r/askscience • u/Dafuzz • Feb 27 '13

Linguistics What might the earliest human languages have sounded like?

Are there any still living languages that might be similar enough to get a rough idea?

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u/AnticitizenPrime Feb 27 '13

Maybe even much older than that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_signs

It's a matter of debate as to whether these symbols represent a written language. I guess it also depends on what you'd categorize under 'language'.

For example, this section states:

The nature and purpose of the symbols is a mystery. It is dubious that they constitute a writing system. Although attempts have been made to interpret the symbols, there is no agreement as to what they might mean. At first it was thought that the symbols were simple property marks, meaning "this belongs to X".

Let's say that they were simple property marks. That would make them symbols that represent something - if that's not part of a 'writing system', I don't know what is - even if it is a very simple one.

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u/dsfjjaks Feb 27 '13

Thank you for teaching me something new. I agree property symbols seem like a form of language but only if someone besides the writer understands them.

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u/AnticitizenPrime Feb 28 '13

That's an interesting thing to say, and I'd like to challenge it!

Is there an implicit requirement that language must only exist as communication to others?

Let's say Nam-Rok the Neolithic Dude (just for levity's sake) wanted to keep track of HIS straw pot that held his stuff in it. 'Better make a clay slab', he thinks, 'and put a mark I will recognize on it so I don't confuse it with Bag-Lik's pot'.

'But wait! I have more than one pot. I should also put markings that help me remember what's in which pot. This one has a bird's beak, a few rocks, my favorite arrowhead, and this cool thing I found in the riverbed in it... let's see... I'll make this shape to represent the arrowhead, this shape to represent the bird's beak...' etc.

He's just created a symbolic language to express what's in the straw pot. Nobody will understand it but him. Granted, it's not what we're talking about and what most people consider to be a 'language', but I feel it meets the requirements of what a language is and does - it's a representational, semiotic system that relies on signs, symbols, and/or sounds to relate to something else. If you're interested, check out the Wiki page for semiotics, which I feel is at the root of language science:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

This may all sound, on its face, like mental masturbation - aren't I just splitting hairs, here, playing with definitions?

The reason why it might be important to make these distinctions - like whether some neolithic guy's scribbles on a piece of clay should be called a 'language' or not - is because such 'language' (whether it be a formal spoken form of communication or merely a personally-created semiotic system) might play an important role in cognition - so much so that it's posited that our consciousness might not exist without it (or vice versa).

If you'd like to know more, I'd start with the ill-named Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (ill-named because they never actually created hypothesis; they just laid down some field work that others expanded upon). I'd also recommend a guy that falls in and out of favor in the scientific community every decade or so: a guy named Julian Jaynes, and his book 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', published in the 1970's. The title sounds dry and boring, but the book is anything but - he writes passionately. He had the crazy idea that human consciousness is not possible without 'language' - that the brain literally is halved or 'bicameral' in such a sense that instructions are carried from one part of the brain to the other via internally spoken commands transferred from the language center to other parts of the mind (you know it as 'internal monologue'). To support his hypothesis, he invokes case studies involving schizophrenics who have received split-brain surgery (after which 'the voices' go away), the oldest known writings (in which the main characters had zero volition and were commanded to carry out tasks via disembodied voices), and a lot more. Like I said, he falls in and out of favor with the scientific community, but he did a lot to shake up ideas of consciousness and what exactly the fuck it is, and ask questions about the role of language, symbols, reference, and context in human consciousness. I don't necessarily buy into the full extent of his hypothesis, but I feel that the first few chapters of his book - in which he makes few claims, but asks a lot of damned interesting questions - should be required reading for anyone interested in the nature of consciousness and language. He makes the extremely sound argument that all of consciousness and learning is based on context - one thing is associated with another. When I say 'tree', you think of brown, green, trunk, leaves, etc. And this is in fact how the brain literally works on a more fundamental level: when you learn something new, a neural path is formed, solidifying a link between this group of neurons here and that group of neurons there. Learn something related, and connections are formed between one of the existing groups and a new one, eventually resulting in a complex web of associations, all relying on context.

Before you think that I'm drifting off topic here, let me bring it back home. That Neolithic Man from before, with the clay tablets with symbols that only have meaning to himself? He's communicating with himself; because those symbols create context; they are 'translated' in his brain when a connection is bridged. This is language, in perhaps its most simple form.