the origin of language

It is an intriguing question, to which we may never have a complete answer: How did we get from animal vocalization (barks, howls, calls...) to human language?
Animals often make use of signs, which point to what they represent, but they don’t use symbols, which are arbitrary and conventional. Examples of signs include sniffles as a sign of an on-coming cold, clouds as a sign of rain, or a scent as a sign of territory. Symbols include things like the words we use. Dog, Hund, chien, cane, perro -- these are symbols that refer to the creature so named, yet each one contains nothing in it that in anyway indicates that creature.
In addition, language is a system of symbols, with several levels of organization, at least phonetics (the sounds), syntax (the grammar), and semantics (the meanings).
So when did language begin? At the very beginnings of the genus Homo, perhaps 4 or 5 million years ago? Or with the advent of modern man, Cro-magnon, some 125,000 years ago? Did the neanderthal speak? He had a brain that was larger than ours, but his voice box seems to be higher in his throat, like that of the apes. We don’t know.
There are many theories about the origins of language. Many of these have traditional amusing names, and I will create a couple more where needed.
1. The mama theory. Language began with the easiest syllables attached to the most significant objects.
2. The ta-ta theory. Sir Richard Paget, influenced by Darwin, believed that body movement preceded language. Language began as an unconscious vocal imitation of these movements -- like the way a child’s mouth will move when they use scissors, or my tongue sticks out when I try to play the guitar.
3. The bow-wow theory. Language began as imitations of natural sounds -- moo, choo-choo, crash, clang, buzz, bang, meow... This is more technically refered to as onomatopoeia or echoism.
4. The pooh-pooh theory. Language began with interjections, instinctive emotive cries such as oh! for surprise and ouch! for pain.
5. The ding-dong theory. Some people, including the famous linguist Max Muller, have pointed out that there is a rather mysterious correspondence between sounds and meanings. Small, sharp, high things tend to have words with high front vowels in many languages, while big, round, low things tend to have round back vowels! Compare itsy bitsy teeny weeny with moon, for example. This is often referred to as sound symbolism.
6. The yo-heave-ho theory. Language began as rhythmic chants, perhaps ultimately from the grunts of heavy work (heave-ho!). The linguist D. S. Diamond suggests that these were perhaps calls for assistance or cooperation accompanied by appropriate gestures. This may relate yo-heave-ho to the ding-dong theory, as in such words as cut, break, crush, strike...
7. The sing-song theory. Danish linguist Jesperson suggested that language comes out of play, laughter, cooing, courtship, emotional mutterings and the like. He even suggests that, contrary to other theories, perhaps some of our first words were actually long and musical, rather than the short grunts many assume we started with.
8. The hey you theory. A linguist by the name of Revesz suggested that we have always needed interpersonal contact, and that language began as sounds to signal both identity (here I am!) and belonging (I’m with you!). We may also cry out in fear, anger, or hurt (help me!). This is more commonly called the contact theory.
9. The hocus pocus theory. I think that language may have had some roots in a sort of magical or religious aspect of our ancestors' lives. Perhaps we began by calling out to game animals with magical sounds, which became their names.
10. The eureka theory. And finally, perhaps language was consciously invented. Perhaps some ancestor had the idea of assigning arbitrary sounds to mean certain things. Clearly, once the idea was had, it would catch on like wild-fire!
Another issue is how often language came into being (or was invented). Perhaps it was invented once, by our earliest ancestors -- perhaps the first who had whatever genetic and physiological properties needed to make complex sounds and organize them into strings. This is called monogenesis. Or perhaps it was invented many times -- polygenesis -- by many people.
We can try to reconstruct earlier forms of language, but we can only go so far before cycles of change obliterate any possibility of reconstruction. Many say we can only go back perhaps 10,000 years before the trail goes cold. So perhaps we will simply never know.
Perhaps the biggest debate among linguists and others interested in the origins of language is whether we can account for language using only the basic mechanisms of learning, or if we need to postulate some special built-in language-readiness. The learning-only people (for example, B. F. Skinner) say that childhood conditioning, or maybe modeling, can account for the complexity of language. The language-acquisition-device (LAD) people (such as Chomsky and Pinker) say that the ease and speed with which children learn language requires something more.
The debate is real only for those people who prefer to take one or the other of these extreme views. It seems very clear to most that neither is the answer. Is there some special neural mechanism for language? Not in the sense of a LAD.
In most mammals, both hemispheres looked very much alike. Somewhere in humanity's early years, a few people possibly inherited a mutation that left one hemisphere with a limited capacity. Instead of neural connections going in every direction, they tended to be organized more linearly. The left hemisphere couldn't related to things in the usual full-blown multidimensional way. But -- surprise! -- that same diminished capacity proved to be very good are ordering things linearly. And that's exactly what language needs: The ability to convert fully dimensional events into linear sequences of sounds, and vice versa.
