Steven Mithen (/maɪðən/), a British archaeologist seen in these parts a couple of years ago, published a book called The Language Puzzle: How we Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age that was recently reviewed in the LRB by Francis Gooding (Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026; archived), and even though you won’t learn anything new and exciting, it’s a useful roundup of ideas on the topic. Some excerpts:
Saussure steered linguistics away from questions about the beginnings of language: for him it was a red herring, since words take meaning only in relation to one another, within the boundaries of their histories. The study of words can’t illuminate what came before words: there is no thread to be found in language which would help us trace human speech back to the moment of its emergence. ‘No society … knows or has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such,’ Saussure says in Cours de linguistique générale (1916). ‘That is why the question of the origin of speech is not so important as it is generally assumed to be. The question is not even worth asking; the only real object of linguistics is the normal, regular life of an existing idiom.’
Yet whether it is worth asking or not, the question of the origin of language never goes away. It remains one of the most fundamental mysteries of human evolution. So far as we know, true symbolic language is unique to the human species. (On the most generous reading it may go a bit further back in the human lineage. And there is an open question about cetaceans – it was recently discovered that the structure of humpback whale vocalisations is remarkably similar to the organisation of human speech.) And it continually recurs as the most probable explanation for the differences between human behaviour and that of all other living things. If you ask why we have been able to make pyramids and spaceships and musical instruments, while no other animal has managed anything of the sort in three billion years, the answer will always cite language as a decisive factor. So the question of how we alone came to be blessed – or cursed – with words is not to be lightly dismissed. But it does come with a serious difficulty: language is an evolved feature of the human organism, but words don’t fossilise like bones. How then to find the missing links?
The Language Puzzle is a grand tilt at that seemingly intractable problem. In it, Steven Mithen marshals the disparate factors and fields of research that might give us some clue as to how language evolved, and tries to build a plausible account of how we ended up as the only speaking animal. Of necessity, the book ranges very widely, because the fields that touch on the evolution of language are in no way unified. Mithen draws from palaeontology, archaeology, primatology, the study of animal communication, linguistics, neurobiology, philosophy of mind, evolutionary genetics and more.
When investigating the ancient past, typically there is at best only partial evidence for a proposed evolutionary sequence: often that evidence will consist of little more than a few morphologically similar fossils, the remnants of creatures separated from one another sometimes by millions of years. And even by these standards, the evolution of human language is a particularly tricky case. Not only is language in large part a behavioural phenomenon, so that the consequences of its development can only be inferred on the basis of ambiguous and circumstantial archaeological evidence (stone tools, traces of fire etc), it is also dependent on the use of soft parts of the body (the tongue and the larynx, but of course mainly the brain), which don’t leave a fossil trace. As a result, it’s hard to ascertain which physical shifts may have accompanied the development of speech. […]
At a certain point during the development of human speech, and out of a huge array of more or less complex communicative sounds, the true sign, with its signifier and signified, must somehow have emerged. Is it right to say that the sign – the word – ‘evolved’? Or did sign-words emerge into communication and consciousness out of a complex of other mental and communicative functions that previously did other jobs? Did this happen gradually or suddenly? Can we hazard a guess at what sort of creatures first spoke true words, as distinct from making other kinds of sound? Is there any trace of this transformation? Or was the point of entry into the forest of symbols sealed up behind us long ago?
These questions bring us back to those ‘iconic’ or ‘sound-symbolic’ words. In the 20th century linguistics tended not to take much notice of them. With their awkward and apparently not quite arbitrary resemblance to sounds and textures, their stubborn resistance to change, and their long association with the outmoded inquiry into the origins of language, they were relegated to the status of what Steven Pinker could call, as late as 1994, ‘a quaint curiosity’. But as Mithen makes clear, such dismissals were premature. Recent research suggests that iconic words may after all have the crucial originary role that thinkers from Socrates to Herder assigned to them, as a genuine remnant – or analogue at least – of one of the evolutionary staging posts that marked the way to modern human speech. […]
Several decades of indifference later, the American linguist Roger Wescott returned to the problem of iconism. Writing in 1971, he observed that i and ee sounds are preponderant in words signifying ‘small’ (for instance ‘tiny’, ‘light’ or ‘wee’), and suggested that the round-sounding vowels a, o and u are associated with things that are large and slow (as in ‘vast’, ‘huge’ or ‘sluggish’). Many consonants, he went on, have sound-symbolic roles too: words featuring laterals like l (‘in which the tip of the tongue blocks the passage of air’) seem to correspond to smallness or lightness, while labials, made using the lips, as in b or m, are linked to largeness (as in ‘big’, ‘boom’ or ‘massive’). Wescott even pushed beyond the sound and production of words to see iconic elements in morphology, syntax and stress. Words that indicate extension or growth, for instance, often themselves get longer (as in ‘big’, ‘bigger’ and ‘biggest’), and reversals in meaning are frequently signified by a reversal in word order (‘I will’ v. ‘will I?’).
