# 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:** 18\ **Page:** 3
**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, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/41 "2012-08-27T23:42:17Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > 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. It does seem to fit with the hunting origin theory mentioned by **Siam Sam** ; a fellow hunter clicking his tongue would presumably be audible over a reasonable distance, yet also be less likely than a vocalized call to alarm the quarry. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/42 "2012-08-27T23:45:36Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > 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. I know - I was sort of thrown off by the fact that **Johanna** , who I know to be a linguist, was asking about linguistic things. For some reason I thought I’d treat it as an ‘ask the linguist’ thread, and thought I’d ask **Johanna** about this linguistics related thing that had caught my interest earlier in the day. Of course, where PIE was spoken has no bearing whatsoever on how langguage was formed. ---
**Author:** ![sugaree](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@sugaree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sugaree)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2012, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/43 "2012-08-27T23:55:30Z")
Jeez. I just wanted to say that I got the joke too, just from reading the title. It was a good joke, **Johanna** , and I appreciated it. ---
**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 28, 2012, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/44 "2012-08-28T00:43:00Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > It does seem to fit with the hunting origin theory mentioned by **Siam Sam** ; a fellow hunter clicking his tongue would presumably be audible over a reasonable distance, yet also be less likely than a vocalized call to alarm the quarry. Maybe. But I think “Man the Hunter” has been way overused in anthropology and I’m just as inclined to think that language started by women needing to talk to each other or their infants for social cohesion or when they were out gathering. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2012, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/45 "2012-08-28T00:43:08Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 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.” I believe you’ll be sad to know that I don’t think they’ve gotten much more complex. It’s still mainly split between the Ur-language and a bunch of independent languages springing up over time. I think the only real _evidential_ development of late is that the main pioneer of the Ur language hypothesis ran a computer analysis on every documented language and it decided that some absurd number of words (on the order of thousands) were CLEARLY linguistically related down to a common ancestor. Everybody else proceeded to look at him funny and say that a lot of the examples it output are known to be false and that the search criteria were WAY too permissive so back to square one. This all according to a linguistics professor when I asked a similar question oh… a couple months ago. ---
**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 28, 2012, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/46 "2012-08-28T06:13:44Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > I think the only real _evidential_ development of late is that the main pioneer of the Ur language hypothesis ran a computer analysis on every documented language and it decided that some absurd number of words (on the order of thousands) were CLEARLY linguistically related down to a common ancestor. Everybody else proceeded to look at him funny and say that a lot of the examples it output are known to be false and that the search criteria were WAY too permissive so back to square one. Could you mean Shevoroshkin? Or Greenberg, or Ruhlen? The Proto-World guys. I recall them saying, though, that the Proto-World hypothesis does not bear on the question of monogenesis vs. multiregional origins. It only connects all known, recorded languages of historical times. There could have been multiregional origins of which all died out without a trace except the one that produced all languages known today. Although the more I think about multiregional extinctions with one survivor, the less likely it seems. ---
**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 29, 2012, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/47 "2012-08-29T13:12:31Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > 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. Makes kind of sense to me, from the “natural language” perspective, clicks are some of the phonemes babies produce (from a statistical sample of 2 🙂 ) so it’s personally surprising they aren’t used in more languages beyond onomatopoeia and animal control . ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2012, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/48 "2012-08-30T01:47:20Z")
John Mace writes: \> 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. There are those with significant arguments against that theory: [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3742](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3742) ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2012, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/49 "2012-08-30T08:35:30Z")
> [@Spud](#): > > 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. Judging by their age, I would guess the earliest is some kind of common stone followed by bronze. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2012, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/50 "2012-08-30T09:14:08Z")
> [@Eutychus](#): > > Same way as babby. Gee, I hope not. ---
