How the hell do you understand the words that I'm clicking away on my keyboard right now?
I think we take our ability to communicate for granted. There is no other species on the planet that can express abstract thoughts, or talk about the weather, or the big game, or where the nearest gas stop is. Other animals can only communicate immediate issues, like a lion stalking a zebra and the zebra's friends sending warnings.
One thing I've always asked people to do is to define the word "what". Define "to". Define "in". Define "a". Define "the". Define "of".
Of course, you could literally search "definition of of" online and Google would tell you. Thing is, you need words to define other words. So what was the first word defined? HOW was that word defined without previous words? How did we go from grunts to grammar? From hieroglyphics to hashtags? From semaphores to snapchats?
There was no caveman convention to set down the rules of language. There was no instruction manual for it. It simply began.
Many theories for language's inception emerged in the 18th and 19th century. Today, they've been discredited and have been given silly names for their simplicity:
The Bow-Wow Theory: the idea that natural sounds initiate language. The early language began when hominid ancestors mimicked the onomatopoeic sound. Examples would be ribbit, woof, meow, and bang. This theory does not take into account variations of sounds between languages.
La La Theory: explains that language evolved through song and music. An example could be whistling or humming. This ignores rational and complex language aspects.
Yo-He-Ho Theory: argues that language arose from rhythmic grunts during manual labor. This theory does not speculate how these sounds were transformed into meaningful language.
I think the Yo-He-Ho theory is the theory that most people think about, and it's the one I thought about too.
Today, there are more complex hypotheses––for example, the gestural theory.
It states that human language developed from gestures that were used for simple communication. While it does seem simple, the evidence supporting it is a little bit more in-depth: scientists found that both gestural language and vocal language rely on similar neural systems. The cortical regions responsible for mouth and hand movements border each other.
When I first read this, I was kind of dumbfounded. However, I recall learning in my psych class that verbal language and sign language depend on similar neural structures. In other words, a person who's signing will actually activate parts of the brain related to talking physically.
Moreover, research has found that patients who used sign language, and who suffered from a left-hemisphere lesion, showed the same disorders with their sign language as vocal patients did with their oral language.
Another theory is the "putting down the baby" theory. Dean Falk believed that vocal interactions between early hominid mothers and infants began a sequence of events that led, eventually, to human ancestors' earliest words.
The core idea posits that human mothers, distinct from their primate counterparts, couldn't navigate and forage with infants clinging to their backs due to the lack of fur in humans. Consequently, mothers frequently found it necessary to place their babies down, leading to the imperative of reassuring infants that they weren't being abandoned.
In response, mothers developed a communicative phenomenon termed 'motherese,' incorporating facial expressions, body language, gentle touching, patting, caressing, laughter, tickling, and emotionally expressive contact calls directed specifically at infants. The hypothesis proposes that language development sprang forth from this intricate interplay.
I think this theory makes sense because there's no way language could have evolved had children not played a large role in it.
The idea that it gets harder to learn a new language as you grow older is indeed true, and that's largely because of how our brain changes
The connections in a child's brain are still very raw, which allows new links to be made easily. In contrast, an adult's brain already has these fortified paths that they've been using for years, hence why the branches are so thick and well-developed.
I'm not sure if we'll ever be able to discover the true origins of language. As we ponder the primordial grunts and tender exchanges between parent and child, perhaps language's birth remains as elusive as the first word ever spoken––a mystery that exists just to be a mystery.
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