Rich Travs
Mon, Jul-21-03, 06:12
Starts at
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html
Five screens worth, so it's hard to summarize. But here's some
interesting excerpts:
... Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known
split between any two human populations occurred between the
!Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since
both of these very ancient populations speak click languages,
clicks may have been used in the language of the ancestral
human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down
from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation
point), serve the same role as consonants.
That possible hint of the first human tongue may be echoed in
the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just
like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000
years ago. But they still used the same set of crude stone
tools as their forebears and their archaic human
contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe.
Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place.
Settlements in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools
made from stone and bone, art objects and signs of long
distance trade.
Though some archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the
transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the
suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change
that occurred around that time and, because of the advantage
it conferred, spread rapidly through the population.
That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude
that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps
the final step in its evolution. If some neural change
explains the appearance of fully modern human behavior some
50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose that
the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly
spoken phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written. ... How then
did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of
the common ancestor of chimps and people?
One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr.
Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is
the study of pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made
up from scratch by children or adults who have no language in
common, and of creoles, the successor languages that acquire
inflection and syntax.
Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a proto-language must
have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's
discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he
argued, in pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the
symbols used by trained chimpanzees and in the
syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to
speak at the normal age.
In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans
may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of
words without syntax, as long as two million years ago.
Modern language developed more recently, he suggests, perhaps
with appearance of anatomically modern humans some 120,000
years ago.
The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes,
occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest
and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on
information was the driving force," he said in an interview.
Foragers would have had to report back to others what they
had found. Once they had developed symbols that could be used
free of context — a general word for elephant, not a
vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" —
early people would have taken the first step toward
proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of
stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said.
There's more, including bits on gestures, FOXP2, social
aspects, and even Chomsky.
Bickerton's mention of a possibility of language elements at 2
mya would coincide roughly with erectus and hominid expansion.
I've always felt this could not have taken place without a bit
more than just a stone tool kit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html
Five screens worth, so it's hard to summarize. But here's some
interesting excerpts:
... Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known
split between any two human populations occurred between the
!Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since
both of these very ancient populations speak click languages,
clicks may have been used in the language of the ancestral
human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down
from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation
point), serve the same role as consonants.
That possible hint of the first human tongue may be echoed in
the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just
like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000
years ago. But they still used the same set of crude stone
tools as their forebears and their archaic human
contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe.
Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place.
Settlements in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools
made from stone and bone, art objects and signs of long
distance trade.
Though some archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the
transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the
suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change
that occurred around that time and, because of the advantage
it conferred, spread rapidly through the population.
That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude
that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps
the final step in its evolution. If some neural change
explains the appearance of fully modern human behavior some
50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose that
the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly
spoken phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written. ... How then
did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of
the common ancestor of chimps and people?
One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr.
Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is
the study of pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made
up from scratch by children or adults who have no language in
common, and of creoles, the successor languages that acquire
inflection and syntax.
Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a proto-language must
have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's
discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he
argued, in pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the
symbols used by trained chimpanzees and in the
syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to
speak at the normal age.
In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans
may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of
words without syntax, as long as two million years ago.
Modern language developed more recently, he suggests, perhaps
with appearance of anatomically modern humans some 120,000
years ago.
The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes,
occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest
and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on
information was the driving force," he said in an interview.
Foragers would have had to report back to others what they
had found. Once they had developed symbols that could be used
free of context — a general word for elephant, not a
vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" —
early people would have taken the first step toward
proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of
stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said.
There's more, including bits on gestures, FOXP2, social
aspects, and even Chomsky.
Bickerton's mention of a possibility of language elements at 2
mya would coincide roughly with erectus and hominid expansion.
I've always felt this could not have taken place without a bit
more than just a stone tool kit.