Language, religion, origins, etc.

This is a reply to a post by dailymeh where he said:

While we’re on the topic of divine revelations, I wouldn’t mind a revelation, though a scientific one would do, about the origin of language. It is, with only a bit of hyperbole, as mysterious as the origin of the universe or of life. We know a lot about how the universe evolved after the Big Bang and about how animals evolved from the primordial life and about how languages evolve from their ancestors, but how the universe, the first life, or the first language came into existence is very, very unclear. The relationship between sounds and concepts is essentially arbitrary. It makes no difference whether I call water afdaxhamasr or water, so long as my friends and my family and you and everyone else calls it the same. So how did the first association come about? We can explain why water is called water by studying the history of the word, but how did there come to be a word for water in the first place, and how was that word chosen? Did language develop once or many times? Does every language that exists today have a common ancestor, and if so, can we reconstruct it? (No, we probably can’t even if we could show that there was a common ancestor. But the rest of those are open.)

A few years ago, I took a course on psycholinguistics. Some courses have had a profound impact on my world view, and this was one of them. The required reading for the course was Pinker’s The language instinct. I can’t recommend that book enough for anyone interested in the topic.

In that book, Pinker argues that we humans are driven to learn language and that it takes very strange circumstances indeed (essentially total isolation until adolescence) for this to not happen. He discusses some interesting cases, such as the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. I’ll only summarize it here; that Wikipedia article gives a more detailed description.

In Nicaragua, until the 1970s-1980s, deaf children were scattered across the country and were not taught a sign language. Although I assume many learned to lip-read, this is a very difficult (and even at its best, inaccurate) skill. Because of this, they had a hard time fitting into society. To address this problem, the government established a school to bring these children together and teach them a sign language. A group of educators sat down and developed their own sign language and began to teach it at this school. The children hated it and were incapable learn it. It simply wasn’t a human language.

Instead, the teachers noticed that on the playground, completely spontaneously, the children were developing their own sign language completely unlike the one the teachers had tried to teach them. It began with simple gestures (the signing equivalent of a pidgin language), but over time it developed its own syntax much like you would find in a mature language like American Sign Language. It had transitioned from a pidgin to a creole language. Similar phenomena have been observed in other situations where people without a common language are forced together. The “pidgin language” article linked above lists some examples.

In fact, this should not be surprising since all human languages share a common structure, which linguists call X-bar theory. I don’t know enough about X-bar theory to comment on it, except that the theory states that the syntax of all human languages differ only in the order of elements within X-bar rules.

To specifically answer dailymeh’s questions, the actual words of a language are not important and have more to do with history and anthropology than anything else. Obviously, the pronunciation is limited by the phonemes (sounds) that a human can produce, but other than that they are arbitrary.

I suspect that what we consider language developed from simpler roots that we can see in our living primate relatives. At some point, our hominid ancestors needed more sophisticated ways of communicating. Perhaps it was an advantage for groups of hunters to be able to plan elaborate strategies while on a hunt. For this reason, I suspect that language developed only once, but over millions of years of refinement.

Since our language faculties have not changed substantially for as long as we have been homo sapiens, if you were to clone an early modern human they would be able to learn a modern language like any other child born today. Similarly, if you found yourself with a group of neolithic humans you would have no more difficulty than learning another (unrelated) modern language.

I think that human language is one of our most fascinating abilities. It’s humbling to think that all human languages are so similar — far more similar, in fact, than they are different.