**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 30, 2012, 9:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/51 "2012-08-30T09:27:34Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > There could have been multiregional origins of which all died out without a trace except the one that produced all languages known today. Although the more I think about multiregional extinctions with one survivor, the less likely it seems. A [bottleneck in H. sapiens population](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) (to a few thousand breeding pairs) would make it less unlikely. I know nothing of the evidence for or against such a bottleneck, though was intrigued to see Wikipedia cite as evidence a DNA study … of human lice parasites. :smack: Even if pre-sapiens hominids had language and interbred with H. sapiens, one would guess they would shift to a more “prestigious” H. sapiens language. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2012, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/52 "2012-08-30T12:08:21Z")
Given that the op and others here are linguistic experts allow me to ask some follow up to my post#5. Again, the brain imaging and functioning perspective (and the gene study, FOXP2) puts “language” emergence, possibly initially primarily gestural, co-evolving with composite tool use, somewhere around 300K years ago. But that raises the question of _what qualifies as “language” from a linguistic POV?_ What are the key features for “language” (as opposed to communication that is not language) and how does the creation of novel compositie tools and the transmission of the knowledge of how to create them fit the structural cognitive needs of those qualifying features? Or does not? It seems to me that tracking phoneme spread _presumes_ that the key feature of language is its spoken nature, and I cannot see any reason to assume that to be the case (nor to rule it out a priori either). **John Mace** to some degree disputed language as co-emerging with composite tool use by stating that “we don’t see evidence of symbolic thinking (usually manifest as art) until about 60K years ago” - yet there is no a priori reason to believe that the level of symbolic thinking needed for art is required to exist before language does. In fact the converse makes just as much if not more sense: symbolic thinking manifesting as art emerged as a later outgrowth of more complex (articulate) language and the culture that languages facilitated. Comments from those with linguistic expertise please. ---
**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 30, 2012, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/53 "2012-08-30T19:23:59Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > But that raises the question of _what qualifies as “language” from a linguistic POV?_ > > What are the key features for “language” (as opposed to communication that is not language) Grammar. Syntax. Word morphology. As distinct from simple semiotic signaling. > [@](#): > > and how does the creation of novel compositie tools and the transmission of the knowledge of how to create them fit the structural cognitive needs of those qualifying features? Or does not? I don’t know about this. > [@](#): > > It seems to me that tracking phoneme spread _presumes_ that the key feature of language is its spoken nature, and I cannot see any reason to assume that to be the case (nor to rule it out a priori either). Linguists recognize sign language as genuine language. It meets all the official criteria for language despite its lack of phonetics. Either spoken or signed language is considered primary. Written language is a representation/replication of spoken language, and is considered secondary. Of course written language is important to historical linguistics because it’s the only access to dead languages. But the science of linguistics itself is centered on spoken language, yes, by definition. There are sound reasons for that. > [@](#): > > **John Mace** to some degree disputed language as co-emerging with composite tool use by stating that “we don’t see evidence of symbolic thinking (usually manifest as art) until about 60K years ago” - yet there is no a priori reason to believe that the level of symbolic thinking needed for art is required to exist before language does. In fact the converse makes just as much if not more sense: symbolic thinking manifesting as art emerged as a later outgrowth of more complex (articulate) language and the culture that languages facilitated. > > Comments from those with linguistic expertise please. I think language itself originally came together from different streams joining. Language has a function as poetry, not just hunting clicks or bills of lading, that has a claim to being as old as human society. Perhaps pre-\*sapiens \*hominids used sign language in the absence of vocal phonetic ability. Humans need communication for many functions in society. Poetry originally connected humans with their feelings of the numinous, and like much else spiritual or intellectual, must have originated in connection with paleolithic shamanism. Shamanism was closely tied in with economics, politics, and intellectual life. If a society is organized along any lines at all, mutual discussions of how the society is best organized are an inevitable function of whatever language exists among them, which would be the origin of politics. That hypothesis of language originating with hunters’ clicks is more of the same old male-centric blinkered view of human origins that treats women’s contributions as nonexistent. _H. sapiens_ HG women spend their time collectively helping one another and socializing throughout their domestic work and child rearing, and language is very important to this female bonding. I dare say that early HG women used more speech among themselves than male hunting bands would have. If so, the greater part of how language was formed was women’s contribution. Not to speak of the greater part of HG caloric intake—thanks to the G. I can think of a way to test the hypothesis about hunters’ clicks: Not all words in click languages have clicks. Only some proportion, say half, of the vocabulary in a given click language might have click phonemes. Examine the proportion of clicks in specialized hunting vocabulary vs. in domestic vocabulary vs. in the whole language overall. If hunting terms are not found to have a higher incidence of clicks than domestic terms or the overall vocabulary, that pretty much shoots down that idea as a just-so story. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2012, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/54 "2012-08-31T02:22:36Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Grammar. Syntax. Word morphology. As distinct from simple semiotic signaling. … Thanks. That’s pretty much what I thought (although not being all that linguistically literate I could use some help understanding the distinction between grammar and syntax). Creating composite tools - the actual physical process of making a known design - requires holding various concepts in place in mind and planning around gathering up the bits that fit in those necessary structures, shaping those bit into required shapes by a series of complex movements in particular orders, and arranging the newly created bits into required orders. Creating a new design requires putting those elements into novel structures. The process of teaching and learning how to create the tools requires communicating those processes. It seems to me that the process parallels the required elements of language quite well and that the teaching and learning of that process would _require_ the basic elements required of language. > [@](#): > > Language has a function as poetry … that has a claim to being as old as human society. Perhaps pre-sapiens hominids used sign language in the absence of vocal phonetic ability. Not quite sure how you can state that poetry’s claim dates that far back. It might. Or how you can restrict the possibility of gesture only first to pre-sapiens hominoids. How would a need for poetry drive the acquisition of the needed cognitive skill set for language? I can see it driving _music_ and the cognitive skills from composite tool making being applied into that domain … perhaps that is one means that your proposed different streams merged? The poetic needs expressed both by mouth and by hand and foot musically being merged with the grammar and syntax like processing needed to produce composite tools into language and an emerging actual culture? And in parallel applied to other domains such as group hunting, bonding, etc. … ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2012, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/55 "2012-08-31T03:01:25Z")
Thinking a bit more … communication during hunting does not seem to require the elements that parallel to grammar and syntax and morphology of the individual elements, more just semiotic signaling (You, left. You, right. Run now. … fixed elements.) And while language could foster bonding, bonding among the women does not seem to require that which would drive the development of the skill set. If we are going to make up a just so story it should be one that can drive the creation of the cognitive skills that set language apart from mere signaling … and that fits what the brain scientists have learned about the brain areas involved in language. Music production btw like composite tool making [shares similar and overlapping brain areas.](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2006.04785.x/abstract;jsessionid=3EB5F9A19C109B6E2FB046D1241FA0BD.d02t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false) It fits very well with your hypothesis of streams merging, specifically a stream of movement involved in producing objects of sound that expressed emotional and perhaps spiritual content merging with a stream of movement involved with creating complex multiple part physical objects, both benefiting from the same underlaying processing core being applied in different informational domains, and together allowing for “fully articulate language” and culture. ---
**Author:** ![Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e47c2d/32.png) [@Hershele\_Ostropoler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hershele_Ostropoler)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2012, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/56 "2012-08-31T04:10:16Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > But the science of linguistics itself is centered on spoken language, yes, by definition. There are sound reasons for that. I see what you did there. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2012, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/57 "2012-08-31T13:45:06Z")
Trying more to flesh out that “different streams joining” concept you articulated a bit more … If you have easy access to a university library the abstract of [this article](http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v7/n1/full/nrg1747.html) suggests it might give some details that are consistent with it. > [@](#): > > Here we synthesize recent developments in linguistics, psychology and neuroimaging with progress in comparative genomics, gene-expression profiling and studies of developmental disorders. We argue that language should be viewed not as a wholesale innovation, but as a complex reconfiguration of ancestral systems that have been adapted in evolutionarily novel ways. Even with some pages missing in the usual Google books sample style [this chapter of “Language and Music as Cognitive