For unknown thousands of years humans have lived in a world of language. It surrounds us and is a part of us. From time to time, there have been those who pondered the question: What is the origin of language? For European scholars, whose scholarship was bounded by Christianity and a Biblical wordview, the answer was simple: language had been given to humans by their god. Since they already had the answer, there was little incentive to explore the question further.
By the late eighteenth century, an understanding of language and the interconnectedness of some groups of language was just beginning. In 1772, Johann Gotfried von Herder (1744-1803) wrote an essay entitled “Concerning the Origin of Language” in which he rejected the commonly held view that language was the gift of God. He put forth the idea that language was more like an embryo pressing to be born. In his book Perspectives in Linguistics, John Waterman writes of Herder’s ideas:
“Man, he concludes, is the only creature who has the ability to single out sensations: he alone is capable of conscious linguistic reflection. While accepting the belief that Hebrew was the original language, he believed that it developed of necessity from man’s innermost nature.”
In
Language, Culture, and Society, Zdenek Salzmann writes:
“For Herder, language was not of divine origin, as some others before him had attempted to prove, because it lacked perfection; rather, it sprang from humanities’ innermost nature, developing together with thought, from which it is inseparable. Although Herder believed that all languages descended from a common source, he was convinced that individual languages faithfully reflect the thought patterns and the spirit of those who speak them.”
A major step in understanding language came in 1786 when Sir William Jones (1746-1794) gave a speech in which he compared Sanskrit with other languages and noted that they all came from a common source. This marked the beginning of the concept of the language family. Jones was not the first to note the similarities of language, but what makes his study different is that it was based on the careful inspection of data rather than simply intuition. John Waterman reports:
“Once the conservatism of tradition and literalistic theology had been overcome, the way was clear to approach the study of language in this new perspective. Scholars came to understand that language was in a state of constant flux, that it had a history, and that its genesis and development could be studied from the historical point of view.”
Speculation, often inspired more by imagination than actual data, blossomed and many different non-religious ideas regarding the origins of language emerged. One popular idea—one that is still popular among some people today—was the Bow-Wow Theory (also known as the Onomatopoeic Theory) which speculated that speech emerged when early humans began to imitate the sounds around them—animal sounds, running water, the wind, and so on. Zdenek Salzmann puts it this way:
“…the first words of the early humans were uttered in an effort to imitate natural sounds, particularly those made by animals.”
John McCrone, in his book
The Ape that Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind, writes:
“One idea—known as the Bowwow theory—suggested that early man started by imitating the natural sounds of the world—going ‘quack’ or ‘cuckoo’ to alert his hunting partner to a gaggle of ducks or whatever.”
Another popular speculation was the Pooh-Pooh Theory: language first began with instinctive cries regarding pain and strong emotions. The first words, according to this idea, must have been along the lines of “ouch” or “oh” or, perhaps even, “yikes.”
Yet another interesting idea has been called the Ding-Dong Theory in which there was supposed to be a psychic resonance between certain combinations of sounds and natural objects. Chip Walter, in his book Thumbs, Toes, and Tears and Other Traits that Make Us Human, explains:
“The Ding-Dong theory suggests that our ancestors reacted to the world around them by spontaneously producing sounds we associated with a person or thing.”
Regarding the Ding-Dong Theory, Zdenek Salzmann writes:
“…the peculiar ring of each substance in nature came to be vocally represented in the first human words.”
There was also a Yo-He-Ho, Yo-Heave-Ho, or Work Chant Theory which saw language emerging from the cooperative work songs or chants used by early humans. John McCrone writes:
“Scholars imagined the group all grunting to roll over a boulder or shift a tree trunk, coordinating their efforts with the Stone Age equivalent of ‘one-two-three-heave!’”
However, Gordon Hewes, in a chapter in the
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, points out:
“The work-chant theory has no plausible basis in the reconstruction of the daily life of early hominids, nor in fact of that of any human groups until activities had reached the level of building elaborate structures of heavy logs or stones.”
One rather interesting hypothesis regarding the origin of language stems from Jean-Pierre Brisset who concluded that language (French, in this case) developed directly from the croaking of frogs. In
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention, Guy Deutscher explains:
“One day, as Brisset was observing frogs at a pond, one of them looked him straight in the eye and croaked ‘coac’. After some deliberation, Brisseet realized that what the frog was saying was simply an abbreviated version of the question ‘quoi que tu dis?’ He thus proceeded to derive the whole of language and combinations of ‘coac coac’.”
The problem with looking for the origins of language was that it appeared that there was no hard data. There were no fossil words or grammars. The primary hard data regarding early language was language. However, the earliest written languages were only about 5,000 years old. By the time writing appeared, humans already had thousands of fully developed languages. Since all of the so-called “theories” about the origins of language were pure speculation, in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris barred from its meetings any papers dealing with the origins of language. Serious inquiry into the origins of language was still a century away.
