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.

                                                                                        Philip Lieberman

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



17 Comments »

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. A. Gaubert said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 12:00 pm

    "I will not discuss his lengthy fieldwork among the hunter-gatherer Pirahã"
    They are not hunter-gatherers…

  4. Victor Mair said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 5:56 pm

    @A. Gaubert:

    I've checked many sources that say they are hunter-gatherers.

    What do you think they are?

  5. Cervantes said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 12:12 pm

    Language is kinda like walking in that a) everybody who has normal physiology and at least an adequate childhood environment ends up doing it but b) it does have to be learned. However, everybody walks pretty much the same way, with fairly minor variations, whereas the range of mutually unintillegible languages is vast.

    I would say that language is certainly associated with an evolved organ, the brain. Whether it requires physically distributed parts of the brain, as opposed to a single "center" seems a quibble. It doesn't actually require the vocal apparatus, since sign languages are fully languages, speech is just one way of implementing it. Writing came later, sure, but there are people who can read and write but who cannot speak. These facts are all obvious. I think this discussion consists mostly of semantic quibbles.

  6. DJL said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 12:40 pm

    The post reads a bit like an advertisement for Everett's book, and it is certainly typical of the man to quote himself in the heading to the Introduction.

  7. Jerry Packard said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 1:11 pm

    Daniel Everett was Noam Chomsky’s student, but came to disagree with Chomsky about whether all human languages have the property of recursion (I.e., self-embedding) following his fieldwork on Pirahã. As a result, Everett’s work is not held in great esteem by Chomsky and his acolytes (to view the evidence of this, google the debate between Everett and David Pesetsky on the topic of recursion in natural language).

    But this is not to say that Everett believes that the capacity to learn language is not innate and exclusive to humans (i.e., ‘hard-wired’). I think I’m not mischaracterizing Everett’s position by saying he believes that homo sapien’s ability to engage in complex cognition is innate, and that our ability to learn and use language is based upon our ability to perform complex cognitive processing. This is different from the hard-core Chomskians, who generally argue that we have innate linguistic abilities that are in principle separate from our ability to engage in complex cognition.

    I would add that, as others above point out, it seems obvious that our ability to learn and use language must be innate (and not simply learned) at some level – either cognitive or linguistic – as evidenced by the fact that no other animal learns language upon exposure to natural language stimuli.

  8. Cervantes said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 3:10 pm

    Well I dunno about you, but when I engage in complex cognition I hear words inside my head. Sometimes conclusions come to me seemingly in a flash, so something is also going on that doesn't produce the perception of a stream of words, but I have to be producing that stream, or have done so recently, in order for the thunderbolt to strike. And then I need language to fully understand the result (often my first draft ends up requiring correction or addition), record it, and convey it to others. I really don't think that I could engage in complex cognition without language — if I can't put it into words, I don't understand it. Maybe some people are different.

  9. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 3:28 pm

    wrt Cervantes's first point, key word *dedicated* evolved organ: the brain is of course the everything organ, whereas Chomsky etc. spoke in effect (to employ the above analogy) of the "walking instinct" / "walking organ"

    which analogy is of course not perfect but better than it might appear… first and trivially, as there clearly exists *some* degree of walking variation which is down to cultural and environmental conditioning ("邯鄲學步" comes to mind), one can isomorphize as one wishes. Second and interestingly, just bring in the more crucial condition which affects ways of talking: you gotta do it practically *exactly* like those around you to get anything done. Now this would bring walking variation from town to town to a whole new funkyass level…

  10. Cervantes said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 3:40 pm

    Well, plenty of people who talk quite differently from each other are mutually intelligible, although admittedly I don't understand Alabaman very well. And I understand there is a Ministry of Silly Walks.

  11. david said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 4:02 pm

    In the 19th century two neurologists, Broca and Wernike, discovered areas in the brain necessary for speech production and language comprehension. There must be other regions involved with the connections to the ears and eyes and to the vocal chords and the gesturing muscles.

  12. Jenny Chu said,

    January 16, 2025 @ 11:06 pm

    Is one of his arguments that, because language uses various parts of the brain and one specialized organ, it cannot be an innate ability? One might say there is no specialized organ for walking, since the legs cannot do it without the rest of the body and, indeed, can certainly not do it without the brain. Does it mean walking is not an innate or instinctive ability?

    Or am I misunderstanding his thesis?

  13. khoobplus said,

    January 17, 2025 @ 5:19 am

    Daniel Everett's perspective on the evolution of language, as discussed in your post, offers a compelling alternative to the traditional view of an innate language instinct. His proposition that language developed gradually through stages—G1 (linear order), G2 (hierarchical structures), and G3 (recursion)—challenges conventional timelines and underscores the intricate relationship between culture and communication. It's fascinating to consider how these stages might have influenced the cognitive and social development of early humans.

  14. Jerry Packard said,

    January 17, 2025 @ 9:25 am

    @Jenny. I’m not sure. I think that too much is made of the notion that a language ‘organ’ is a discrete, localized entity. The organ idea is an abstraction, and was never intended to entail the idea that it has a discrete location in place X. It must have a location in the existential sense, but that location happens to be physically distributed among the neural circuits of the brain. Some parts are more discretely located than others (e.g., Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas).

    @khoobplus. I personally see no conflict between the view of an innate language instinct and Everett’s view of how it evolved be that way. After all, we are all now born with that same ability, and it would seem to make little difference how we evolved to have that ability. Even if there are some remnants of the G1 and G2 grammars in some extant languages (and I don’t know if Everett is arguing that), that doesn’t seem to argue against the possibility that they are innate.

  15. Chris Button said,

    January 17, 2025 @ 10:48 am

    @ Jerry Packard and @ Jenny Chu

    Isn't the physiological argument from Lieberman that the larynx lowered as humans became bipedal and upright, and that lowering then allowed for the distinctive sounds of speech? Presumably, what effect that lowering had on the brain is open to debate.

  16. Sally Thomason said,

    January 27, 2025 @ 11:03 am

    @Cervantes: I'm like you, I hear words inside my head when I'm thinking. But I don't think adults are a test case for claims about thinking in words vs. thinking without words, and preverbal children can't tell us how they're thinking, much less how complex their thoughts are. But they certainly understand a lot of language before they can produce words, and they can express fairly complex thoughts, too. I do realize that anecdotes aren't evidence, but still: I recall my older daughter asking a (rather simple and in an obvious context) question intelligibly by intonation alone, and my younger daughter claiming, before she could talk and therefore wordlessly, that it was her sister, not her, who had just broken a glass. Admittedly, it might be that they have the words in their heads and are thinking in words even if they can't pronounce them, but that seems to me to be a bit of a stretch.

  17. Francis Boyle said,

    February 4, 2025 @ 11:01 am

    I write poetry (maybe an aberrant form of language use but I suspect instructive nonetheless). The output is language but I'm pretty sure the process which produces that output is non-verbal. Of course I can reason about, say, whether one word or another is better in a particular location, but that's really just editing. I certainly no of no linguistic procedure which can handle the creation process. When in that mode my brain may as well be an LLM.

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