Is Gradualism Really That Impossible?

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

While I was beginning to be a Christian, at age 9 or a little earlier, I had read the Gospels but not Genesis. Even after reading Genesis, I was hoping some time for a loophole for evolution to be true also. I mean, so much detective work had gone to it, and I was a fairly big sucker for detective stories. One thing that helped me decide for fullfledged creationism rather than evolutionism, if not fullfledged Biblical chronology yet, was the question how total non-speakers of a human language (any language whatsoever) could develop a language. If Tolkien could invent Quenya, he already had experience of knowing other languages (Finnish and Greek had helped to inspire Quenya, Spanish and Welsh had inspired Naffarin, Latin at least gave the rythm for Quenya and Sindarin with its antepaenultima rule, he already knew English and perhaps some French before starting Latin ... all starting when his mother taught him English at the apropriate age). So, let's go through a few hairbrained and detailed ideas.

One or two over the internet have suggested, when someone came up with saying the sound "tiger" when seeing a tiger, this had a survival advantage. Actually, no. Green monkeys have three danger signals, depending on whether the threat is tiger, eagle or snake. The tactic is different. Please note, if you recall, the animals generally have up to 500 signals, unitary, with well defined phonemes constituting the morphemes that constitute the entire signals. And getting to shift the entire tactic of communication, introducing more than one phoneme per morpheme and a notion of classification into the morpheme, is not the kind of thing you do in a hurry. It's like saying a Morse telegraph developed ASCII code of computers by being heavily shaken.

I found a theory (a bit more seriously) that language came by as a way for mothers to communicate with offspring they couldn't carry on the back like monkeys do. Or however it is monkeys do carry them. Well, in that case, the arguable outcome of not being able to carry offspring the normal way for a female would not be to develop a new way of communicating, but rather to lose the offspring and therefore get extinct.

Back when I was a child, about ten, I saw the theory, the first phoneme, morpheme, sentence of the human language was a bilabial f, the sound phoneticians describe by Greek letter φ - what you get when you blow through pursed lips. Why? The same sound is needed to light fires, once you master the fire. So, the one sound came to mean "fire" and "light a fire" and (since you do it with your breath) "breath" and "soul" (the thing that ceases to breath in your body when you die) and obviously "die" and "death" as well ... all this for one sound. Meanwhile, ee came to symbolise "here, by me", ah came to symbolise "there" and oo came to symbolise "yonder" ... I think one consonant and three vowels is a bit thin to actually start sorting out the diverse meanings of the original sound-word φ ...

And in Sarlat, in a library, I saw the theory Homo erectus spoke with ten speach sounds stringed vowel + cosonant and ten other ones stringed consonant + vowel. These twenty "phonemes" were also morphemes, and each had a fairly abstract meaning, with ad + am = earth + harmonious (samples of "living fossils" from this one included Eden, Aden, Adam!) ...

Enough of hairbrained ones, here is a reference, Pascal Picq, and here are my responses to one of his books:

Human Language Revisited · Elves and Adam · Back to Picq · Off the Bat

Here there is not much of an idea, the one salient point being that the language capacity of two year olds would represent the past language capacity of human ancestors at an un-precise past.

And my idea about it being that Pascal and his pals hadn't even started to scratch the problem. Plus, the suggestion makes one wonder - wouldn't a language with capacity for only positive and indicative two word sentences be a source of misunderstanding and a liability for survival rather than anything else?

Now, I'll mention Jean Aitchison with respect. Her book Language change: Progress or decay? (3rd edition (1st edition1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001) was an eye-opener in 1993 about the process I've likened to repainting a house or resewing a pair of pants or shorts - the gradual changes you see between different human languages, all of which are already perfectly human. She has also written, and I have not yet read, The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.) It is probably the best one, it basically says (as far as I have gathered) that human or pre-human courtship came to include certain songs that came to be associated with meaning outside courtship as well.

And now I'll try to fill in the details, a bit like I tried back when I was a child with "φ as in φanning a φire being the φirst word". Notable difference, to that one the book hadn't given details, and with Aitchison, I haven't had occasion to read them.

Human anatomy involves the capacity for infants to babble indefinitely and for both themselves and the surrounding adults to hear the babbling. On what I take Jean Aitchison's theory to be, this babbling came to be reused in courtship. And let's imagine some male not-yet-quite-human wooer got into saying "pat-pat-pat" while strewing nuts before the object of his desires, while in another not-yet-quite human tribe the sound at that moment would have been "pal-pal-pal" and the offering would have been apples. And the two tribes unite and some time later they note they are using "pal-pal-pal" for "give me an apple" and "pat-pat-pat" for "give me a nut" ... no, I don't think this is much better than the φ-theory already alluded to. I was going to write off that ape courtships don't have the sufficient complexity for this, but this appears to be not true, some chimps do have complex courtship.

But even so, it would take very much for distinguishing foods from combinations of courtship rituals to actually coming anywhere near a human language. It would among other things also involve inventing sentence structure and negatives and conditionals and pasts and futures as much as the other theories. And having a language lacking these would, as said, be hazardous.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Saturnine
29.XI.2021

PS: I think my impression of Jean Aitchison's work on language origin came from another preview than these two:

The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution. Aitchison Jean. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp 281.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/abs/seeds-of-speech-language-origin-and-evolution-aitchison-jean-cambridgecambridge-university-press-1996-pp-281/3D19734EA6CA3C0C6938D39BF6D26F54

The Seeds of Speech Language Origin and Evolution
Jean Aitchison
Excerpt
https://beckassets.blob.core.windows.net/product/readingsample/443426/9780521785716_excerpt_001.pdf

However, the comparison to bird song and the statement about birds using song for nesting reminds me of the thing I half recalled./HGL