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« The First Language » – BBC Word of Mouth

Released On: 21 May 2019

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00057n2

Durée de transcription: 27 min et 38 secondes

Nombre de caractères (espaces compris): 29 675 caractères

Michael Rosen:

When I was at university, I studied old English poetry. This is the poetry written in

Britain before the Norman invasion of 1066. One of the poems is called the dream

of the rude. That's rude, meaning cross. In the notes in my student edition it said

that some of the phrases in the poem overlap with an inscription on what is known

as the ruffle cross in the village of ruffle in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland.

However, these words on the cross are not written using the Roman alphabet.

They're written using the alphabet called runes, a wonderful complex system of

alphabetic signs, many of which look a little bit like diagrams of feathers. At the

time when I was at university, many scholars believed that the inscription was the

oldest example of poetry found in the British Isles. People are not so sure anymore,

or far from it actually, but leaving that to one side, the mere mention of the idea of
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the earliest writing of poetry found in Britain sent me off on searches through

books for examples of early writing. No, I wanted to find the very earliest writing

anywhere. And this took me on into the many speculations that take place about

early and the very earliest languages that were spoken. I was fascinated and that's

what we're talking about today and with me in the studio historical linguist, Dr

Laura Wright alongside two people who have given the early days of language a

great deal of thought, Robert Foley Leavey whom Professor of human evolution at

the university of Cambridge and Maggie Tallerman a Meritor professor of

linguistics at Newcastle university. So why is this such an important thing to do?

Looking at early languages, Maggie ?

Maggie Tallerman:

Human beings are the only species that have language and it's entirely possible that

no other species except Homosapiens had full language. So we're unique and that

uniqueness makes it an interesting question.

Michael Rosen:

Doesn't it Rob?
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Robert Foley:

Yes, I think that's absolutely right. Language is one of the little complex of things

that makes us human. It goes with intense sociality and cooperation. If we want to

understand being human, we need to know language. It's also for being called one

of the major transitions in evolution and real game changer. People have been

fascinated forever about, you know, the origins and evolution of language.

Michael Rosen:

Now there are thousands of languages in the world, maybe over 6,000 some people

say so how do people work out, which is the oldest? I've got some strange image in

my mind, perhaps of us sort of swinging down some kind of family tree of

languages to arrive at a root. I seem to remember that faintly from the 60 some

picture like that. Laura, as a historical linguist, you're always tracing linguistic

clues. Aren't you back through time?

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Laura Wright:

Well, yes, but unlike Maggie and Rob, I only go so far back as writing. I mean I go

to history rather than to pre-history. But having said that, you can reconstruct

earlier States from the earliest writing. So, to give you an example, a really

common verb in English is the verb to be. And it's a composite of three or maybe

even four earlier verbs. You've got the is are am bit and you've got the be been bit,

and then you've got the was were bit, and these verbs rule unrelated to each other.

They end up in English as as one verb, but they all belong to the Indo-European

family and they have relatives in other languages, languages like Sanskrit and

Hittite and ancient Greek.

Michael Rosen:

So you've got a kind of persistence. That's what you're saying, [Laura says

‘Exactly’] accross time, yes. [Laura says ‘Yeah.’] So we're going to spool the tape

back even further than dates meet, doesn't it? And we're going way past now, the

Norman conquest. Let's go pass the Vikings, past foundation of Rome. We're

looking out on the world of what we call ancient languages like Babylonian,
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Egyptian, 2000 years BCE. Maggie, how useful is it for your studies looking at

those ancient languages?

Maggie Tallerman:

Actually not at all, because they are exactly the same as all modern languages

today. So when you're talking about ancients, for you, ancient might be up to say

6,000 years old, but that's just a fragments of the total time that we suspect that

human beings have had language. Everybody is relatively happy with the dating of

language to at least 50,000 years old. Most linguists are fairly satisfied that it's an

awful lot older than that and many of us think that it could be as much as half a

million years old.

Michael Rosen:

And my pretty family tree? Is that any good? [Maggie says ‘Nope.’] [laught] So

Latin giving birth as it were to French and Portuguese and Spanish, [Maggie says

‘Yeah.’] That sort of thing.

