The search for the origins of language raises the possibility of a protolanguage: a communication system that is more complex than an animal communication system, but less complex than language. Some linguists feel that protolanguage would be a stage in which there are lexical items—words—but no syntactic organization. It is syntax that allows language users to string words together into longer meaningful units, i.e. sentences. Like the animal communication systems of other apes, this form of communication would be based on a finite vocabulary, but unlike the animal communications systems the meanings of the words would be symbolic, i.e. learned, rather than instinctual.
In his book The Origins of Grammar, James Hurford writes:
“Protolanguage is envisioned as a discrete intermediate stage between no language at all and full human language.”
James Hurford goes on to say:
“In a protolanguage, the ‘words’ would be uttered in sequence, but not in any regular order, and with no marker of grammatical structure.”
Modern studies of how human babies acquire language may provide some clues about the nature of a hypothetical protolanguage. In his more recent book The Origins of Language: A Slim Guide, James Hurford reports:
“Language-ready modern children learn vocabulary voraciously before they begin to make grammatical utterances several words long. So we presume that in the origins of language a one-word stage preceded our remote ancestors’ first steps into grammar. The term ‘protolanguage’ has been widely used to describe this one-word state, where there is vocabulary but no grammar.”
James Hurford goes on to report:
“From a range of different observed situations involving some of the same meanings and some of the same words, children first learn correlations between words and whole object types. The majority of words in the first 100 learned by children refer to types of objects. It seems likely that the first protolanguage was atomistic in the relation between means and forms.”
This protolanguage might have been based on vocalization or on sign language or a combination of the two. Looking at human ancestors, Gordon Hewes, in an essay in Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, writes:
“Hominids with average brain volumes of 700 cc may well have been able to sustain a proto-sign-language, i.e., a system going beyond the production of isolated gestural signals.”
With regard to the possibility of an early protolanguage, linguist Derek Bickerton, in his entry on protolanguage in the Encyclopedia of Languages & Linguistics, writes:
“Language was unlikely to have emerged with all its modern complexity, so a more primitive antecedent was intrinsically plausible.”
Derek Bickerton also writes:
“Protolanguage is the hypothesized predecessor of all modern human languages, with a time depth measured in hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of years.”
One of the issues raised by those who have studied the origins of language deals with the nature of the protolanguage: signed or spoken. Derek Bickerton writes:
“Two things can be said about this: first, there is no compelling evidence either way, and second, it is unclear whether the question has any importance.”
Derek Bickerton goes on to say:
“It is possible, indeed likely, that the earliest protolanguage mixed manual signs with vocal utterances—whatever worked communicatively would have been good enough.”
In his book Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Zdenek Salzmann writes:
“Reconstruction of words of a protolanguage and their meanings is likely to throw light on some aspects of the prehistoric culture of those people who spoke the protolanguage.”
Salzmann also suggests that the communication system which came before fully developed language might be described as prelanguage.
One of the interesting concepts regarding protolanguage is Hmmmmm: Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic. In his book Humans: From the Beginning, Christopher Seddon writes:
“It was more complex that the vocalisations of any present-day non-human primate, but less so than that of present-day humans.”
According to this concept, Hmmmmm may have evolved into language when early human communities began to adopt specialized economic roles—i.e. some form of division of labor—and also began trading with other communities. There are suggestions that this may have happened with Homo erectus (Homo ergaster) in Africa about 1.5 million years ago.
Since our closest living relatives today are the great apes—chimpanzees and bonobos—there have been some researchers who have looked for evidence of a protolanguage among the apes. In his book The Origins of Grammar, James Hurford reports:
“Protolanguage is beyond the capacities of wild animals, and producing it is just within the range of captive, home-reared apes.”
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Human Origins: Sex
Human Origins: Humans as naked apes
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