** has made two posts subsequent to this one, both of which look normal to me. I presume she is just joking around. Or maybe she was dictating! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660.md?page=3)