Maggie Tallerman:
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You know all this is basically yesterday as far as evolutionary linguists are

concerned and we can only reconstruct them to most six or 7,000 years old.

Michael Rosen:

So let's imagine we're on some kind of time machine, we're flying all over the

world and all these languages or language families are popping up all over the

place. We're not seeing them join up. They're not linking up what's actually making

them emerge. Now I've heard of the theory of spontaneous and separate evolution.

They do that certainly about human beings and animals to a certain extent. Does

that work as far as language and languages a concern, things going on similarly in

different places at the same time?

Robert Foley:

Yeah, it's possible in where it's simpler to assume that the, all of current languages

are descended from some sort of common ancestor. We say that partly because of

the biology of our evolution. The genetics suggests that we come from a relatively

small population in Africa. I would take the age back probably two or 300,000

years for that, you know, although there might've been other languages outside

that lineage, the ones we see now probably all descended from modifications of
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those languages. I mean, the problem is language is so mutable. It changes so

much. It loses its history very rapidly. We can't really infer back except for the

sheer diversity of languages back to those very earliest ones. My guess is that we're

certainly talking at least the origin of our own species and probably earlier.

Michael Rosen:

Is that how you say it, Maggie?

Maggie Tallerman:

Yes. I had no particular reason to think that homosapiens hasn't always had

language. Um, it's entirely possible that earliest species such as homoerectus,

homo heidelbergensis had, either full language or some kind of primitive language,

which doesn't look like the languages that we have today or the languages we have

records of.

Michael Rosen:
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Laura, so...

Laura Wright:

I'm interested that Rob mentioned diversity. So diversity is a clue.

Robert Foley:

I mean, if we understood a little bit about the, the rate at which language has

changed and the reasons why languages differ one from another, we can make

some sorts of calculations back. There was a paper recently which looked at the

relationship between the frequency of words in a language, how often they're used

and how similar they are across the different languages. And what it showed is that

the more frequent a word is, the slower it changes. So if you then focus on the the

slow evolving ones, you can reach a little bit deeper back into the past. But there's

always been terribly controversial. The whole issue of getting back into the deep

time and there are wonderful hypothetical languages such as Nostratic and

Eurasiatic attempts to claw our way back into the past. But there's still a long way

to go.
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Michael Rosen:

So I see you people here at this point, a bit light detectives that you've got to piece

together things you've already described, one or two processes there Rob. Any

others? I mean wherever you are, either studying or going out in the field, where

did you look for the clues?

Maggie Tallerman:

Normally we would hope to find evidence in both the fossil record and in the

archeological record, but the archeological record is not that much use because it's

incredibly incomplete and it's not clear in any case what would count as evidence

for language. So sometimes people have looked at things like beads and so, you

know, it's very complex to make a neck lace. It's complex just to make a knot. It's

hard to make little holes in shells. So perhaps when we find the first strong beads,

that's evidence for the first languages. But that only takes us back around 80,000
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years, which is probably far too recent. And in any case it's very indirect. So now

what is the link between say shell beads in language? Well, there's no clear link at

all.

Michael Rosen:

So if we flip that on its heads, some people then try to recapitulate the story by

looking at infants today, babies and going into children. They look at the way that

works and say will you could recapitulate story of language from the way a baby

goes from not being able to speak to year one, saying a few words and then by year

two starting to chat. Is that got any validity to it?

Maggie Tallerman:

The problem with us is that obviously modern infant have a full language faculty,

you can put them down anywhere in the world and they'll pick up the ambient

language, but we're really trying to reconstruct an era when our ancestors were

just developing the language faculty. So obviously they went like modern children

in the beginning there were not a soul light and modern children. I...
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Michael Rosen:

Could I say something a bit heretical there, but say that, well the world was full of

noises. I'm sounding like a Talibani [laughts] around toward the aisle is full of

noises, but the world is full of noises. You know, it's quite possible for hominids to

imitate those noises and sound like a river and then say [mouth sound] and point to

a river and that meant river that they could perhaps begin in that sort of area.

Maggie Tallerman:

But just the advents of imitation is a really major transition in our species because

other apes and we are apes don't imitate. In fact, they're very bad at imitating.