Systems”](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HaJNoBcp2sQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA254&dq=music+foxp2&ots=9ogF85tSAf&sig=LF2f6JdA8z9407JatKP-HM2PkTs#v=onepage&q=music%20foxp2&f=false) has a bunch of interesting information as well, focused on how music and language processing overlap and also have separable components: Right off the bat is the divergent role that FOXP2 (remember it as the gene identified as being language related in modern humans, defects in that gene causing deficiencies in sequencing the oral motor processing of language and a broad deficit in linguistic and grammatical processing, and that has been identified in Neanderthal DNA as well) plays in music and language - those with defects in FOXP2 have those language issues and have impairments in rhythm perception/production with preservation of melody/pitch perception/production. (Melody/pitch seems to be more associated for understanding the [emotional content](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40285907?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101014012493) of music.) OTOH individuals who are congenitally deficient in pitch sequencing have no language deficits. The chapter then further discusses various studies demonstrating both overlaps and differences in the processing streams. [This article](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/650296) goes into the composite tool making language co-evolution concept in much more detail. It also has [this specific section](http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/650296#h6) that raises your point about the sort of impact that language as bonding and diplomacy has a specific impact on modern human behaviors in contrast to the simpler language as imperatives. > [@](#): > > Grammatical innovations for indirect speech (Pinker, Nowak, and Lee 2008), which I prefer to call the language of diplomacy, may have facilitated the mutual trust required to maintain reciprocal cooperation. Direct forms of speech such as speaking in the imperative or the declarative present tense may have sufficed for communication and cooperation within a social group, especially if there was a highly structured dominance hierarchy. However, imperative commands, demands, and orders are unlikely to foster trust in intergroup relationships … > > … Passive grammatical constructions—for example, the third‐person interrogative, abstract, and subjunctive constructions, such as posing hypothetical solutions (“What if one were to try to do something this way?”)—would be nonthreatening forms of speech that would permit individuals to make the choice to follow suggestions and to cooperate, thus preserving dignity and agency and engendering trust. There is a world of difference between ordering someone to join a risky hunt and saying “I heard that the wildebeest migration started early. If we moved to the game pass and worked together, we could get enough meat for both of our families for weeks. Would you like to join our camp?” Such a diplomatic voicing of a constructive memory scenario would be a good start on a long and mutually rewarding relationship and a strong foundation for extended social landscapes. > > Perhaps language played a role in stimulating oxytocin and vasopressin production analogous to that played by touch and grooming. Among primates, grooming may increase oxytocin, vasopressin, and endorphin levels, thus reducing stress and facilitating social bonding (Dunbar 2010). Conventional trust‐game experiments show that massage significantly increased oxytocin if it was followed by an intentional act of trust and that generosity was positively correlated with increase in oxytocin (Morhenn et al. 2008). Dunbar (1993, 2003) proposed that social grooming, which occupies a substantial amount of time, was replaced by vocal grooming of several individuals simultaneously when hominid group sizes exceeded a threshold that required allocating more than 30% of the time budget to one‐on‐one grooming. If vocal grooming has the same effect as tactile stimulation, then the repertoire of the language of diplomacy and indirect speech may have also included the language of affirmation, compliments, friendship, and flattery. So prefacing the cooperative hunting offer above with “Your spear looks mighty fine, and I bet you can throw it pretty far” might prime the neuroendocrinological pump for reciprocity trust and cooperation. This language‐of‐love hypothesis should be easily testable in the lab by substituting vocal grooming for massage in the well‐designed experiments of Morhenn et al. (2008). Putting that all together the model emerges that language as defined as communicating with grammar and syntax … the rhythm of language … emerged along with FOXP2 and composite tool making and perhaps was manifest as imperative language (whether it was gestural only first or speech or both). Meanwhile pitch vocalizations were used during grooming and fostered bonding and were in a sense protopoetry. The sequencing skillset of the basic grammar and syntax is also that which allows rhythm perception/production, creating true music, and by connecting the streams the emotional/poetic/group bonding capacities of music were applied to language, driving the more complex passive grammatical constructions that Ambrose refers to as the language of diplomacy. ---
**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 31, 2012, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660/58 "2012-08-31T14:12:02Z")
Wow, you’ve really taken that and run with it. Fascinating stuff. I didn’t have any theory so elaborate, simply an observation that language covers many different functions in life, with a hunch that there must have been multiple reasons coming together for it to arise. Thanks for all that! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-was-langguage-formed/632660.md?page=2)