The Origin of Language

Archeological evidence, although it enables us to set an approximate date for the beginnings of language, offers no evidence from which we can reconstruct its evolutionary development. We must approach this problem by comparing human language as a whole with the communicative systems of the animals, and primarily with the systems known to exist among the apes.

The communicatory systems of 1he modern apes, and probably also of the early hominoids, are in essence closed repertories of calls. Man's language, on the other hand, is an open system, a system that is capable of producing an almost infinite number of utterances, some learned but many others formed on patterns common to the speech community rather than learned. Indeed, man's language enables him both to produce and to understand utterances that are completely novel, that have never been spoken or heard before, This property of language, its productivity, is apparently lacking in the call systems of the animals.

A second property of language, also absent from all call systems, is displacement, Displacement refers to man's ability to talk about things and events that are remote in time or space. It is the faculty of displaced speech that enables man to recount events in his past and events that took place long before he was born; to talk about things and events he hopes to achieve in the future; and to create, in myth and fiction, beings, things, and events, natural or supernatural, that have never existed and. perhaps never can exist, Displaced speech, it is evident, also gives a continuity to physical experience, and so enables man, alone among the animals, to work out his problems in the absence of the physical situations in which these problems arise.

The utterances of a language consists wholly of a sequence of elementary signaling units - distinctive sounds, or phonemes, Phonemes have no meanings in themselves but serve only to keep meaningful utterances apart, as when the utterance I hit him is clearly distinguished from I bit him simply by changing the first phoneme of hit and bit. Language also has a structure in terms of morphemes, minimum meaningful elements, such that a pair of utterances like, he walks along and he walked along are distinguished by the contrast between walk and walked; more specifically by the fact that the morpheme written -s and marking the present tense appears in the first utterance, whereas the morpheme written –ed and marking the past tense occurs in the second utterance.

This design feature of language, whereby morphemes are differentiated by varying combinations of phonemes, is called duality of patterning. It is duality of patterning that makes it possible for a language to possess several thousands of morphemes, even though the number of distinctive signaling units, or phonemes, is rarely more than fifty. In a call system, each call differs as a whole from the rest, both in total sound effect and in meaning.

The fourth distinctive property of language, traditional transmission, refers to the fact that language is taught and learned; it is not, as appears to be the case with call systems, transmitted by the genes. Human children have no language at birth - they acquire one by hearing and rehearsing utterances made by adults and" later, by inferring from the utterances they hear the meanings of the morphemes and, more importantly, the processes by which phonemes and morphemes are built into complete utterances. Once they have acquired these processes, the children build their own, often quite novel utterances, ones they have neither heard nor rehearsed.