Kind of irony is that apes don't ape. Every human needs to be able to imitate, to

learn a language from the environments. [Michael Rosen says ‘Yes’] And that's

something, this has obviously evolved and was one of the major things in fact that

had to evolve.

Michael Rosen:
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Minor digression here. I was at London zoo the other day. The Gibbons were there

and you know, Gibbons do wonderful whooping sounds and it's quite interesting.

All the children immediately wanted to imitate the givens. [Laura says ‘You were

totally up stage.’] Yeah I was, they were going, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Like the

Gibbons were, but anyway, just little minor digression on Gibbons and aping. And

so when we dating this matter of when we think language begins, are there any

clues from the fossils there in terms of the structure of human beings, the structure

of their, their mouths and larynxes?

Robert Foley:

I think there are, I'm in speeches in a way is, is kind of fancy breathing. You know,

we're, we're just breathing with enormous control to make sounds. In order to do

that, we have a fine muscular control of our diaphragm. A diaphragm is more

highly innovated than that of an ape. [Michael Rosen says ‘Lots more nerves going

into it’] lots more nerves and in order for that to happen, our spinal cord is a little

bit thicker in that area than apes and then that means the vertebral column has to be

a little bit sicker. If you look at Neanderthals, they have that expansion in that

psoriasis [Michael Rosen says ‘Give us the dates for the Neanderthals again’] So

the Neanderthals we're talking well, the last common ancestor with Neanderthals
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is probably about 600,000 years ago. So basically we've got it and they've got it. It

probably means it was there in the last common ancestor, but you go back a

million years to homo-erectus and it doesn't have it. So that gives us a kind of

timeframe and of course a million years is a long time and we're now getting new

methods for it, and that comes from genetics that there's a gene called the FOXP2

gene, which all primates have and we have a mutant of it and it looks as if it plays

an important role in speech. And we know that because some people have the non-

mutant form and they often have problems in speech production and syntax.

[Michael Rosen says ‘Oh right’] The Neanderthals had the same variant that we

do.

Laura Wright:

So if the inference that Neanderthals had speech ?

Robert Foley:

So I think they had some form of speech now whether that's really the full Monte is

another matter. And then of course that gets us into the naughty area of the

relationship between speech and language.

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Michael Rosen:

Maggie?

Maggie Tallerman:

Yeah, I think we know that FOXP2 is not in any sense a gene for language. It does

many, many things and it's certainly not unique to us or to other apes. It's also

found in mice, in fact, and also in different form in birds. So we know it has

something to do with vocalization and we know it has something to do with

language, as Rob says. But the trouble is what makes language is very hard to

detect from the genetic evidence of the present state of knowledge.

Michael Rosen:

How about the size of the cerebral cortex? The brain in short. We've got quite big

brains, quite complex brain structurally with all these wrinkles and stuff, does that

come to play? Maggie?

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Maggie Tallerman:

Well, we don't know how big a brain it takes to make a language. And we also

know that Neanderthals had brains in fact larger than ours because they were

larger animals.

Michael Rosen:

So are we talking about something that's unique to humans? I mean, there's

obviously, we all love our pets and we're quite sure that they understand exactly

what we say. I used to talk to my late cats regularly, leaving that to one side, the

sentimentality and so on. Are we totally sure language is unique to humans?

Robert Foley:

Yes. I probably want to put a slight caveat on what exactly you mean by humans

under that looks rather pedantic way of looking at it. But I'm a paleontologist.

[laughts] [Michael Rosen says ‘fair enough’] I'm allowed to be. So in other words,

it's a dominant trait. The last common ancestor of of us and chimpanzees, our

closest living red almost certainly didn't have language. The lineage leading to us
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evolved a completely unique form of communication and thought exactly when the

complete syntax recursion the complexity when that comes in, I think we have to

be a lot more cautious about saying.

Michael Rosen:

And if people ask you why us? How do you answer that question, Maggie?

Maggie Tallerman:

Well, something must have changed in our lineage that didn't change in the

ancestor lineage for chimpanzees. Some of the many species that have gone extinct,

like for instance, homo heidelbergensis, the possible common ancestor of us and

Neanderthals may well have had language or some kind of proto language. At the

time, we were evolving language. There were many other hominin species around.

