One of my aspirations in life has been to come to an understanding about what language is and how it came to be. Errant career trajectories and tangents (to say nothing of intellectual deficiencies and personal tendencies toward sloth) have prevented me from contributing to human understanding of the questions myself, but the curiosity has remained with me and led me to indulge in readings on the subject throughout my literate lifetime. Forthwith I present an understanding I have come to, thanks to the writings of principally
Noam Chomsky, with contributions from Robert Berwick, Stephen Pinker*, Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. The ideas are adapted from my limited, unguided and to some extent, chance readings of these writers. My contribution has been the application of my understanding to them which if wrong nevertheless informed what I've come to think of as a wholly integrated view which is convincing to myself. The beauty is that if I'm wrong or my understanding is incomprehensible, then I can just say "Oops!" and be done with it. If I'm right, the implications are nearly as inconsequential. So take this for what it's worth.
My interest in language was originally particularly in the variety of spoken forms of it. Surely only a comparative study of languages living and extinct would reveal the nature of language. But in the course of reading about it, I've become convinced that the nut of the question is more properly what were the biological pathways that made language itself a universal feature of human populations. The differences in expression are a fascinating and worthwhile icing on the topic but the cake itself is the phenomenon of language, which can be considered essentially a unique biological adaptation that permitted the revolution in human cognition that underlies human society, technology and history-- and indeed the only hope of getting us out of the mess it's gotten us into.
Language is a tool for thought-- perhaps best thought of as a module for translating mental computation into comprehensible structures to be consumed by one's conscious cognition. The building blocks of language are not the words and sentences we feed into Google Translate, but rather pre-verbal operations of cognition. One of these operations, called MERGE by linguists of the minimalist program school of thought, merely carries out the rules for combining two elements into a third which can then further combine with other elements. That there are rules for how merge operations are carried out is the basis for what could be considered universal grammar. To whatever extent one buys into this notion, it seems evident that a grammar of some kind comes with birth. Anyone who has observed a human child acquiring language has to have been struck by the speed with which it all comes together-- speech, comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, creativity and innovation. Clearly we come equipped with tools in place for applying language to thought which have only to be activated through the interaction of a developing human mind with the world.
About thought, it might best be understood as a co-functioning within the human organism of modules of cognition. The modules presumably evolved biologically; in this way humans are innately capable of availing themselves of them, and there is no need for each human to "devise" them from scratch within his or her lifetime. As some extremely oversimplified examples, there might be a math module-- or a system of them-- that at a basic level handles one's understanding of numerical relationships of external objects. Another module might relate objects to each other as a way of forming analogies. One or more might be concerned with recognizing and maintaining relationships of the humans one sees regularly, including kin structures, authority and judgments of character-- who can be trusted and who cannot. Still another might filter the operations of modules that float to consciousness under an umbrella of identity-- this would be the module that convinces me that I'm me and that it is I who am having these thoughts. Through this module one might engage modules of compassion, style, music, humor, emotion or aesthetic appreciation. The model is broadly outlined-- macro-modules may call micromodules the way an application calls a library of dlls. The challenge (and fun) is in trying to understand how the micromodules function.
It’s all mysterious to what extent say beauty is culturally defined and to what extent it’s biological, but I admit I’m more inclined to think that our experience of beauty is itself a biological module. Then again I believe culture is a biological module. Do I know what that means exactly? No I do not, but it seems to me that as Chomsky says is true with language, it’s implausible that this stuff (say, a drive to adorn oneself in a certain fashion) can be constructed out of whole cloth within an individual in a lifetime, let alone in every individual within each of their lifetimes. It would be a more typical scenario if, just as with the development of a limb, an individual develops a tendency to adorn herself in a certain way due to evolutionarily adaptive biological pathways. In other words, we come with the beauty software and the culture software pre-installed and the software gets configured for each individual as the computer gets use.
As I understand it, language development in humans probably occurred originally as a result of a mutation (or a chain of mutations) that was sustained in a small segment of the population not through natural selection but through something more like chance. Chomsky for instance believes when a population evincing a mutation is small, the trait doesn’t have to be adaptive to be spread through sheer dumb luck; and in fact it is dumb luck—not natural selection-- that prevails at the stage at which a trait has not had a chance to be adaptive. New traits are almost never adaptive because they’re almost by definition freaky. The point is not that natural selection doesn’t have a place in evolution of an established and adaptive trait, but that it almost certainly has no part in the origin of a brand new trait and is therefore an inadequate explicator of the beginnings of human language which were certainly unique in terrestrial natural history.
A counterpart to human language that evolved independently per Chomsky and Berwick in their 2016 book, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press) is birdsong. It’s another example of a complex communication system that emerged autapomorphically (i.e., by itself at the end of a branch. You can still see the birds on the branch too, just singing away!) Birdsong is not a language though it entails very similar degrees of development of many brain areas that overlap with language proficiency in humans, but like language it’s unique. The equipment used for it existed in pre-birds, but it took a mutation in a proto-songster bird to put the equipment to use as song. Similarly pre-speechifying humanoids had the equipment but it took a mutation in proto-speechifying humans to put the equipment to use as language. And according to Chomsky and Berwick, stochastic evolution – i.e., pure mathematical probability—accounts for the propagation of the traits to enough progeny for it to become adaptive.
I’m inclined to agree with Chomsky that language is essentially an organ or a system (akin to the circulatory system). How does any organ evolve? This is the question. Consider mutations of existing apparatus that operate on the equipment. The equipment evolves. It tends to be multipurpose (tongues taste and lick in addition to forming consonants and vowels) but it’s not infinite in purpose (tongues can’t fly you to the top of a tree—there’s a kind of natural logic to what equipment can be used for and the kind of mutations we’re talking about would tend to expand these uses along a “predictable” frontier.). Let’s pretend language is just the ability of the tongue to make sounds. In this view, pre-language-capable humans just taste and lick with their tongues, but due to a mutation a pre-human has an innate ability to control sounds with it. At first this is just a freaky thing but the mutation (which is in her DNA) gets passed by chance to some of her offspring who by chance pass it to some of theirs and so forth. With the increase in tongue sounders, this freaky thing grows in importance and perhaps the humans equipped with this ability find themselves making complex sounds at each other just because they can. Clearly it takes a lot more than an agile tongue to speak a language, but humans have been evolving for a million years.
Chomsky does not speculate all that much that I’ve ever seen. He talks about “well-understood” principles and observations and combines them with qualified principles and obligations to make other observations. He doesn’t do thought experiments per se and wouldn’t flounder around in that wilderness I was getting lost in in my last paragraph. But I can’t help but try to paint a picture that if not accurate at least has verisimilitude. The point is trying to grok a likeness to reality, not necessarily ascribing to my story the mantle of reality. I’m also keenly aware that my ability to understand reality is not a prerequisite for the truth of reality. I think Chomsky is comfortable with reality not being comprehensible, let alone pretty and entertaining. I admire that in a fella.
To summarize, language evolved as an internal tool of thought first, so humans originally had an abstract method of computation and cognition evolve in them, part of which involved the potentiality of externalizing that thought through sounds and visual symbolism, and that potentiality was exploited independently in several places to become the multitude of languages that exist today. So the capacity for language is what evolved; languages themselves are historical and cultural artifacts of human exploitation of the externalizability of this capacity.
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* Far better on language and cognition than on social and cultural criticism. In fact, forget his other stuff.
