The Origins and Evolution of Language | Michael Corballis | TEDxAuckland

Language is probably the most difficult problem in science, no one really knows how it works and no one really knows where it comes 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 it. 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 is an infinite capacity to say something different in this talk you will probably hear sinkings that you have never heard before I hope so I can Understanding them, animal

language

or animal communication, on the other hand, is mostly repetitive, automatic and emotional and does not create new meanings.

The English comedian Stephen Fry once uttered the following phrase, hold the nose of the newsreader, waiter or kind milk, or cancel my pants that phrase. I think he was confident and believed he had never spoken out before and I'm happy to repeat it here in case he needs to compound the issue. There are something like 6,000 different languages ​​in the world, most of them impenetrable to anyone else, so most people will speak one or maybe two languages ​​or maybe four or five, but there are over 5,000 languages ​​that will be totally impenetrable to you. If I did this talk in Bantu or Navajo or maybe even Portuguese, you wouldn't understand what I'm saying.

What I am saying is an additional problem: how can there be so many languages, each of them impenetrable to all the others? However, any child can learn any of those languages, as long as he starts earlier. It's a paradox, any child can learn any of them yet. most of us only learned one or two of them, okay, now how are we going to solve that problem? The common solution is in miracle languages. Something miraculous that happened suddenly. It comes from the Bible. The Old Testament. According to the Old Testament that the Lord gave. tongue to Adam the people then became proud and built the Tower of Babel in an attempt to get closer to heaven but the Lord was a vengeful God and destroyed the tower the people dispersed and so did the tongues and that is the biblical story.

Why Why do we have so many languages ​​now? A leading linguist of our time is Noam Chomsky, who has actually made considerable contributions to how we construct language, but I think his notion of how language evolved is positively biblical. What he believes is that approximately 90 thousand years ago, the mutation. it happened in one individual, he doesn't call that individual Adam, he calls that individual Prometheus for some reason that he knows and from there it spread to all other people and eventually created all the languages ​​in the world. That's a biblical story really because it says language. it happened in a single individual once with a single mutation of some kind and I don't think it makes biological sense, there is a representation of the last 7 million years of human

evolution

since we split from the great apes, humans are in the very right At the end of that, there was a little problem in the last 7 million years that we evolved, it seems like it was about 200,000 years ago and, in Chomsky's language, it only arose about halfway through that 200 million years ago. years, sorry, 200 thousand years and I'll show you what that is. where the miracle occurred and to me that doesn't make much sense because we have all those millions of years of human

evolution

since we decided not to be great apes anymore, so it would be an offense if I think that Charles Darwin is rich.

Not so willing to complain, he argued that any complex organ like language, like the liver of the heart or the brain, must have evolved through numerous successive slight modifications and if anyone could find an exception to that it would destroy his theory of evolution. , but Chomsky's theory could then be that case and if Chomsky is right then the theory of evolution would be destroyed on Darwin's own terms. Now I want to try to show you that language did not emerge from vocal calls, it emerged from gestures, that language began by making gestures. and I put my hand in my pocket to make a voluble demonstration, but I forgot when I was able to show a piece of evidence that it actually comes from the monkey brain and that it goes back about 30 or 40 million years to us in terms of an ancestor common there is an area a circuit in the monkey's brain that is dedicated to performing grasping actions, reaching out to pick things up, it is called the mirror system because that system is active every time the monkey reaches for something or when it sees another animal or The person even reaches out and makes the same motion to map what the monkey sees and what the monkey can do.

Some people have called it monkey, come monkey, make a circuit. Now it turns out that the equivalent circuit in the human brain is language. circuit and you'll see that on the slide, so the language areas in the brain seem to have emerged from this mirror circuit in the monkey brain, so in the course of evolution that circuit everyone took over or at least used the deal with the party. Language is now moving forward a little bit in evolution towards ourselves, no one has been able to teach a great ape to speak or approach it, so people had the option that maybe we can teach them to make signs and gestures and there have been several cases .

I showed a couple of layers where quite reasonable conversations have been had between humans and apes using sign language or something similar so that they can ask or make simple requests and be understood and the person again can respond and have a small conversation . It's not a very good conversation in many ways, they cancel it to tell you what they did yesterday or gossip with each other, but they can make requests and have little phrases that are somewhat generative in the way that human language is another famous case like This is Kinzey who is a bonobo and Kenzie uses some kind of iPad I guess but it's a display of symbols and he points out 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'll see, that shows you, I think in the great apes they approach language by either pointing at something or using a form of sign language, it's also known now and this has become a hot topic recently, if you look at the apes . In nature they make many gestures that seem much more like language than their vocalizations, so they are much more flexible. As you can see, there are some of them that you can almost recognize what they are trying to say. on the top left are quite interesting, it's asking to be fixed, sorry, it's actually a toilet.

I think the one on the bottom left is asking to be fixed in that spot, so the aprile is a match point for a body part that wants something. that another animal comes and scratches and you can see a gossip session going on down there right now it is also the moving force of humans we know of course that sign language is purely gestural it is done in silence it is done with hand gestures Of course, but it's also done with facial gestures, so it's a powerful argument. I think language can at least be purely gestural and as effective as speech.

We now know that sign language is linguistically sophisticated and uses the same areas of the brain as spoken language. us and therefore a university in the United States called Gallaudet University that actually only uses sign language in all of its classes, even when teaching poetry, so there are forms of sign poetry now we all gesture while we speak, I'm me making a gesture. They might not put my hand in my pocket, but I still had one hand free and I was gesturing a little bit while I was talking, but in the background you'll see someone translating for me in signs, so that person is making similar gestures to what I'm doing. he was doing while I was gesturing while talking, so that shows us some of our correspondence between signing, I think, and speech.

There's another photo of me gesticulating, and if you look closely, you'll notice that my colleagues look extremely bored right now. I apologize. What I'm doing if I'm doing that to you and one of the ones who died the most, you'll notice now. I think the critical thing that happened between us and the apes was bipedalism, so at some point in human evolution, really starting from us, we changed or from A PUD and B we gradually became more and more upright and that, of course , it freed up the hands and the face for a type of gestural communication and that's where I think it started to become sophisticated, so we started to be able to create meaning by combining gestures in various ways, I think it probably became a form of mime, so people started imitating things they wanted to talk about, whether it was something they've seen on their expeditions at the Hunter meeting or whatever, or maybe what they plan to do tomorrow or maybe it even costs, but what do you think? with each other about ingestible forms that imitate each other?

So I think it probably started as a language-like thing beyond what apes can do from about warp 6, seven million years ago, but the beginning especially, I think around six million years ago. As I will try to demonstrate, this is our image again of the evolution of hominids, which is ourselves, from about seven million years ago. It's a bit tragic, of course, that in all of them there are about 20 different species of hominids that are beyond the apes and them. We are all extinct with one exception and that is again that little dot called homo sapiens on the right, so be careful on the street because all our other cousin species are no longer with us.

So what happened then is that there was increasing bipedalism. through that period and we probably became completely bipedal about two million years ago, when that gives us a lot more canvas to play with, if we're trying to understand how our language arose, I think it makes more sense than assuming there was a sudden mutation 57,90 thousand years ago he suddenly gave us a 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 only by Chomsky by many archaeologists, but also by most biologists.

I talk to I think it doesn't make sense. Well, then you might wonder why there are 6000 languages. So what's up? I think in that course we started doing a kind of imitation, but then it became less iconic and more arbitrary, so the language became simplified. So it gradually lost its pictorial component. It is more efficient to reduce the symbols we use with our hands to something that is more conventional or decided by people arbitrarily than to try to make them imitate what you see out there. so there's more room for variation, so I think that as the people who left Africa about 90,000 years ago spread around the world, the languages ​​they use adapted to the geography, the culture and the religion, maybe that's why all these things became different now that they became different, more different than you would expect, so I think it's because we partly designed language to keep other people away, so that people don't understand us, so language is not just a means of communication, it is a means of preventing communication, it is a kind of a fortress that we build around ourselves, a silo, if you will, and that is in a way the disadvantage of language and especially speech, where it can be quite arbitrary, deciding what sounds will receive or correspond to what things, just to summarize, so I maintain here that language began with a grasping reflex, as seen on the left, a type of genuinely communicative act of the great apes all the way to something like Homo erectus, which probably has a much more sophisticated way of signing and paves the way for the beginnings of grunts and things that became speech, but also the beginnings of tools, so I think when we lost the manual component, what happened was we freed up the hands for the second time.

The first liberation of the hands was bipedalism, but then, as language began to develop gesturally, we began to lose the manual. component again and we put the thing on the face, the language becomes more dedicated to the face, which is also a very expressive organ and eventually I think we put it in the mouth, which is a brilliant idea, it's really the first example that miniaturization feed for the Whole, instead of having to move your entire body while communicating, it is perfectly hidden in your mouth and frees your hands to do other things and, in particular, to do things well.

Now I think it didn't stop there, obviously, the language. Still speaking, 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 is of growing importance; It starts maybe with reading and writing, which adds In one dimension, language first started in memory, so once you start writing things down, they are permanently stored and you can go back to them at any time, then gain distance when we have phonesof the ATMs by radio and then you begin to be able to communicate. to great 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 last thing, it really has memory, distance and computation, so we have a kind of Somehow , I now have communication at such a level that we have almost emptied our minds into our communication systems.

In some ways, we are also retreating, we are returning to visual language. Writing, of course, is visual and the cell phone is. visual some of you may already be using thumb gestures communicating on your cell phone, so we've gone through if you want, I guess with the cell phone, from the movement of the tongue to the movement of the thumbs, thanks for listening. I'm going to give one more gesture that is one of the few that I know you