What was the First Language?
20 January 2005
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Let's try a simple answer first: Over the past several hundred years, American English "spun off" from English in Britain and became a separate way of speaking. English itself "spun off" from a language that was an ancestor of today's German. Just about all of the several thousand languages in the world came into being through this kind of splitting and re-splitting.
Yes, but that doesn't answer the question: What was the first language, the one that started all the splitting? And when did language start?
Questions like these were easier to answer back when supernatural explanations were in fashion. You could just say that language was a gift granted to humans at birth, like their senses and their limbs. The answer to "when" was: when Adam and Eve lived In the Garden of Eden.
Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a different way of thinking about the history of humans and their languages showed up. Researchers found relationships among existing languages. They began to show how "family trees" could have arisen through thousands of years of changing and splitting from languages that no longer exist. They developed a method of reconstructing those long-dead languages from clues surviving in today's languages, and almost everybody believes it gives trustworthy results for languages separated for up to about 5,000 or 7,000 years. But most scholars think that languages separated for 10,000 or more years have changed too much for the method to be reliable. And modern humans have been around five or ten times that long.
So when did wordless early humans, or almost-humans, turn into the talkers that we've since become? And what was their speech like? Over the past quarter-century increasing amounts of brainpower -- and more and more kinds of brainpower -- have been devoted to those questions. Paleontologists studying fossils and ancient artifacts have improved our understanding of humanity's early past. Psychologists have studied how infants make the transition from wordless creatures into talking children. Primatologists have devised ingenious experiments to determine how much human-like linguistic behavior apes can learn, if any. And neurologists and anatomists are making clearer just how extensively human language is enabled -- and limited -- by the human body and brain. They point out that language was impossible until modern humans were anatomically ready for it -- we had to have both the right kind of vocal tract to make speech sounds and the right kind of nervous system to control them.
Did you know that humans are unique in having a lowered larynx that permits the production of speech sounds? Speech isn't just a byproduct of a system designed for breathing and eating. Changes that took place in the larynx, pharynx and mouth came about at the cost of less efficient breathing, chewing and swallowing. You can choke from food lodged in your larynx; but a chimpanzee can't. Your dog can eat his food in a few quick gulps, but he can't talk. You can talk because you can't wolf your food. There must be great survival value in speech, if it cost us efficiency in eating. In short, we're built for speech. And the changes in our anatomy, traceable in fossil remains, took place around 50,000 years ago. So the consensus is that language probably started then, around the time our ancestors started to draw pictures on the walls of caves.
As I've said, we'll probably never be able to reconstruct what words those ancestors said, what their speech sounded like. But some fascinating recent research suggests that we may be able to know something about the grammar of the earliest languages -- how words came together to form sentences. Within the past few centuries several new languages of a special kind have been born. European colonists arriving in the third world communicated with their local laborers using Pidgin, a kind of adult babytalk using a hodgepodge of words from different languages, strung together with a rudimentary grammar. When children are raised speaking a Pidgin as their native language, it becomes a Creole, with a broader vocabulary and a more elaborate grammar. Now here’s the fascinating part: Unrelated Creole languages in places as far apart as Surinam, Haiti, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea have radically different vocabularies, but they all seem to share very similar grammars, suggesting that the human brain may be hardwired to create particular patterns of speech. Could this be a clue to the language of the Garden of Eden?
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from philologist and free-lance writer Barry Hilton in Maine. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you’d like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.