Some imagine “cavemen” with a very limited language.  If they talk at all people imagine pidgin.  The present-day human species have never talked like that when people spoke their mother tongue.  Typical hunter-gatherers may lack words for many abstract concepts.  But they can describe their physical surroundings with high precision.

Human language is to complex to have arisen all at once.  Some social animals can use variations of calls to describe predators.  The question is when the evolution towards a more human language started.  I think it seems sensible as Louis Leakey suggested it was at the same time as stone cracking.  How does one then know if stones have been intentionally cracked?  One can compare with monkeys using rocks as tools today.  Both capuchins and macaques have been observed doing this.  When they do it happens that the stones they use crack.  However, they don’t seem to grasp that cracked stones can be used for anything.  If “stone tools” can’t be told apart from such they are likely not made deliberately.

We know members of the species Homo habilis used intentionally cracked rocks.  I think they used combinations of sounds to indicate objects.  This is the beginning of a language not only warning group members.  Now it could also be used to help to instructing others.  In contrast I am not sure how many language sounds they could pronounce.  Maybe so few it to us would not quite sound like speech.

I think members of Homo erectus sounded like variegated babbling.  But the content of what they said must have corresponded to sentences of at least two – three words.  This species existed for at least 1.8 million years.  During this long their average brain size increased.  So the species could have gradually evolved more complicated sentence structure.

Homo erectus gave rise to Homo heidelbergensis.  This and the later Neanderthal I think talked pretty normally.  The content of what they said may have sounded pretty childish.  These species grew up faster which gave their brains less time to develop.  Certainly their languages varied less in their phonotactics than the historically attested.  They could pronounce fewer languages sounds than us.

Since the origin of the present-day human species I don’t think language ability changed.  What instead has changed is how we use the language.  With the beginning of state societies several possible contexts arose.  For example the word tower can mean watchtower or water-tower depending on context.  I think the Romans did just that.  Their word was castellum which has also given rise to castle.

Then how does it come people has spoken pidgins?  These have originated in the encounter between speakers of different languages.  If the languages are not closely related words and expressions are rarely analogous.  Then members of one group have created a heavily simplified version of the other group’s language.  Later the heavily simplified version has been used for talking with foreigners.  In fiction natives have talked like that so the audience would understand them.  So arose the myth that they do so when speaking with their own people.

Uploaded on the 29th of September 2024.