The evolution of language

Language is a strange entity. We talk about languages, family of languages, structure of languages etc. The world is a babble of languages. Most have a structure which is useful to express our ideas, our feelings and of the nature around us. Then there are non-linguistic languages and languages that cannot be spoken. 

Mathematicians would read an equation as “d square x by d t square is equal to minus k x” but frankly the amount of background training one needs to make sense of what the phrase “d square x by d t square” is significant. To understand this sentence requires a fairly involved learning of the common agreement on symbols and what they stand for and what they imply. Most of us would be quite happy to ignore the above sentence. Yet all our clocks and a lot more are derived from this sentence of mathematics.

Language can be far more complex than we normally care to acknowledge. It is the most common mode of communication, but can also create more confusion. For important issues, we prefer to meet in person rather than use a phone. We attribute this to the need to have human interaction. To really understand what someone is saying, it is often important to read the ‘body language’ along with listening to the spoken words. Even video conferences are not fully satisfactory. We all spend enormous resources in personally meeting each other. Indeed the most cunning of men (and women) perfect the art of not communicating while talking so that they can keep their personal thoughts private even while interacting with people and deceive people into believing something else. 

So language is used to express the most complex ideas, to express our deeper feelings, to understand each other and to hide ourselves from others in full public view. Yet this importance of the spoken word is strange because our strongest sense is not the sense of hearing, but the sense of sight. We are designed to eat, not be eaten and to reproduce in a generally hostile environment. In that case, sight is certainly the most important sense that provides us with immediate information on dangers. Hearing, for humans at least, is a secondary sense. For other animals, especially at night, this may not be true, but for us it is. That is why we feel we need to see a person we are talking to, so that we get more comprehensive information about the person. It is also transient and the memory that we have of spoken words is often much worse than that of what we have seen.

Languages are extremely subtle. For example, the famous saying 'God Is Truth' has three different meanings depending on which word you emphasise. Then there are cultural biases which are reflected in the language we use. Language is a very sophisticated window to who we are. If you have read the Diary of a Social Butterfly by Moni Mohsin you will know how English in the subcontinent is so much different from the English in other parts of the world. It is commonly said for example, that the universal language of science is broken English, since people who normally communicate in other languages need to speak English as best as they can to communicate to the world wide audience.

Language of other animals is of course another completely separate issue. They use it for communicating danger, attracting mates but for little more. Social insects like ants have a communication mode which is more through smell and contact and honeybees have a special dance to communicate location of the best flowers to take honey from. Other primates have a language that includes both, speaking and hand gestures, that are integral to their communication. 

The origin of human language is of course shrouded in prehistory going back to hundreds of thousands of years. It goes back to a period when humans were not even humans. 

The common wisdom of research in the subject seems to be that languages became complex through increase in cultural evolution. Humans innovated on the basic sounds they could utter based on the complexity of their interactions and environment. They spoke what they needed to, and as ideas they needed to express became more complex, they became more precise in their speaking. However, this required a corresponding flexibility in the brain and the vocal chords to create and deliver new sounds that provided meaning to new needs such as making tools, domestication of animals and conveying new experiences through a commonly agreed grammar. These developments were primarily for sharing information. Once having mastered this, large groups of humans needed language for more than just utilitarian purposes and they now needed it to express emotions. Music and poetry are two excellent examples of this. This set up a feedback system where expressions enhanced emotions and the vivid nature of experience as well as allowed accumulation of knowledge allowed humans to deviate from their primate cousins in a fundamental way. 

But this required developments not only in our social activity and chemistry of the brain, but the shape of the brain and parts of the body that are involved in speaking and listening. How we acquired language and how we process it is governed by our genes which make them. So, for example, compared to our primate cousins, we needed a sound box and the combination of throat, tongue, teeth and jaws capable of creating the complex and subtly varying sounds. At the same time, the part of the brain that is involved in speaking and speech recognition also had to evolve and become more sophisticated. And the process has to be fast. For example, to speak I need to think what I want to say, then call upon my speech area to work out the sequence of sounds that express that idea based on what I learned in my early education. I then need to instruct my lungs to release the air, get valves to send the air through my sound box to produce sound and then get my throat, mouth, tongue and jaw to move in this pre-learned synchronisation to talk. And I have no more than 0.002 seconds in which to achieve this synchronisation. And if you want to sing, the process simply becomes far more complex. 

The listener in turn has to receive the sound, recognise it as a human sound with meaning, then agree that the listener is interested, send it to the part of the brain that is involved in speech recognition which will break the sound down into its elements, compare it with the sounds already pre-recorded while learning the language and convert it into a meaning which other parts of the brain can make sense of. Phew, talking and listening is not so easy. And understanding music is an even higher level of complexity of mixing listening with emotions. 

So did we learn to speak and demand changes that produced new genes or did we learn to use speech since we realised we can be good at it? That becomes a chicken and egg question. Did the genetic changes come first or did the language skill come first? The best guess of course is that each fed the evolution of the other and communities who could communicate best had the highest chances of survival. However languages are not the same and there are several family of languages. So even with this human evolution of learning language, including abstract syntactic principles governing the evolution of language was probably driven by natural selection of preferred sound and sound sequencing that made hearing more attractive. This was a cultural choice. 

When you think of it, I think it is a miracle that we can talk and listen, though there are times when I curse this development as quite often cacophony seems to overwhelm us and stop us from thinking. Quite often, instead of aiding thinking, it seems to work as an obstruction to thinking. It is a pity that we use our ability to speak not to unite but to divide. It is a travesty of an important gift of nature. So next time you decide to speak, think before you do.

(Dr Mayank Vahia is a scientist working at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research since 1979. His main fields of interest are high-energy astrophysics, mainly Cosmic Rays, X-rays and Gamma Rays. He is currently looking at the area of archeo-astronomy and learning about the way our ancestors saw the stars, and thereby developed intellectually. He has, in particular, been working on the Indus Valley Civilisation and taking a deeper look at their script.)