South Africa's Week

This week a “Cradle of Language Conference” will be underway in Stellenbosch, South Africa, just outside of Cape Town. Today’s sessions are of the get acquainted type and are more likely to be a source of good gossip than news of direct interest to this blog. The rest of the week will present a cornucopia of papers exploring the general question: did human language emerge in Africa?

The answer is almost assuredly yes, although not every scholar agrees on this point. An alternative speculation is that language arose from an insight of genius after Homo sapiens had diverged from one another and that it spread across the species as one person after another appreciated the gains to be had by speaking. In that case the genius inventor could have been anywhere. The dominant argument at Stellenbosch, however, begins with the proposition that language evolved in Africa and bases that idea on three assumptions:

1. The brain began to develop a linguistic capacity around 2 million years ago.
2. A protolanguage emerged about a million years ago.
3. Full language appeared perhaps 150 thousand years ago with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens (a.k.a. us).

This set of propositions should be considered jumping off points. Participants are under no obligation to accept them and this blog can report that several key speakers will propose alternate timetables.

A number of the papers scheduled concern sign language and gesture, so there may be a lively discussion as to whether the protolanguage was a form of speech or gesture. There are also a number of papers scheduled that examine the relationship between music and language origins, which does not fit neatly into the outline above.

A small operation like this blog cannot possibly attend the conference to report directly from there, but it will be making a persistent effort to cover the news all week and will probably have much more to report in the weeks that come.

Some of the attendees have sent private words of support to this blog and all attendees are encouraged to post fulsome comments about the papers, discussions, and any good gossip. The idea of a blog is that people in a position to know can contribute directly to the discussion, so please, conference-goers, join in.

The conference organizers have created a website (here).

While the conference goes on Babel’s Dawn will function a bit differently. The normal midnight (New York time) posting will consist of a short commentary on a theme scheduled for the day’s meetings. As the conference proceeds notes will be added from time to time during the day.

Next week the blog will return to normal.

Comments

[TLTB]

When I was in Stellenbosch some years ago I conducted some very interesting self-experiments on the effects of wine on linguistic capacity.

That is an impressive line up. I see my friend Salikoko Mufwene is giving a talk. It'll be interesting to see what comes from the conference.