On the other hand, is language just a matter of conditioning or imitation? Only if you forget to take the insights of people like William James, the Gestalt psychologists, and modern cognitivists into account. Just like we don't really need to learn to perceive colors or depth, we don't really need to learn certain facts about language, because these facts are there in reality for us to see.
As I mentioned, language requires that we translate the full four dimensional world into the (nearly) one dimensional medium of speech. How on earth can we do that? Well, there are actually only a few possibilities open to us. In general perception we have a rule called proximity: We put things that are close to each other together in our minds -- because they are close to each other, obviously. Well, we put words that belong together closer together than words that don't belong together. No inborn LAD required, no special conditioning required.
When it comes to relationships (which are, of course, three- and even four-dimensional), there are only three ways we can make them linear. If a and b represent two things, and f represents the relation between them, then we have a choice between these:
f (a, b) - bites the dog the man(a, b) f - the dog the man bites(a) f (b) - the dog bites the man
If you think of a and b as nouns, and f as a transitive verb (or a preposition), you see something that already looks like the three basic language structures: Verb-Subject-Object (the relatively uncommon VSO, like Irish), Subject-Object-Verb (SOV, like Finnish), and Subject-Verb-Object (SVO, like English), respectively. Oh, and why does the subject usually come before the object? Well, the subject is more salient, more active; the object is more incidental, more passive. What sticks out in our perception or thoughts comes first. Now we have two of the most basic rules of language, and we haven't needed a LAD or conditioning!
What if you are looking at intransitive verbs or adjectives? Now there are only two possibilities: f (c) and (c) f. Green house or house green. The first is naturally most compatible with f (a, b) or VSO, the other is most compatible with (a, b) f or SOV and (a) f (b) or SVO -- just drop the b! Here we have another one of the famous "universals" of language. All you need to add is the principle of consistency: If our sentences are of one of the patterns, our noun, verb, and prepositional phrases will tend to adhere to the same pattern. With tons of exceptions, naturally!
Of course, as in any field, the more dramatic theories get the most attention, so it might be a while before common sense prevails. It's the same in psychology generally: Compared to a straight-forward biosocial theory, Freud is sexier, Skinner is more elegant, Maslow is more uplifiting, Jung is cooler, cognitive psych is more high-tech...
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/langorigins.html
What then is the origin of language? The question may be split into two parts, each of which has evoked in the scientific discourse of recent years a very different kind of response. We may call them the hard originary part and the less hard (but not easy) prehistoric part. The first, hard, part of the question addresses what I myself have always taken for essential: the moment, whether or not drawn out in actual time, of the emergence of language from non-language, which is also to my mind the moment of the emergence of the human from the non-human. The second, easier, part is concerned with reconstructing the intermediate stages between this origin and language as we know it.
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The second part of the question has generated a vast amount of research over the past two decades. As a result, our understanding of the parameters that define the physical and mental capacity for human language and their possible emergence in the course of primate evolution has become ever more precise. I will share some of these results with you in a moment. But on the hard part of the question that I attempted to address in The Origin of Language, that of the specific motivation and occasion of the origin of language and the human, there is a near-silence that grows in embarrassment in proportion to the anthropological intuition and semiotic sophistication of the writer. This is, in a way, a form of progress. Only the naïve or retrograde still dismiss the importance of this question, as was common a generation ago, by proposing that human language emerged over a long period of time through the gradual improvement of primate communication systems. As our understanding of the underlying neurological means by which language evolves, is learned, and is transmitted becomes more precise, and as, accordingly, its radical difference from all other forms of animal communication is appreciated, the source of what one writer calls the "magic moment" in which language began becomes all the more mysterious. I will speak to you later of a partial exception to this rule: a scholar whose solution to this enigma, as we shall see, strongly resembles that proposed in The Origin of Language, although it stops before reaching the unique scene of origin postulated by the "originary hypothesis" on the basis of the theory of mimetic desire.
There were then and, for the moment at least, still are two views of the time at which language originated; we may call them the "early" and "late" hypotheses. The dominant early hypothesis is that language in some form, what some writers call "symbolic" activity and I prefer to call "representation," appeared at the same time as the genus Homo, whose emergence from Australopithecus around two million years ago coincides with the first evidence of stone tools—the so-called Oldowan technology. In this hypothesis, the increase in brain size from Homo habilis through Homo erectus to the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was itself the product of language.
