The Rapid Rise of Human Language

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Piotr, our esteemed associate, is a linguist. I admire the discipline of linguistics on many levels and some of my professional work has been in formal languages (computer languages, DNA languages). Noam Chomsky was noted for his contributions to computers, languages and psychology. Chomsky’s work was my first and only formal introduction to linguistics.

Piotr and I have different views of origins, and creationists have viewed language as also a special creation. But I’ve always enjoyed his discussion of languages.

One thing I will admit, I’ve been astonished at how rapidly and radically the English language has evolved in the history of the language. For example, the battle records of the Battle of Agincourt in 1414 are written in a way that is completely unrecognizable to me.

The English in the time of the poet Shakespeare and the King James Bible in the 1600’s is a little more recognizable to me. The English of the 1800’s is noticeably different from the 1600’s. Even watching old movies, I can hear subtle changes in accents. So it seems to me, from my limited perspective, languages can evolve and change quickly.

Whatever one thinks of origins of language, I found this article compelling:

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/rapid-rise-human-language-0331

At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It is easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing. But in a new paper, an MIT linguist contends that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the ones we use today.

“The hierarchical complexity found in present-day language is likely to have been present in human language since its emergence,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, and a co-author of the new paper on the subject.
…
Miyagawa has an alternate hypothesis about what created human language: Humans alone, as he has asserted in papers published in recent years, have combined an “expressive” layer of language, as seen in birdsong, with a “lexical” layer, as seen in monkeys who utter isolated sounds with real-world meaning, such as alarm calls. Miyagawa’s “integration hypothesis” holds that whatever first caused them, these layers of language blended quickly and successfully.
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Miyagawa’s integration hypothesis is connected intellectually to the work of other MIT scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, who have contended that human languages are universally connected and derive from our capacity for using syntax. In forming, this school of thought holds, languages have blended expressive and lexical layers through a system Chomsky has called “Merge.”

155 thoughts on “The Rapid Rise of Human Language”

  1. Piotr Gasiorowski:
    Rober Byers: there is no evolution in language except people changing things in mutual agreement.

    In most cases people like to imagine they stick to traditional norms, and they may even try to prevent language change and (see how many “Letters to the Editor” contain angry protest against linguistic innovations). Have you ever been to a public meeting where the proposal of a new language change was discussed and put to the vote?

    I mentioned the Norwich dialect in one of the posts above. They have quite a few funny pronunciations there. Foer example, they treat intervocalic /nt/ before an unstressed vowel in a way that is unique in the English-speaking world. The /n/ is deleted and the /t/ is pronounced as a glottal stop (written below as an apostrophe). Twenty, plenty, going to end up as twe’ee, ple’ee, gaw’a. This pronunciation is the outcome of a sequence of historical changes affecting regular articulation habits. They took several human generations to become fixed locally. How did the local people reach “mutual agreement” on it (or on ple’ee of other local innovations) in your opinion?

    The local people may of been a immigrant population or simply secluded enough in the beginning. if non english immigrants then they brought a few differences or if native it came from some segregated group in that small society. Say the young men when being aggresive in the society. talking faster.
    So its then mutual agreement amongst the rest to change to this new style.
    Local dielects strongly suggest its mutual agreement. Sudden and not sloppy evolving with no rhyme or reason.
    There is a innovator in language changes. A idea. not a evolving chancy thing.

  2. Another Szymborska poem begins:

    My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
    My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.

    🙂

  3. keiths:

    Another Szymborska poem begins:

    Apparently soft poern is ok at TSZ.

  4. keiths:

    I have always been — and still am — quite willing to have substantive discussions with people I personally dislike, even when they use pejoratives. Otherwise I would have stopped commenting at UD a long time ago!

    Alan:

    Lizzie has persuaded me that perhaps having fun is less satisfying than taking the longer road of understanding where others are coming from and possibly widening their horizons.

    Those aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible to

    a) have fun,
    b) understand your opponent’s position,
    c) have a substantive discussion,
    d) dislike said opponent, and
    e) call him ‘Greg’ instead of ‘Gregory’,

    all at the same time. What’s preventing that in this case is Gregory’s unwillingness to supplement his pejoratives with an actual argument.

    The pejoratives aren’t the problem; the lack of substance is.

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