The origin of language

Two chimpanzees provide care Ian Gilby

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• The tree of the language;

  by Lola Pons

The knowledge received tells us that human language is an arbitrary system, that is, that there is no objective relationship between a word and its meaning. There is nothing in a tree that corresponds to the sound

, nor to its phonemes a, r, b, o, l. Semantics is in this sense a frozen accident, an arbitrary decision of an ancient population that, from a certain moment, is perpetuated by cultural inheritance. It is the same concept that biologists use to explain the origin of the genetic code. Very well. Now let's see what the latest language experiments say. Reality rules.

Linguist Marcus Perlman, from the University of Birmingham, and his colleagues from around the world have just presented the first large and multicultural study focused on a key question: Can the speakers of any language understand a vocalization totally invented by English speakers? For example, a sequence of sounds invented to mean

or

is presented to the speakers of 28 languages ​​and they are asked to assign a meaning from 12 options, be it words of their language or pictures. Incredible as it may seem, the result is that yes, they guess it far above what you might expect by chance. An important point is that the invented vocalizations exclude onomatopoeia, such as

or cockroach, which are words that imitate the sound of their meaning (in the case of the cockroach, rather the sound of stepping on one, which is better appreciated in English

).

The details are complicated.

For example, participants scored better with made-up vocalizations that were intended to mean

and

and downright wrong with

and

Living things performed better than inanimate entities.

The authors do not rule out at all that gestures were important for the origin of human language, as most linguists maintain, but they provide evidence that mere sounds were another essential vector in that process.

We don't know if language originated in our species, by the way. There is genetic and anatomical evidence that Neanderthals possessed this ability, and that means that it was neither we nor they who developed it, but the common ancestor of the two species,

emerged two million years ago in Africa. There are even recent indications that great apes (chimps, gorillas and orangutans) have remarkable control of their vocalizations. The rhythm of your lungs is loosely coupled with the movements of your tongue and lips, a precondition of human language. On this substrate, evolution has been able to build a progressive improvement in vocalization control. There is no proof, but the framework is conceivable, because it fulfills both of Darwin's prerequisites. First, that the number of connections between the cerebral cortex, seat of the mind, and the muscles that move the mouth and tongue is under genetic control. And second, that the genes responsible provide an obvious advantage to their carrier, and therefore can be propagated by natural selection.Linguistics has opened a window to the origins of our species.