But the likelihood is that we went off and developed our own particular way of

living that made it adaptive for our ancestors to develop language. So something

changed in the way that we live. So the ancestors of chimpanzees probably loved
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much the same as chimpanzees do today. They probably hung around in trees and

ate fruits and [Michael Rosen says ‘beat each other’], but our ancestors developed

a very different lifestyle, over 3 million years ago, our ancestors started using tools,

which it was ramped up into a real specialization.

Michael Rosen:

Can you also say that it's because it's unique to human beings? It's a kind of

specialized form of activity. Just as we might look at, I don't know the way a

cuckoo behaves, that's what cuckoos do. Can we look at it in that? That's what

humans do when we look across all the species.

Maggie Tallerman:

Yeah I mean clearly language is vital to the particular environmental niche that

we've constructed for ourselves and no other species has been able to construct that

same environment or niche.

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Robert Foley:

As often a thought that humans are somehow a generalized species. You know,

giraffes have long necks and elephants have long trunks and they're highly

specialized and we tend to think of ourselves as highly generalized and I think

you're absolutely right. We're not. We're highly specialized and we've specialized

in our brains and our evolution. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Brains are

extraordinary expensive organs. They're using up 20% of your energy as you sit

there doing nothing, even sleeping, so incredibly expensive. They take a long time

to grow. The selection, pressure to produce large brains must be immense and I

think, I mean clearly language is part of that. It's, it's part of a complex of with

social group living, cooperation, tolerance and we watch chimpanzees, they're

intolerant, speech and language and thought are all part of an interactive system.

Michael Rosen:

Well, let's tease that out a little bit about the thought. We tend to think of thought

preceding language, but I know some theorists so almost turn it round the other

way and say that the inner speech that we have is predicated on our social language
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interaction, but when we're thinking about the origins of language, can we think

that somehow over these folks were thinking before they spoke?

Robert Foley:

Ask half a dozen scientists and you'll get half a dozen different answers. My own

view is that probably thought in its complexity precedes language and then speech

suddenly comes as a real bonus to some extent. Language is a bit over engineered.

Just to be speech.

Michael Rosen:

Maggie.

Maggie Tallerman:

We're probably the only species that can do offline thinking. We don't need a

stimulus to be presence. We can say, I wonder if that really mean leopard will

come round again tonight when the leopard isn't present.

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Michael Rosen:

Which is crucial for survival!

Maggie Tallerman:

I don't live that near,...

Michael Rosen:

No you don't sorry I'm thinking back a few hundred thousand years.

Maggie Tallerman:

I wasn't thinking about our ancestors talking in that way, but rather the fact that

we today have this offline thinking, we can even talk about things that don't exist

like unicorns or ghosts or whatever.

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Robert Foley:

Cause what you're talking about is is displacement in space and time. The ability to

talk about things yesterday, today or in the very distant path. And of course you

can begin to see there how that sort of ability could start with very simple things.

Who you know, you, you're able to displace your thoughts and your

communication by minutes, hours and then days. And so we can see how language

and thought can actually be part of a ratchet process. And I think many of us would

prefer to think of it that way is a gradual improvement rather than some of the

more revolutionary ideas you are here with one fell swoop. We get language.

Michael Rosen:

Can we talk of proto-language? Can we talk of a, a language that's before the stuff

that we're talking now? Can we possibly tell what the first words might've been?

Can we think well it must be blood or it must be hair or it must be teeth or

something. You're shaking your head at me quite angrily.

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Robert Foley:

I want to start. It has to be, we haven't a clue. I'll give you a speculation. If you

think proto-language starts with words without syntax, I'm not sure that's a

universal view. You have a bunch of words and you simply string them along. If

we go back to primates and the work on baboons and monkeys, they have what

primatologists always enthusiastic about these things would call words. And those

words are predators. They all make sounds, which other members of their group

will recognize as Eagle or leopard. So a particular squawk and that all look up a

different one and they'll look for a steak. So you could suggest that those sorts of

very simple concrete things in the environment would be the first words.

Michael Rosen:

So Eagle are alternatively dangerous flying thing that sometimes attacks us.

