The Story of Human Language

I want to get across what I'm always going to mean by this wonderful thing called language with some examples from the animal kingdom and why they're not quite getting to where we are. Then we're going to look at the very beginnings of language among humans as far as we know at this point. But in general, we can start with the fact that animals, even though they communicate, are not exactly using language. And so, for example, I love dogs and cats as much as anybody. You can kind of communicate with them. But Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, once said, a dog cannot relate his autobiography. However eloquently he may bark, he can't tell you that his parents were honest, though poor. And that's true. There's an awful lot that a dog simply could not say. Bees are an example of how animals can communicate to an extent. And so it's been found that in their hive, a bee can tell the other bees where honey is based on this kind of dance. It goes in the direction where the honey is, and then it waggles its posterior with a certain frequency that corresponds with how far away the honey is, and it vibrates kind of frenetically while doing this waggling to indicate how rich the source is. That's pretty neat. Bees can actually tell each other which way to swarm. That's absolutely fabulous, and that's all they can do. They can't talk about anything. They can't talk about where anything else is. They can't convey concepts. There's just this one thing, absolutely miraculous, that allows them to communicate in that one way about that one thing. So that is communication. But bees cannot chew the fat. They only do that one thing. So that's one level of communication, but it's not exactly language. Now apes are better than bees at this kind of thing, and there have been all sorts of attempts to get some sort of speech out of apes. I recently had occasion to deal with a chimpanzee, and they do seem to look at you with almost human eyes. At one point, the chimpanzee reached up with its finger and went like this and took it down with the same poise that we use in scratching our nose. They're little human beings. So you would think, well, can't you talk? And the fact is that they can just approximate what we're doing but never get terribly impressively far. It goes way back to hope that you could make these queer little semi-people talk. Samuel Pepys, who was a man of affairs in Restoration England, encountered a baboon, and he writes about it in his diary, which is very quotidian and colloquial. At one point, he said, it's a great baboon, but so like a man in most things that yet I can't believe but that it is a monster god of a man and a she baboon. I do believe it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs. So people have tried to teach apes how to talk, and it doesn't really get too far. In 1909, there was a little chimpanzee, and it learned to say mama, and that was it. Then in 1916, there was an orangutan, and it learned how to say papa and cup, and that was as far as he got. Then in the 1940s, there was a chimpanzee that could say papa, mama, cup, and up, up referring to it wanting to be picked up, but it never got any more words than that. That's not language. That's communication. So parental units, cup probably with something good in it and being picked up, but that was it. That's different from talking about how you saw a strange looking piece of fish and ate it and it made you sick or something like that. So they only went so far. Now there have been times when things went a little further, and there's a large literature about this. Washoe, the chimpanzee, 1966. Washoe was taken when she was about a year old, and after about three months, she started being able to sign. Washoe was in the company of people who really wanted to see how far we could take in teaching these creatures to sign because one suspects that there's something about their vocal apparatus that keeps them from being able to do this, but maybe they could do it with their hands because humans, of course, have sign languages, which are very much full, nuanced languages. So by the time Washoe was four, she had 132 signs, and that's pretty darn good. And she was taught open by opening a door, and then she could mentally extend that to, say, taking a lid off of something or taking a lid off of a pot, which is a kind of an advanced cognition to think of both of those things as opening.