Babel's Dawn

A New Framework

Don't Look Down! Yikes. Yosemite Sam has run out of ground to stand on. So has the standard framework for understanding speech origins.

I’ve been thinking about this blog’s posts that appeared during the past two months. Reporting on one revolutionary article after another has forced me to regroup. During the 16 months I’ve been reporting on developments concerning speech origins I’ve changed my mind about so many important points that I’m now asking questions quite different from the ones I began with. So this post will set out a framework for speech origins that seems more in tune with the material I have reported.

The standard framework for speech origins is very much in keeping with an individualistic, rationalistic view of human behavior. The rationalism side assumes that speech organizes symbols to express their relationships, while the individualism part supposes that genes are selected to increase the speaker’s ability to control others through the rational power speech provides.

A traditional humanist might want to quarrel with this or that point, but the whole structure is supported by distinct lines of inquiry. So even if a doubter questions one proposition, the structure remains sturdy and able to stand. However, when I sat down to list the major changes I have made as a result of this blog I discovered the whole established structure has been replaced. Like Yosemite Sam finally noticing the ground beneath his feet has gone, I’m forced to holler Yikes.

One Year On

The blogger. Edmund Blair Bolles at a reunion of Peace Corps Volunteers in October 2007. Photo taken by fellow volunteer Marilyn Kelly.

Last month, without my noticing, I passed the first anniversary of this blog. Now that I have noticed the event, I thought this might be a good time to update the “declaration of purpose” with which I began this blog (here). Visitors to the site regularly check out that original post, but I did not read it once it went up. So I looked it up and find that, at least, the main ambition of the blog has held steady and stayed in my mind:

…become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges. … The questions that concern this blog are where did [speech] come from? Why did we evolve it? When did we evolve it? How did we evolve it? Somewhere along the human line our ancestors began speaking while chimpanzee ancestors did not. What accounts for the difference?

My anticipated reward for success at understanding the origins of speech is also the same as I suggested at the outset, gain “a good, detailed knowledge of just what it is that made humans human,” although it is plain that not everybody who writes in this field looks for the same reward. Some expect to find that the differences between animals (including the great apes) and humans are overrated and that we are part of a continuum of species, not an outlier. Others are looking for mechanical and computational explanations of speech’s details. How did we become talking machines? But whatever goal drives one’s curiosity we are all faced with the same data and are pushed in the direction it points.

What has changed is my sense of the elements of speech. The original declaration of purpose listed a series of “elements of speaking” that now needs revising. Below is my current list of elements. If we understood their development we would have a good detailed knowledge of how we came to be human, although, as I said in my original post, “we must admit that with so many circumstances lost forever, the best we can hope for is probably a very grainy story. But right now, grainy sounds good.” Grainy still sounds good, but perhaps the list is a bit more clearly focused:

Vive la Différence

This post begins the creation of a blog that aims to become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges.

I say speech rather than language because speech is a concrete behavior while language is an abstraction. In order to speak our ancestors had to evolve all the general elements of language (e.g., the ability to utter words in syntactical form) along with the specific powers of making verbal sounds. Some investigators have speculated that sign language predated speech, but even if that notion proves correct, it is speech that characterized humans when they emerged into history. The questions that concern this blog are where did that behavior come from? Why did we evolve it? When did we evolve it? How did we evolve it? Somehwere along the human line our ancestors began speaking while chimpanzee ancestors did not. What accounts for the difference?

Unfortunately, scholars are not agreed on what makes speech different from animal vocalizations, as will become clear the moment people begin to define the differences. Some common examples of difference between speaking and vocalizing include:

• A larger vocabulary: Although stressing this difference will strike many as tragically naïve, it is in some sense plainly correct. Ape vocalizations are few. Long before their second birthdays, toddlers probably have larger vocabularies.
• Syntax: Noam Chomsky once defined a language as the full set of sentences that can be generated by its grammatical rules. The full set, by the way, is infinite. Chimpanzees cannot string their vocalizations into grammatically organized sentences. On the other hand, speech is a performance and often not syntactical. "And then!" is not a full English sentence, but it can be effective and quite meaningful speech. Syntax is taken as speaking's critical difference by those who believe that humans are computing machines and that their speech has been generated entirely through a process of mechanical computation.
• Symbolic representation: Words are profoundly unlike vocalizations for having a symbolic meaning. Gorillas can point or learn their name, but they cannot express themselves symbolically. That is to say, they cannot communicate about anything beyond their perceptual gestalt of the here and now. The importance of symbols as the distinguishing difference of human thought has long been accepted by many schools of philosophy and retains its central role among many people who have not embraced syntax as the key difference.
• Concern for another: Speech requires listeners as well as speakers, and to listen you have to care about what is going on in the head of another. Such concern is not completely unknown in the non-human universe. Mothers are often concerned teachers of their young, but for speech to work that concern must be generalized to a larger group.
• Imagination: Imagination gives us something to say. You may be concerned about me, but if I have nothing to report your concern will go unsatisfied. It would take more than the gift of tongues to make your beloved pet cat speak. A whole new way of experiencing the world would have to be added before meow became insufficient to the moment. Much speech has a subjective side. It includes emotions, point of view, taste, and attitude. At any given moment, most of us are only dimly aware of any of these things but without consciousness of some part of the subjective stew we will have nothing to say that vocalization could not satisfy. There is very much of a chicken-and-egg quality here because speech brings out consciousness of our difference from others, giving speakers more to think about and say. Humanists stress this difference.
• Speech Organs: The idea that speech organs alone were enough to explain speaking had strong support 40 years ago. Many people argued that chimpanzees could use language if only they were not required to produce and attend to sounds. The notion led to a variety of experimental efforts at teaching apes to communicate silently, most famously in attempts to teach sign languages to young gorillas and chimpanzees. This work established that primates could use signs as references, but it also showed that, even when given every opportunity and encouragement, they do not organize these signs grammatically nor do they turn them into symbols. This work was a great triumph of experimental science, settling in a few years an argument that might have lasted for generations if it had remained a philosophical dispute. Speaking cannot simply reflect our body’s ability to fine tune sounds. In that chicken or the egg question, we have a fact: the organs of speech are a chicken that came out of an egg that already supported some Difference with our non-verbal, primate cousins. Obviously, the evolution of speech involved a great deal of anatomical adaptations, but they have the look of a lagging indicator.

If we understood the development of each of these elements of speaking, we would have a good, detailed knowledge of just what it is that made humans human. Sadly we must admit that with so many circumstances lost forever, the best we can hope for is probably a very grainy story. But right now, grainy sounds good. The task of this blog will be to develop the stories of these various elements and, from time to time, see if they can be combined into any sort of image, no matter how grainy.