From Hand to Mouth

Michael C. Corballis

Imagine trying to teach a child to talk without using your hands or any other means of
pointing of gesturing. The task would surely be impossible. There can be little doubt that
bodily gestures are involved in the development of language, both in the individual and
in the species. Yet, once the system is up and running, it can function entirely on
vocalizations, as when two friends chat over the phone and create in each other’s minds
a world of events far removed from the actual sounds that emerge from their lips.
Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around 2 million years ago but
would at first have been primary gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and
other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and emotional.

On the face of it, an acoustic medium seems a poor way to convey information about
the world; not for nothing is it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Moreover,
signed language has all the lexical and grammatical complexity of spoken language.
Further, in a hunter- gatherer environment, where predators and prey are major
concern, there are surely advantages in silent communication since sound acts as a
general alert. And yet we came to communicate about the world in a medium that in all
primates except ourselves is primitive and stereotyped- and noisy.

It has also been proposed that speech itself is in many respects better conceived as
composed of gestures rather than sequences of these elusive phantoms called
phonemes. In this view, language evolved as a system of gestures based on
movements of the hands, arms and face, including movements of the mouth, lips, and
tongue. The essential feature of modern expressive language is not that it is purely
vocal, but rather that the component can function autonomously and provide the
grammar as well as meaning of linguistics communication.

One possible advantage of vocal language is its arbitrariness. Except in rare cases of
onomatopoeia, spoken words cannot be iconic, and they therefore offer scope for
creating symbols that distinguish between object or actions that look alike or might
otherwise be confusable. The names of similar animals, such as cats, lions, tigers,
cheetahs, lynxes, and leopards, are rather different. We may be confused as to which
animals is which, bur at least it is clear which one we are talking about.

It may well have been very important for hunter-gatherers to identify and name a great
many similar fruits, plants, trees, animals, birds, and so on, and attempts at iconic
representation would eventually only confuse. He points out that humans are unique
among primates in that they can expect to live to a ripe old age, well beyond the age of
child bearing (although perhaps it was not always so). A slowing down of senescence
may well have been selected in evolution because the knowledge retained by the
elderly enhanced the survival of their younger relatives. An elderly, knowledgeable
granny may help us all live a little longer, and she can also look after the kids.
This is not to say that gestural signs could not to do the trick. Manual signs readily
become conventionalized and convey abstract information. Nevertheless, there may be
some advantage to using spoken words, since they have virtually no iconic content to
begin with, and so provide a ready-made system for abstraction. . Especially in initial
stages of acquisition, in which the child comes to understand the linking of objects and
the action with their linguistic representations. But spoken languages, ones acquired,
may relay messages more accurately, since spoken words are better calibrated to
minimize confusion. Even so, the iconic component is often important, and as I look the
quadrangles outside my office I see how freely the students there are
embellishing their conversations with manual gestures.

But speech may have evolved, not because it gave the hands freer rein for mimetic
expression, but rather because it freed the hands to do other activities. Charles Darwin,
who seems to have thought of almost everything, wrote, “We might have used our
fingers as efficient instruments, for a person with practice can report to a deaf man
every word of a speech rapidly delivered at a public meeting, but the loss of our hands,
while thus employed, would have been a serious inconvenience.” Speech has the
advantage over manual gestures in that it can be accomplished in parallel with manual
demonstration. Demonstrations might themselves be considered gestures, of course,
but the more explanatory aspect of pedagogy, involving grammatical structure and
symbolic content, would interfere with manual demonstration if they were too conveyed
manually.

Another reason why vocal language may have arisen is that it proves an extra medium.
We have already seen that most people gesture with their hands, and indeed their
faces, while they talk. One might argue then, that the addition of vocal channel provides
additional texture and richness to the message. It is not only a question of being able to
communicate at night. We can also speak to people when objects intervene and you
can’t see them, as when you yell to your friend in another room. All this has to do, of
course, with the nature of sound itself, which travels equally well in the dark as in the
light and wiggles its way around obstacles. The wall between you and the base
drummer next door may attenuate the sound but does not completely block it.

Language and manufacture also allowed cultural transmission to become the dominant
mode of inheritance in human life. That ungainly bird, the jumbo jet, could not have
been created without hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of cultural evolution, and
the brains that created it were not biologically superior to the brains that existed in
100,000 years ago in Africa. The invention of speech may have merely been the first of
many developments that have put us not only on the map, but all over it. The idea that
language may have evolved relatively slow, seems much more in accord with biological
reality than the notion of linguistic “big bang” within the past 200,000 years.