Origins of Language

• How humans first learned to talk -- natural selection, survival advantages of communication in group cooperation (Lieberman)
  
  
• Chimpanzee cannot raise its tongue to the roof of its mouth to cut off passage of air and make sounds like "t" or "k" (Savage-Rumbaugh); but apes capable of learning sign language
  
  
• 5-6 million years ago, humans split from chimpanzees
  
  
• 3.6 million years ago, African australopithecines, apelike vocal tract, could not speak, communicated by gestures and grunts (Ehrlich)
  
  
• 3 million years ago, crude human proto-language: emergence of ability to pronounce more distinct sounds; early language as mixture of gestures and sounds
  
  
• 2 million years ago, archaic Homo erectus developed physical organs and mental capacity to produce a rough form of speech
  
  
• 300,000 years ago, early Neanderthals still could not pronounce "ee" and "oo"
  
  
• 100,000 years ago, first modern vocal tract appears in fossils of Homo sapiens
  
  
• 50,000 years ago, brain lateralization and language ability localization in left hemisphere
  
  
• 45,000 years ago, beginnings of development of symbolic thought and of language as we know it

Origins of Writing

• Writing as derivative of speech but also independent from it
  
  
• Durability in space and time
  
  
• Earliest graphic representations, cave paintings, pictographs, petroglyphs
  
  
  • Chauvet Pont-d'Arc cave paintings (32,000-30,000 years ago)
    
    
  • Lascaux cave paintings (17,000-15,000 years ago)
    
    
  • Altamira cave paintings (17,000-14,000 years ago)
    
    
  • Native American petroglyphs (13,000-2,000 years ago)
    
    
• Sumerians, "invention" of writing, c. 3,000 B.C.
  
  
  • cuneiform: reed on clay, wedge shaped marks, example, Sumerian-Babylonian ideogram ninda = "bread":
    
    

  
  

  • business and accounting records
    
    
  • pictorial symbols, then more schematic symbols
    
    
  • word signs, then syllable signs
    
    
  • Sumerian writing adopted by others (Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians)
    
    
  • Sample of Babylonian cuneiform script

• Egyptian hieroglyphics, invented during the Archaic period (3000-2650 BC)

• Pictographs, ideograms, logograms, syllabaries, alphabets
  
  
  • from pictures to more abstract graphics:
    
    

  

  • phonetization of writing: use of homonyms, examples:
    
    
    • hieroglyphic for Ancient Egyptian djeba = "finger" also used for number 10,000:

    

    • hieroglyphic for Ancient Egyptian kha ="lotus" also used for number 1,000:

  
  
  

  • from representation of words to that of syllables and individual sounds. Cf. contemporary Japanese writing systems, logographic (kanji), syllabaries (katakana and hiragana, each with 46 signs), and can also be written with Roman alphabetic characters
    
    
  • rebus expression: word signs standing for syllables/sounds which can be used in denoting other words or parts of words, example:

   

  
  
  

• Semitic/Phoenician syllabary/alphabet to Greek and Roman alphabet
  
  
  • Phoenicians used cuneiform writing but also developed an alphabetic script (22 symbols), since 15th c. B.C.
    
    
  • Around 1000 B.C. Greeks adapted Phoenician/Semitic symbols to their own writing

Links & References:

• Ian Tattersal, "How We Came to be Human," Scientific American, December 2001, pp. 56-63.
• Ian Tattersal, The Monkey in the Mirror (2002)
• Philip Lieberman (Brown University), Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (1998)
• Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University), Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (2000)
• Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (Georgia State University)
• Akira Nakanishi, Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms (Charles Tuttle, 1990)
• James Norman, Ancestral Voices: Decoding Ancient Languages (1975)
• KryssTal's Writing: Origins and Development ...
• Ideogram
• Ancient Scripts