The late hypothesis, which still has a few supporters today, was constructed to explain the contrast between what appeared to be extreme technological stagnation over some two million years of tool-making and the "take-off" of about 50,000 years ago that produced more sophisticated technologies, cave art, evidence of ritual burials, and eventually the Neolithic invention of agriculture that in ten or twelve thousand short years made us what we are today. More than tool technology, it is the appearance at this time of the first indubitable signs of "culture"—that is, ritual, religious culture—that gave this hypothesis its plausibility.
With respect to the choice between the early and late hypotheses, I admit to having displayed a mild degree of what psychologists call "dissociation." I was far more concerned to defend the single origin of humanity against the once-popular multiple-origin hypothesis than to decide at what moment this single origin might have taken place. By not choosing between early or late language origin, I was able to retain features of each without really reflecting on their incompatibility.
http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0501/gans.htm

Design implies a Designer; thus, evolutionists have conjured up theories that consider language nothing more than a fortuitous chain of events. Most of these theories involve humans growing bigger brains, which then made it physiologically possible for people to develop speech and language. For instance, in the foreword of her book, The Seeds of Speech, Jean Aitchison hypothesized:
‘Physically, a deprived physical environment led to more meat-eating and, as a result, a bigger brain. The enlarged brain led to the premature birth of humans, and in consequence a protracted childhood, during which mothers cooed and crooned to their offspring. An upright stance altered the shape of the mouth and vocal tract, allowing a range of coherent sounds to be uttered.’
Thus, according to Aitchison, we can thank ‘a deprived physical environment’ for our ability to talk and communicate
Another evolutionist, John McCrone, put it this way:
‘It all started with an ape that learned to speak. Man’s hominid ancestors were doing well enough, even though the world had slipped into the cold grip of the ice ages. They had solved a few key problems that had held back the other branches of the ape family, such as how to find enough food to feed their rather oversized brains. Then man’s ancestors happened on the trick of language. Suddenly, a whole new mental landscape opened up. Man became self-aware and self-possessed.’
Question: How (and why) did that first ape learn to speak? It is easy to assert that ‘it all started with an ape that learned to speak’. But it is much more difficult to describe how this took place, especially in light of our failure to teach apes to speak today. In his book, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, Michael Corballis stated:
‘My own view is that language developed much more gradually, starting with the gestures of apes, then gathering momentum as the bipedal hominids evolved. The appearance of the larger-brained genus Homo some 2 million years ago may have signaled the emergence and later development of syntax, with vocalizations providing a mounting refrain. What may have distinguished Homo sapiens was the final switch from a mixture of gestural and vocal communication to an autonomous vocal language, embellished by gesture but not dependent on it.’
The truth however, is that evolutionists can only speculate as to the origin of language. Evolutionist Carl Zimmer summed it up well when he wrote:
‘No one knows the exact chronology of this evolution, because language leaves precious few traces on the human skeleton. The voice box is a flimsy piece of cartilage that rots away. It is suspended from a slender C-shaped bone called a hyoid, but the ravages of time usually destroy the hyoid too.
In a chapter he titled ‘What, When, and Where did Eve Speak to Adam and He to Her?,’ Philip Lieberman commented:
‘In the five-million-year-long lineage that connects us to the common ancestors of apes and human beings, there have been many Adams and many Eves. In the beginning was the word, but the vocal communications of our most distant hominid ancestors five million years or so ago probably didn’t really differ from those of the ape-hominid ancestor.’[13]
Using biblical terminology, Lieberman had written a year earlier: ‘For with speech came a capacity for thought that had never existed before, and that has transformed the world. In the beginning was the word’.[14]
When God created the first human beings—Adam and Eve—He created them in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27). This likeness unquestionably included the ability to engage in intelligible speech via human language. In fact, God spoke to them from the very beginning of their existence as humans (Genesis 1:28-30). Hence, they possessed the ability to understand verbal communication—and to speak themselves!
God gave very specific instructions to the man before the woman was even created (Genesis 2:15-17). Adam gave names to the animals before the creation of Eve (Genesis 2:19-20). Since both the man and the woman were created on the sixth day, the creation of the man preceded the creation of the woman by only hours. So, Adam had the ability to speak on the very day that he was brought into existence!
That same day, God put Adam to sleep and performed history’s first human surgery. He fashioned the female of the species from a portion of the male’s body. God then presented the woman to the man (no doubt in what we would refer to as the first marriage ceremony). Observe Adam’s response: ‘And Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man"’ (Genesis 2:23). Here is Adam—less than twenty-four hours old—articulating intelligible speech with a well-developed vocabulary and advanced powers of expression. Note also that Eve engaged in intelligent conversation with Satan (Genesis 3:1-5). An unbiased observer is forced to conclude that Adam and Eve were created with oral communication capability. Little wonder, then, that God said to Moses: ‘Who had made man’s mouth? ... Have not I, the Lord? Now therefore, go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say’ (Exodus 4:11-12).
http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp