language is probably the hardest problem
in science nobody really knows how it
works and nobody really knows where it
came from and yet we can all do it I
think it’s a bit like driving a car we
can drive a car but we don’t really know
how the machine works one of the things
that makes language unique I think is
that we can generate new sentences all
the time there’s an infinite capacity to
say something different in this talk you
will probably hear subsidences you’ve
never heard before yet I hope you can
understand them animal language or
animal communication on the other hand
is mostly repetitive automatic and
emotional and doesn’t create new
meanings the English comedian Stephen
Fry once uttered the following sentence
hold the newsreaders nose squarely
waiter or friendly milk or countermand
my trousers that sentence I think he was
confident and believing had never been
had been uttered before and I’m happy to
repeat it here in case you needed to
compound the problem there is something
like 6,000 different languages in the
world
most of them impenetrable to any other
so most people will speak one or maybe
two languages or perhaps four or five
but there are well over 5,000 languages
that will be totally impenetrable to you
if I were to do this talk in Bantu or
Navajo or perhaps even Portuguese you
wouldn’t understand
what I’m saying so that’s an added
problem how can there be so many
languages each of them impenetrable to
all of the others any child though can
learn any one of those languages
provided they start earlier
so that’s a paradox any kid can learn
any one of them yet most of us only
learned one or two of them okay now how
are we to solve that problem the common
solution is at languages of miracle
miraculous thing that happened all at
once that comes from the Bible the Old
Testament according to the Old Testament
the Lord gave language to Adam the
people then grew proud and they they
built the Tower of Babel in an attempt
to get closer to heaven but the Lord was
a vengeful God and he destroyed the
tower the people scattered and so did
the languages and that is the biblical
account why we have so many languages
now a foremost linguist of our time is
Noam Chomsky who’s made actually
considerable contributions to how we put
language together but his notion of how
language evolved I think is positively
biblical what he thinks is that roughly
90 thousand years ago mutation happened
in one individual he doesn’t call that
individual Adam he calls that individual
Prometheus for some reason known to him
and from there it spread to all other
people and eventually created all the
languages of the world that’s a biblical
story really because it says language
happened in a single individual once
with a single mutation of some sort and
I don’t think it makes biological sense
there is a representation of the last 7
million years of human evolution since
we separated from the great apes humans
are right on the very right hand end of
that a tiny blip in the last 7 million
years we evolved it seems about 200,000
years ago and according to Chomsky
language only emerged with about halfway
through that span of 200 million years
sorry 200 thousand years and I’ll show
you that that’s where the miracle
happened
and to me that doesn’t make much sense
because we’ve got all those millions of
years of human evolution from when we
decided not to be great apes anymore
then it would be offense if I think to
Charles Darwin wealthy it’s not so
around to complain
he argued that laying any complex organ
like language like the liver of the
heart or the brain must have evolved
through successive numerous slight
modifications and if anybody could find
an exception to that that would destroy
his theory of evolution but Chomsky’s
theory then might be that one case and
if Chomsky is right then
evolutionary theory would be destroyed
in Darwin’s own terms now I want to try
and demonstrate to you that language
didn’t arrive arise from vocal calls it
arose from gestures that language
started from making gestures and I put
one hand in my pocket so that I went to
demonstrate to volubly but I forgot when
I can wave around one piece of evidence
for that actually comes from the monkey
brain and that takes us back about 30 or
40 million years in terms of a common
ancestor there’s an area a circuit in
the monkey brain that is dedicated to
making grasped actions the reaching out
of picking things up it’s called the
mirror system because that system is
active whenever the monkey reaches out
for something or when it sees another
animal or person even reaching out and
making the same movement so it maps what
the monkey sees on to what the monkey
can do some people have called it a
monkey see monkey do a circuit now it
turns out that the equivalent circuit in
the human brain is the language circuit
and you’ll see that on the slide there
so that’s the language areas in the
brain seem to have arisen from this
mirror circuit in the monkey brain so in
the course of evolution that circuit
each having taken over or at least used
party
deal with language now moving forward a
bit in evolution towards ourselves no
one has ever been able to teach a great
ape to talk or come anywhere near it
then people had the either that maybe we
can teach them to sign to gesture and
there been a number of cases I shown a
couple of a layer in which quite
reasonable conversations have been had
between humans and apes by use of sign
language or something like it so they
can ask or make simple requests and be
understood and the person again can
respond and have a little conversation
it’s not a very good conversation in
many ways they cancel to tell you what
they did yesterday
or gossip about each other but they can
make requests and have and make little
sentences that are somewhat a generative
in the way that human language is
another famous case as this is kinzey
who’s a bonobo and Kenzie uses a kind of
an iPad I guess but it’s a display of
symbols and he points to these symbols
they represent objects and actions so he
can also ask for things and have little
conversations with one of his helpers
there as you will see so that shows you
I think that in great apes they come
closer to language by using either
pointing to something or using a form of
sign language it’s now also known and
this has become a hot topic recently
that if you look at Apes in the wild
they make lots and lots of gestures that
seemed much more language like then
their vocalizations are so they’re much
more flexible they as you can see there
are some of them you can almost
recognize what they’re trying to say the
one on the top left they are quite
interesting it’s asking to be I’m sorry
that’s actually grooming the think the
one on the bottom left is asking to be
groomed in that spot so the aprile’s a
match point to a part of the body who
wants some other animal to come along
and scratch and you can see a bit of a
gossip session there on the bottom right
now it’s also moving force of humans we
know of course that sign language is
purely gestural it’s done silently it’s
done with gestures of the hands of
course but it’s also done with gestures
of the face so that’s a powerful
argument I think that language at least
can be purely gestural and just as
effective as speech we now know that
sign language is linguistically
sophisticated it uses the same brain
areas that spoken language to us and
thus a university in the United States
called Gallaudet University which in
fact uses only sign language in all its
classes even when it teaches poetry so
there are forms of poetry in sign now we
all also all gesture as we speak there’s
me gesturing I didn’t put my hand in my
pocket they might but I still had one
hand free and I was gesturing a bit
while I was talking but in the
background you will see there somebody
translating me into sign so that person
is making somewhat similar gestures as I
was making while I was gesturing while I
was talking so that does show us some of
our correspondence between signing I
think and speaking there’s another
picture of me gesturing and you might
notice if you look carefully that my
colleagues they look extremely bored now
I apologize I’m doing if I’m doing that
to you and one of the most actually died
you will notice now I think the critical
thing that happened between us and Apes
was bipedalism so at some point in human
evolution beginning really from we we
switched or from the from a PUD and B we
gradually became more and more upright
and that of course freed the hands and
the face for a gestural kind of
communication and that’s where I think
it began to become sophisticated so we
began to be able to create meanings by
combining gestures in various ways I
think it probably developed into a form
of mime so that people began to mime
things I wanted to talk about either
something that they’ve seen on their
expeditions at Hunter gathering or
whatever or maybe what they plan to do
tomorrow or maybe even cost but how
about it to each other about ingestible
form mimicking each other so I think it
probably began as a language like thing
beyond what apes can do from around
about warp 6
seven million years but the beginning
especially I think about six million
years ago as I’ll try to demonstrate so
this our picture again of hominin
evolution that’s ourselves from about
seven million years ago it’s a bit
tragic of course that all of them there
are about 20 different hominin species
there that are beyond the Apes and
they’ve all become extinct with one
exception and that’s again that tiny
little blip called homo sapiens
on the right so be careful out there on
the street because all of our other
cousin species are no longer with us
okay so what happened then is there was
increasing bipedalism through that
period and we probably became fully by
people bipedal about two million years
ago when that gives us much more canvas
to play on if we’re trying to understand
how lecture our language actually came
about it makes more sense I think than
supposing there was a sudden mutation 57
90 thousand years ago that suddenly gave
us language that to me makes no
biological sense I should add by the way
that the idea that there was a sudden
event is widely held not just by Chomsky
by a lot of archaeologists although most
biologists I talk to I think it doesn’t
make sense okay now then you might ask
why is 6000 languages so what happens I
think in that course we started out by
kind of miming but then it became more
less iconic and more arbitrary so
language became simplified so it kind of
gradually lost its pictorial component
it’s more efficient to reduce the the
symbols that we use with our hands into
something that’s more conventional or
decided by people arbitrarily than it is
to try to make them mimic what it is
that you see out there so there’s more
room for variation so I think as people
scatter that came out of Africa about
90,000 years ago scattered around the
world they the languages that they use
adapted to geography and culture and
religion perhaps so that’s why these
things all became different now they
became different
more different than you might expect
because of that’s I think that’s because
we partly design language to keep other
people out so the people won’t
understand us so language is not only a
means of communicating it’s a means of
preventing communication it’s a kind of
a fortress that we build around us a
silo if you like so that’s in a way the
downside of language and especially
speech where it can be quite arbitrary
where you decide what sounds will
receive or correspond for what things
just to recap then I’m maintaining here
that language started with a grasping
reflex as you see on the left kind of
genuinely communicative act by great
apes through to something like Homo
erectus who probably has a much more
sophisticated way of signing and preps
the beginnings of grunts and things that
were turned into speech but also the
beginnings of tools so I think as we
lost the manual component then what
happened was we freed up the hands a
second time the first freeing of the
hands was bipedalism but then as
language began to develop gesturally we
began to lose the manual component again
and put the thing in the face the
language becomes more dedicated to the
face which is also a very expressive
organ and eventually I think we put it
into the mouth which is a brilliant idea
really it’s the first example I think of
miniaturization for the whole thing
instead of having to move your whole
body around as you communicate it’s
tucked away neatly into the mouth and
frees up the hands for doing other
things and in particular for making
things okay now I think it didn’t stop
there obviously language didn’t stop a
speech we have developed many more
different forms of language since we
decided to speak and each of those
changes including speech itself has been
of enormous importance to our species I
think and it’s a growing importance it
starts perhaps with reading and writing
which adds a dimension it first started
language to memory so once you start
writing things down then they become
permanently stored and you can go back
to them at any point in time then it
gains distance when we got Radio teller
telephones then you begin to be able to
communicate at vast distances and we go
to the Internet where you can
communicate instantly with people on the
other side of the world and finally to
the cell phone which is perhaps the
ultimate really it’s got both memory and
distance and computation so we’ve kind
of in a way now I’ve got communication
to such a level where we’ve almost
emptied our minds into our communication
systems in a way then we’re also
retiring
we’re returning to visual language
writing of course is visual and the cell
phone is visual some of you are perhaps
already using gestures with your thumbs
communicating on your cell phone so
we’ve gone if you’d like I suppose with
the cell from from the wagging of
tongues to the wiggling of thumbs thank
you for listening I’m going to give one
more gesture which is one of the few that I know
in science nobody really knows how it
works and nobody really knows where it
came from and yet we can all do it I
think it’s a bit like driving a car we
can drive a car but we don’t really know
how the machine works one of the things
that makes language unique I think is
that we can generate new sentences all
the time there’s an infinite capacity to
say something different in this talk you
will probably hear subsidences you’ve
never heard before yet I hope you can
understand them animal language or
animal communication on the other hand
is mostly repetitive automatic and
emotional and doesn’t create new
meanings the English comedian Stephen
Fry once uttered the following sentence
hold the newsreaders nose squarely
waiter or friendly milk or countermand
my trousers that sentence I think he was
confident and believing had never been
had been uttered before and I’m happy to
repeat it here in case you needed to
compound the problem there is something
like 6,000 different languages in the
world
most of them impenetrable to any other
so most people will speak one or maybe
two languages or perhaps four or five
but there are well over 5,000 languages
that will be totally impenetrable to you
if I were to do this talk in Bantu or
Navajo or perhaps even Portuguese you
wouldn’t understand
what I’m saying so that’s an added
problem how can there be so many
languages each of them impenetrable to
all of the others any child though can
learn any one of those languages
provided they start earlier
so that’s a paradox any kid can learn
any one of them yet most of us only
learned one or two of them okay now how
are we to solve that problem the common
solution is at languages of miracle
miraculous thing that happened all at
once that comes from the Bible the Old
Testament according to the Old Testament
the Lord gave language to Adam the
people then grew proud and they they
built the Tower of Babel in an attempt
to get closer to heaven but the Lord was
a vengeful God and he destroyed the
tower the people scattered and so did
the languages and that is the biblical
account why we have so many languages
now a foremost linguist of our time is
Noam Chomsky who’s made actually
considerable contributions to how we put
language together but his notion of how
language evolved I think is positively
biblical what he thinks is that roughly
90 thousand years ago mutation happened
in one individual he doesn’t call that
individual Adam he calls that individual
Prometheus for some reason known to him
and from there it spread to all other
people and eventually created all the
languages of the world that’s a biblical
story really because it says language
happened in a single individual once
with a single mutation of some sort and
I don’t think it makes biological sense
there is a representation of the last 7
million years of human evolution since
we separated from the great apes humans
are right on the very right hand end of
that a tiny blip in the last 7 million
years we evolved it seems about 200,000
years ago and according to Chomsky
language only emerged with about halfway
through that span of 200 million years
sorry 200 thousand years and I’ll show
you that that’s where the miracle
happened
and to me that doesn’t make much sense
because we’ve got all those millions of
years of human evolution from when we
decided not to be great apes anymore
then it would be offense if I think to
Charles Darwin wealthy it’s not so
around to complain
he argued that laying any complex organ
like language like the liver of the
heart or the brain must have evolved
through successive numerous slight
modifications and if anybody could find
an exception to that that would destroy
his theory of evolution but Chomsky’s
theory then might be that one case and
if Chomsky is right then
evolutionary theory would be destroyed
in Darwin’s own terms now I want to try
and demonstrate to you that language
didn’t arrive arise from vocal calls it
arose from gestures that language
started from making gestures and I put
one hand in my pocket so that I went to
demonstrate to volubly but I forgot when
I can wave around one piece of evidence
for that actually comes from the monkey
brain and that takes us back about 30 or
40 million years in terms of a common
ancestor there’s an area a circuit in
the monkey brain that is dedicated to
making grasped actions the reaching out
of picking things up it’s called the
mirror system because that system is
active whenever the monkey reaches out
for something or when it sees another
animal or person even reaching out and
making the same movement so it maps what
the monkey sees on to what the monkey
can do some people have called it a
monkey see monkey do a circuit now it
turns out that the equivalent circuit in
the human brain is the language circuit
and you’ll see that on the slide there
so that’s the language areas in the
brain seem to have arisen from this
mirror circuit in the monkey brain so in
the course of evolution that circuit
each having taken over or at least used
party
deal with language now moving forward a
bit in evolution towards ourselves no
one has ever been able to teach a great
ape to talk or come anywhere near it
then people had the either that maybe we
can teach them to sign to gesture and
there been a number of cases I shown a
couple of a layer in which quite
reasonable conversations have been had
between humans and apes by use of sign
language or something like it so they
can ask or make simple requests and be
understood and the person again can
respond and have a little conversation
it’s not a very good conversation in
many ways they cancel to tell you what
they did yesterday
or gossip about each other but they can
make requests and have and make little
sentences that are somewhat a generative
in the way that human language is
another famous case as this is kinzey
who’s a bonobo and Kenzie uses a kind of
an iPad I guess but it’s a display of
symbols and he points to these symbols
they represent objects and actions so he
can also ask for things and have little
conversations with one of his helpers
there as you will see so that shows you
I think that in great apes they come
closer to language by using either
pointing to something or using a form of
sign language it’s now also known and
this has become a hot topic recently
that if you look at Apes in the wild
they make lots and lots of gestures that
seemed much more language like then
their vocalizations are so they’re much
more flexible they as you can see there
are some of them you can almost
recognize what they’re trying to say the
one on the top left they are quite
interesting it’s asking to be I’m sorry
that’s actually grooming the think the
one on the bottom left is asking to be
groomed in that spot so the aprile’s a
match point to a part of the body who
wants some other animal to come along
and scratch and you can see a bit of a
gossip session there on the bottom right
now it’s also moving force of humans we
know of course that sign language is
purely gestural it’s done silently it’s
done with gestures of the hands of
course but it’s also done with gestures
of the face so that’s a powerful
argument I think that language at least
can be purely gestural and just as
effective as speech we now know that
sign language is linguistically
sophisticated it uses the same brain
areas that spoken language to us and
thus a university in the United States
called Gallaudet University which in
fact uses only sign language in all its
classes even when it teaches poetry so
there are forms of poetry in sign now we
all also all gesture as we speak there’s
me gesturing I didn’t put my hand in my
pocket they might but I still had one
hand free and I was gesturing a bit
while I was talking but in the
background you will see there somebody
translating me into sign so that person
is making somewhat similar gestures as I
was making while I was gesturing while I
was talking so that does show us some of
our correspondence between signing I
think and speaking there’s another
picture of me gesturing and you might
notice if you look carefully that my
colleagues they look extremely bored now
I apologize I’m doing if I’m doing that
to you and one of the most actually died
you will notice now I think the critical
thing that happened between us and Apes
was bipedalism so at some point in human
evolution beginning really from we we
switched or from the from a PUD and B we
gradually became more and more upright
