By Jason Pickett
Where did language come from? This is the question that shall be answered in this segment of this report. It is not surprising that language is nearly as old as humanity itself. There are numerous reasons and theories about how language first developed, so we shall only explore the basic and most commonly accepted ones. One theory goes all the way back to the development of hominids as a genus.
If one accepts that mankind is descended from an earlier form of primate, then it should be equally accepted that the primates man is descended from dwelt in the forests of Africa bordering the savanna. As the savanna increasingly encroached on the forest some of these primates found it necessary to leave the forest and wander out to the plains in search of food. At first these bands of primates would stay out for only a short while, but eventually remained for longer and longer until a new species evolved that walked upright on two legs and was acclimatized to living outside of the trees and on the ground. (Gonick, p47-54)
The fact that these animals no longer used their forelegs to help them move may have been the catalyst that started language. The freedom that not using forelegs allows an animal may seem trivial, but without the need of forelegs for transportation the animal now had a much wider range of activities it may now partake in. This fact along with the fact that primates still had an opposable thumb (due to eons of tree dwelling) afforded them the great ability to use tools. The development of tools caused greater need for a larger brain, and within a couple of million years, those primates who used tools doubled their brain size and perfected their upright posture. We know this based on fossil records which show the changing of where the spinal cord hole is in the skull from behind the head, to beneath the head. That indicates that the animal must be upright, otherwise it would spend most of its time looking at the ground. (Gonick, p55-60)
Perfecting the upright posture started a series of developmental steps, it allowed for the head to straighten out which in turn bent the supralaryngeal airway. This bend in the supralaryngeal airway created the ability to use consonants. Consonants are hunting sounds, like a twig breaking, or grass rustling, et cetera; constriction or closure in the breath channel produces them. Vowels are the sounds of normal non-hunting animals and are produced without any obstruction or friction produced in the mouth. Consonants are what separate vowels and even segment them (vowels) in oral language, and the rise of the ability to use them is essential for modern language capabilities to develop. (The Origin of Language)
The creation of simple tools did not mandate a need for communication skills, because the use of such tools was evident, simply from looking at them. As the invention of tools grew more complex however, it grew necessary to communicate what the tools did exactly, and thereby mental models were needed. Mental models require planning, which uses the frontal cortex (the area where forethought is created), planning is essential for both tool and language use. When more and more complex tools were being built, more and more mental models were needed; language became necessary to explain these multiple models. Tools are considered too complex, usually when they serve a specific function, and must be used at specific times (The Origin of Language).
Another factor may be the ice ages because, during the ice ages hominids began to move outside of Africa and into the rest of the world, at this point it was very cold (obviously), and external warmth was required for survival. To fulfill this need for external warmth fire came into play. Fire has been one of mankind’s greatest allies because it quickly thrust early man’s technological abilities. It allowed him to harden wooden spears (which in turn allowed him to hunt larger game), it could also be used to start stampedes of herds (another food source), and it allowed him to cook his food. The most relevant luxury fire gave us ,however, was oral language. Man could sit around a fire after eating and “chew the fat” so to speak, by making abstract noises that gained meaning and turn into words. (Gonick, p64-65)
Every higher animal communicates, whether it is by sound or gestures, but mankind is distinct in that he uses a system of symbols that we must consciously use to name things. The first language was most likely used by Homo Erectus (an earlier primate that Homo Sapiens are directly descended from) and was probably fairly crude in comparison to modern ones, however it was certainly efficient for their means and needs. Their language brought with it symbolism, in that they could make reference to things without need of the things’ presence, simply based on the words that they had made up before. Symbolic language led to the development of other things as well, such as ritual, which led to social progress. The rise of complex language itself can also be credited to the rise of social progression and increasing complicated social situations and circumstances and in turn with language complexity, social progression developed further (Gonick, p66)
Now that we have discovered the bases of the human capabilities of speech, we can proceed by learning the origins of English itself. To understand English fully one must look at the ancestral languages from which it came. The oldest language that we have any knowledge about would be Proto-Indo-European, though not too much is known about it. We know it existed because of the cognates of the languages that are thought to be derived from it (a cognate is a pair or set of words descended from a common ancestor). The word “senile” for instance (meaning old) is related to the Gothic word “sinista” or the Latin word “Senex”, or Greek’s “henee” or Avestan’s (Persian’s ancestral language) “hano” or even Sanskrit’s “sanah”. Based on cognates like these, modern linguists believe that there must have been a common ancestral root language, and because of the cognates in the languages spanning from India to Iceland, we acquire the concept of Proto-Indo-European. Unfortunately we do not really have a written record of Proto-Indo-European, so concrete evidence of it is hard to come by, but it is without question that this language did indeed exist. (Indo European and the Comparative Method)