Chicken or egg; grammar or language
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When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language. Two types stood out: those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing. As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things"). The best stocked / selling one on scripts was Andrew Robinson's The Story of Writing, and its counterpart for speech was Daniel Everett's How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.
In this post, I will focus on the latter volume and its author, with whom Language Log readers are well acquainted (see the bibliography below). I will not discuss his lengthy fieldwork among the hunter-gatherer Pirahã of the Lowland Amazonia region (to be distinguished from the piranha or piraña fish which has such a fearsome reputation and also lives in the Amazon), but will emphasize his radical theories of the origins of language.
The book begins with this epigraph:
Language is not an instinct, based on genetically transmitted knowledge coded in a discrete cortical 'language organ'. Instead it is a learned skill… that is distributed over many parts of the human brain.
The first Introduction is headed by this exchange:
In the beginning was the Word.
John 1:1
No, it wasn't.
Dan Everett
Right away, we can see who Everett is up against, namely those who believe that language is hard-wired in the human brain, whereas he believes it is learned / acquired / developed. This has important implications for how long humans are thought to have had language capability.
Daniel Everett confounds the conventional wisdom that language originated with Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago and that we have a 'language instinct'. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of fields, including linguistics, archaeology, biology, anthropology and neuroscience, he shows that our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, had the biological and mental equipment for speech one and half million years ago, and that their cultural and technological achievements (including building ocean-going boats) make it overwhelmingly likely they spoke some kind of language.
(source)
The figure of 60,000 generations is often given in reference to the length of time that Everett holds Homo has possessed the capacity for speech.
Grammar did not arrive in the human brain hard-wired and full blown, but came in three stages: G1, G2, and G3. G1 are grammars in linear order, G2 grammars that have hierarchy, and G3 grammars that have recursion. All three stages of grammar did not arrive at the beginning of Homo language. The same growth in complexity also applies to phonology, which started out simple and developed into more complicated phonological systems.
At his TED talk in San Francisco, Everett did not mention (but alluded to) linguists who think differently from him about an innate, inborn language in humans. However, he gives a lot of credit to the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) for developing the idea of signs (indexes, icons, and symbols). These too arrived in stages, not full-blown.
And so on and so forth.
It is no accident that Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), the renowned myrmecologist / entomologist, held Everett's work in the highest regard. They both realized that culture and communication are the result of biological imperatives.
Selected readings
- "Dan Everett at TEDxPenn" (3/28/17) — with a lengthy bibliography of posts about his work
- "How language began | Dan Everett | TEDxSanFrancisco" — listen to him speak fluent Pirahã, which has only 10 sounds for women and 11 sounds for men
Scott P. said,
January 16, 2025 @ 9:20 am
I would like to read a learned summary of Everett's arguments. My limited understanding of the matter is that the argument for humans having some innate language ability is grounded on
1) the relative universality and facility with which humans learn language as opposed to other complex skills. An example would be that learning the fundamentals of algebra — which on my Fermi estimate is somewhere between 1/100 and 1/1000 as complex a task of symbol manipulation as being fluent in a language — is considered to be a fairly advanced skill and one requiring years of grounding in even simpler mathematics; a four-year old who had mastered it would be considered a prodigy.
2) the difficulty (some would say impossiblity) of teaching other primates to use language.
As far as speech is concerned, there is also the question of when the modern human pharynx evolved to the point that complex speech sounds could be uttered.
I claim no special knowledge on the subject, but maybe this can spark conversation.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 16, 2025 @ 10:03 am
The whole debate as always been weird IMO — language is a complex learned ("honed"?) skill for which humans obviously have an innate capacity. No one ever said walking is an "instinct" associated with some dedicated evolved "organ" (cf. Pinker/Chomsky); equally, no one ever said walking is a "cultural artifact" like algebra or skiing (cf. Sampson), an arguably even stranger claim. Language is kinda like walking, surely.