Name: How Did Language Begin
Uploaded: 2020-09-16T10:04:40.000Z
Duration: 3 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If we want to know when humans started making fire, or cultivating plants, or domesticating

animals we can look for the things they left behind when doing those things.

But what if we want to know how language began?

Language disappears on the air as soon as it is produced.

We will never dig up the first word, or discover a fossilized sentence.

That hasn't stopped people from speculating about how that first word came about.

For centuries, people have put forth theories on it.

There's the bow-wow theory, that language started from imitation of sounds that things

There's the Pooh-Pooh theory, that it came from automatic vocal responses to fear, pain,

There's the Yo-He-Ho theory, that it came from rhythmic grunts or chants used to coordinate

actions when working on big projects together.

There's the La-La theory, that it emerged from the sounds of inspired playfulness, poetic

This one is lovely, but no more likely than any of the others.

By the late 19th century so much fruitless speculation about the origin of language was

going around that the Paris Linguistic Society banned all discussion of the topic in its

It was fed up scholars who gave the theories those silly nicknames.

But even though language itself doesn't leave a trace we can tell from fossils when we had

the brains and other physical parts that make speech possible.

For instance, we can tell when the voice box moved into its current position.

Chimps, our closest relatives, have their voice boxes in a different place, so they

can't produce the sounds we can, but they also can't choke on food.

Evolutionarily speaking, it must have been really worth it to have the lower voice box.

So the physical pieces were were falling into place 100,000 years ago, when we became homo

Maybe we first needed to develop better memory, or more complex social structures, or other

By the time we were building things that required a lot of coordination, language was probably

If we had the ability to think symbolically enough to make cave paintings, language was

Maybe it was first a sort of rudimentary toddler-like language.

Which should give you some sense of how much people still disagree about this.

Humans are the only beings that have language, but we are not the only ones that communicate.

Some people think there was a genetic mutation that created an innate language ability.

Others think you don't need to assume a sudden mutation, but the right accumulation of other

skills -- good working memory, fine motor control, skill for pattern recognition and

imitation, the ability to imagine other people's minds and make assumptions about what they

understand, an impulse toward social cooperation, a long period where the young stay with adults

as their brains are still developing, -- some animals have some of these things, but humans

have all of them, and maybe, if you have all those things together at a certain level,

you get language for free on top of that.

We don't know, but some time between, oh, 100,000 and 10,000 years ago we started to

share our thoughts with each other in words and sentences.

Then we immediately started using it to criticize teenagers for how they were ruining our language.