[Robert Foley says ‘Yes’] That's that looking out or…

Robert Foley:

Or could it being just look, [Michael Rosen says ‘look’] all look like this.
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Michael Rosen:

Yes, Maggie.

Maggie Tallerman:

But those monkey alarm calls and not word like because they don't combine. Okay.

[Michael Rosen says ‘Yeah.’] So the one absolute characteristic that words have

real words is that they combine.

Michael Rosen:

So we can say, I sit down, we put them together and yet,...

Maggie Tallerman:
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So the likelihood is that alarm calls therapists of a blind alley or a red herring. But

one possibility is that the earliest words were a bit like the kind of words that we

have today that don't combine. So things like 'ch' or 'ps' or 'hey' or 'wow' or...

Michael Rosen:

'Hm', [Maggies says ‘Thanks’.] 'ouh'.

Maggie Tallerman:

So yeah, exactly. Or just ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’. [Michael Rosen says ‘I like those,

yes.’] So all of those things occur in all languages, but the one thing that they have

in common is that they don't have any syntax. So they don't combine. [Michael

Rosen says ‘Yep’] The only way you can put them into a sentence is by saying

something like she said, ‘Hey’, or she said ‘Thanks’

Michael Rosen:

But that's well well advanced as natives.

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Maggie Tallerman:

So the suggestion is that the like the very earliest forms of proto words, but that's a

fairly nice suggestion because it draws attention to what you're thinking or feeling,

but it doesn't refer to anything in the outside world.

Michael Rosen:

And Laura, you spend your time, I know immersed in such things as kind of the

legal roles or you're looking at language in medieval times. So when we're talking

as we are now about the origins of language, what would interest you most if there

was suddenly a discovery?

Laura Wright:

I'm interested in variation. The ways in which we have a material to reach for

when we want to say something. There isn't just one way of saying something. I

mean listening to Maggie, they're talking about those small chunks that tend not to

get written down that we don't even necessarily think of as words but are universal
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in human communication. One that came to mind is ‘A a a’ , I've just put my finger

up at [Michael Rosen says ‘you’re being the parent telling a child to do

something.’] Yes, I wouldn't know how to spell it. And I don't know how many

languages it works and I know it works in more than English. Does it work in

Africa? Rob, have you heard the masai...

Robert Foley:

Where I work in Northern Kenya you hear 'Ooh' a lot of the time and I use it

myself and I've been [laught] using it for so long and it's a wonderful filler. Just a

noise you make in between paragraphs.

Laura Wright:

Do it again, how does it go?

Robert Foley:
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'Ooh'. [laughts]

Michael Rosen:

My father had that kind of pissed up noises, the noise he used to make, which we

used to imitate the went 'Uuh'. [laughts] We used to sit around the table going

'Uuh'. [laughts] So Rob, you've mentioned social, you place that right at the heart

of this business about certainly the evolution of language and perhaps with the

origins of it. So how did this come about? If we conjure up these early societies,

what kind of social lives were these early humans leading that might give us some

clues. Maggie.

Maggie Tallerman:

One possible suggestion is that humans started cooperating to the extent that we do

today in order to exploit their environments and to eat different foods. Our

ancestors started scavenging, exploiting the carcasses of animals left behind by

large predators. Now likes sort of big cats and dangerous predators. But if you

want to feast off a carcass that a pack of hyenas has caught, you better have a

bunch of mates along with you because it's obviously very dangerous.
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Michael Rosen:

Yes, well then why vouchers do that anyway, don't they? I mean, I know they're

not proto-humans, but I mean you see them gather and move in and the other

animals move away cause they don't want to kind of hang about with vouchers very

much.

Maggie Tallerman:

But the role of language here is that if you're out one day with just one friend say,

and you happen to find a carcass, you need to inform the other members of your

group that there's something edible that they can't see. So that brings us back to the

displacement that were talking about earlier and the offline thinking. So you need

to be able to go back to camp and basically at the very least indicate that the

something edible that's away. So the very earliest, um, referential forms of

language might have been used to do that kind of thing.