and that of course freed the hands and
the face for a gestural kind of
communication and that’s where I think
it began to become sophisticated so we
began to be able to create meanings by
combining gestures in various ways I
think it probably developed into a form
of mime so that people began to mime
things I wanted to talk about either
something that they’ve seen on their
expeditions at Hunter gathering or
whatever or maybe what they plan to do
tomorrow or maybe even cost but how
about it to each other about ingestible
form mimicking each other so I think it
probably began as a language like thing
beyond what apes can do from around
about warp 6
seven million years but the beginning
especially I think about six million
years ago as I’ll try to demonstrate so
this our picture again of hominin
evolution that’s ourselves from about
seven million years ago it’s a bit
tragic of course that all of them there
are about 20 different hominin species
there that are beyond the Apes and
they’ve all become extinct with one
exception and that’s again that tiny
little blip called homo sapiens
on the right so be careful out there on
the street because all of our other
cousin species are no longer with us
okay so what happened then is there was
increasing bipedalism through that
period and we probably became fully by
people bipedal about two million years
ago when that gives us much more canvas
to play on if we’re trying to understand
how lecture our language actually came
about it makes more sense I think than
supposing there was a sudden mutation 57
90 thousand years ago that suddenly gave
us language that to me makes no
biological sense I should add by the way
that the idea that there was a sudden
event is widely held not just by Chomsky
by a lot of archaeologists although most
biologists I talk to I think it doesn’t
make sense okay now then you might ask
why is 6000 languages so what happens I
think in that course we started out by
kind of miming but then it became more
less iconic and more arbitrary so
language became simplified so it kind of
gradually lost its pictorial component
it’s more efficient to reduce the the
symbols that we use with our hands into
something that’s more conventional or
decided by people arbitrarily than it is
to try to make them mimic what it is
that you see out there so there’s more
room for variation so I think as people
scatter that came out of Africa about
90,000 years ago scattered around the
world they the languages that they use
adapted to geography and culture and
religion perhaps so that’s why these
things all became different now they
became different
more different than you might expect
because of that’s I think that’s because
we partly design language to keep other
people out so the people won’t
understand us so language is not only a
means of communicating it’s a means of
preventing communication it’s a kind of
a fortress that we build around us a
silo if you like so that’s in a way the
downside of language and especially
speech where it can be quite arbitrary
where you decide what sounds will
receive or correspond for what things
just to recap then I’m maintaining here
that language started with a grasping
reflex as you see on the left kind of
genuinely communicative act by great
apes through to something like Homo
erectus who probably has a much more
sophisticated way of signing and preps
the beginnings of grunts and things that
were turned into speech but also the
beginnings of tools so I think as we
lost the manual component then what
happened was we freed up the hands a
second time the first freeing of the
hands was bipedalism but then as
language began to develop gesturally we
began to lose the manual component again
and put the thing in the face the
language becomes more dedicated to the
face which is also a very expressive
organ and eventually I think we put it
into the mouth which is a brilliant idea
really it’s the first example I think of
miniaturization for the whole thing
instead of having to move your whole
body around as you communicate it’s
tucked away neatly into the mouth and
frees up the hands for doing other
things and in particular for making
things okay now I think it didn’t stop
there obviously language didn’t stop a
speech we have developed many more
different forms of language since we
decided to speak and each of those
changes including speech itself has been
of enormous importance to our species I
think and it’s a growing importance it
starts perhaps with reading and writing
which adds a dimension it first started
language to memory so once you start
writing things down then they become
permanently stored and you can go back
to them at any point in time then it
gains distance when we got Radio teller
telephones then you begin to be able to
communicate at vast distances and we go
to the Internet where you can
communicate instantly with people on the
other side of the world and finally to
the cell phone which is perhaps the
ultimate really it’s got both memory and
distance and computation so we’ve kind
of in a way now I’ve got communication
to such a level where we’ve almost
emptied our minds into our communication
systems in a way then we’re also
retiring
we’re returning to visual language
writing of course is visual and the cell
phone is visual some of you are perhaps
already using gestures with your thumbs
communicating on your cell phone so
we’ve gone if you’d like I suppose with
the cell from from the wagging of
tongues to the wiggling of thumbs thank
you for listening I’m going to give one
more gesture which is one of the few that I know
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