The Meme Machine

THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE 87
The evolution of language
The question of language origins has been so contentious, that as long ago as
1866 the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned any more speculation about
the issue. The glaring gulf between animal communication and human speech
cried out for explanation but, with little evidence from palaeontology, the
speculations of the time could run wild – our words originated from copying
animals or natural sounds, or from making grunts of exertion or disgust. These
theories, mockingly dubbed the ‘bow-wow’, ‘ding-dong’, ‘heave-ho’, and
‘pooh-pooh’ theories, did nothing to explain the origins of grammar and syntax.
More than a century later the issue is far from settled and the arguments are still
fierce. Our theorising is, however, constrained by a much better understanding
of language itself, and by evidence on how the brain and language evolved
together.
First, let us look briefly at the nature of modern human language.
Our language capacity is largely innate and not a by-product of intelligence
or a general ability to learn – though this was once a hotly debated issue. The
fact is that people do not learn language by being systematically corrected for
their mistakes, nor by listening attentively and slavishly copying what they hear.
Instead, they just seem to pick it up, using minimal input to build up richly
structured grammatical speech. Note that by grammar I mean the natural
structures of languages that distinguish who did what to whom or when it
happened or in what order – not the sort of rule-book grammar that used to be
taught at school.
Almost everyone can use language as grammatically as everyone else,
regardless of educational attainment or general intelligence. All human societies
ever discovered have language, and all of them have complex grammar.
Although languages may vary considerably in the size of their vocabularies, they
do not differ much in the complexity of their grammar. Hunter-gatherers and
remote tribal groups have languages just as complex as modern industrial
English or Japanese. Children all over the world can speak grammatically by the
time they are three or four years old, and they can invent languages that are more
systematic than the utterances that they hear. They can even use subtle
grammatical principles for which there is no evidence in the speech they hear. If
spoken language is denied them, as for the deaf, they will find other ways of
making language. Sign languages are not just simplified or distorted versions of
spoken language, but whole new languages that emerge wherever groups of deaf
people come together. They are languages in their own right with gestures and