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Michael Rosen:

And what about heaving and lugging because humans from pretty early on wanting

to heave trees and in fact a carcass might need two or three people. You've got to

actually get a bit of cooperative labor going on there.

Robert Foley:

Yeah, I mean I think cooperation is, is, is core of it. Probably most of the real

social cooperation is, is about uh, social grooming. An awful lot of what we say is

really just making alliances, finding out what's going on. So it's a sort of within

group activity.

Laura Wright:

Chit chat for nattering or chin wagging or, yeah, I mean it's all fairly derogatory

stuff. And yet actually this is the day to day bread and butter of talking with this

correlate with social grooming.

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Robert Foley:

Yes, I think, I think so. I mean the argument is that actually, you know, the idea

we use language for very sophisticated communication is, is greatly overrated.

And most of it is the chitchatting. It's along the lines of, you know, 'Oh', 'Oh dear',

'nice day', all of completely meaningless information. But it is part of that and I

think there's a growing attempt to try and think about this experimentally and one

interesting experiment was to take people who didn't know how to make stone

tools and get them to make two sorts of very simple basic pebble tools and a hand-

axe and then there are two conditions, one getting them to do it without using

speech and the other condition where they're taught. What they found was that

speech made no difference to the quality of making a very simple pebble tool, but

it did make a difference explaining how to make a hand-axe. Now it may well be

that modern people are just not very good at making hand-axes, but I think we

need more of that experimental approach to really get at what is the function of

language. We make the assumption that we use it, I think probably more than we

actually do to coordinate activities.

Michael Rosen:
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So if what you're doing there is involving speech in the making of things, then by

your displacement theory, then there's also the reporting of what I did earlier today

and the idea of explaining or storytelling about what I did. And then once we get

into that, we've got the exchange of story.

Robert Foley:

You know, almost certainly the, the ability to, you know, to, to tell narratives

probably had an enormous impact on how societies operated.

Michael Rosen:

So that raises the question of is, is there an evolutionary advantage for exchanging

information, exchanging stories? How are we going to put it? Either of you..

Laura Wright:
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You see he's got self interest at heart here. [Robert Foley says ‘There's actually’],

[Michael Rosen says ‘Yeah, it's my job, isn't it? So I want to know if I got an

evolutionary advantage yet. I'm only kidding’].

Robert Foley:

You joke but there was a paper published last year or the year before, which was a

study of some Hunter gatherers in the Philippines, and the anthropologists looked

at who was rated as a good storyteller and found that those rated as good

storytellers, you know, really appreciate it and also tended to have more children.

So if you want the Darwinian answer, you [Michael Rosen says ‘Don't, don't look

at me.’] [laughts].

Maggie Tallerman:

This is taking us a long way from the actual evolution of language though. I mean,

we had to have an awful lots of language to be able to tell stories, create rituals

and all that kind of thing. So that may have come a long way down the line

probably hundreds of thousands of years after the initial steps were taken.
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Michael Rosen:

Well, you anticipated a question I was thinking of, well, how do we get from what

you folks are calling proto-language to modern language? There's this huge gap,

between this lovely speculation we'd be having and grunting and crying and

pointing at Eagles and all the rest of it, which is wonderful. But then suddenly we

look at the tiles in the British museum of your Kantian tiles from the Sumerian

peoples and this wonderful complex language that's syllabic and lovely little

squares and these little cuneiform writing and so on. It's such a big jump, isn't it?

How do we do it?

Maggie Tallerman:

Well for the linguists, Noam Chomsky, he suggests that there is a point at which

there's a mutation or what he calls a rewiring of the brain and that enables us to

combine words and once you can combine words, then you basically have a whole
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of syntax. That's one possibility. The critical stage though is how do we get words

in the first place.

Robert Foley:

I suspect a single mutation I'm sure is a, is a complete oversimplification [Maggie

says ‘Yeah I think it is too yeah’] of what happened and I think gradual process is

likely to lead to bond. Remember that all languages spoken today are equally

complex and we know the populations that speak all those often diverged as

populations at least a hundred thousand years ago or more so at least that long ago.

There must have been that level of complexity.

Michael Rosen:

Robert Foley, Maggie Tallerman and Laura Wright. Thanks very much indeed.

Thank you.