Subsequent investigations in the 1990s and into the 2000s sharpened the accuracy of such observations, finally cementing iconic words and sound symbolism as significant parts of all languages. There is now a mass of work on the subject, which has demonstrated a ‘universal propensity’, as Mithen writes, ‘to associate specific sounds with specific meanings … a considerable proportion of one hundred basic vocabulary items show persistent sound-meaning associations irrespective of language families, environment or culture.’ […]
Infants and children learn iconic words earlier and more easily than they learn arbitrary words, and iconic words remain dominant in the vocabulary of children until around the age of six, after which there is a gradual shift towards arbitrary words. ‘Iconic words are easier to learn,’ Mithen writes, because ‘their meaning is grounded in the sensations experienced by the child – the sound, size, shape, texture, movement and other properties of the object or action being named.’ By providing a fundamental link between speech sounds and objects in the world, they ‘scaffold the entire process of language acquisition’. […]
In 2001, two cognitive scientists, V.S. Ramachandran and Ed Hubbard, published a paper proposing that synaesthetic links between vocalisation, bodily movement and the sense perception of objects could have prompted the creation of iconic sounds in an early human ancestor, thus opening the gateway to speech. They returned to maluma and takete, to the ‘small’ sound of ‘i’, and to other cases in which the movement of the mouth seemed to mimic the meaning of a word, or even the movement of other parts of the body: for instance, when the mouth or lips appear to borrow from the typical action of the hand, as in the numerous words for ‘you’ that involve the ‘pointing’ of the lips towards another person; or the way in which the making of the small i or ee sound could correspond to the pincer action of forefinger and thumb when picking up something small. If synaesthetic links were operating in the increasingly flexible brains of early hominins, perhaps they could have had an effect on vocalisations, resulting in the creation of the first mutually intelligible words – mutually intelligible because their meanings would have been established through shared experience.
Fascinating though all this is, it remains, like so much in the field, a hypothesis lacking crucial evidence. It is also dependent on a loose analogy between early childhood and the evolutionary past – an echo of Ernst Haeckel’s largely discredited idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ or that the developing organism moves successively through the forms of its ancestors. […] Ultimately, Mithen is forced to conclude that, for all the research and thinking done about iconism, synaesthesia and cortical leakage, nobody has any idea when or how the arbitrary sign emerged.
Faced with such frustrating stubs, plausible speculations and partial truths, Mithen turns to archaeology. When were there leaps in the design and innovation of stone tools? When did controlled fire start to be used widely? And after that, the brain. What is the timeline for increases in brain size among hominins? What can we learn from casts of the brain cases of extinct human relatives? Mithen quarters the field with care and imagination, cross-checking, noting correspondences and filling in blanks, finally emerging with a carefully synthesised narrative account of the way language developed and finally flourished into modern speech across three million years of human evolution. We are left with the impression that the ancients’ chief error was in thinking that the process took place consciously among already fully human people.
We now see that instead of a prisca lingua created by principal name-givers or people in a state of nature, the process of language acquisition took place over millions of years in the bodies and minds of a series of ancient beings: Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and, finally, the last human standing, Homo sapiens. No doubt there were many others. At some point, perhaps a hominin made a sound that mimicked the movement of a snake or a fish, or a sound that was small like an insect, and eventually these became words; and then a sound that was originally made in imitation of something steadily departed from it in everyday usage, until it was no longer mimicry but was instead an abstract word; and then another abstract word was needed in order to be more specific about how to make a stone tool, and people told stories around the fire, and mothers cooed at babies and so on and so on, until we arrived at modern language. The potential role of ‘motherese’ in language evolution, and the perspective that a more female-centred history of language evolution might provide, doesn’t get much airtime in The Language Puzzle. There are many more fires, hunts and stone tools in Mithen’s story than babies and comforted children, and when it comes to thinking about talking it isn’t immediately obvious why that should be so. But however the story is told and whatever refinements may be made, the arrival of the arbitrary sign is the crux, and although we know more than ever about what may have preceded it, what was necessary for it to happen, and what the first sort-of sign may have been, the event itself remains stubbornly out of reach. In the beginning was the word, and the word is lost.
I’m grateful for the skepticism of the reviewer; it’s all too common for journalists to take the most exciting suggestions and run with them.
Yes, admirably restrained. And the general tenor of the book seems to be sensible too, judging by the review.
Sound symbolism in Volta-Congo languages is pervasive enough that it creates quite numerous false cognates. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the much more prominent role of outright ideophones in these languages compared with SAE.) Several of these are perennial favourites of the Niger-Congo maximalist lumpers.
And contrariwise: I junked several items on the usual Swadeshoid lists when doing back-of-the-envelope lexicostatistics in Oti-Volta, because the languages in question typically use ideophones for those meanings, and even closely related languages use different, quite unrelated, ideophones. (So much for “sound symbolism” …)
I suppose no harm would be done by leaving them in, as far as trying to determine degrees of language relatedness goes (not that it’s a good method anyway): it just increases the noise-to-signal ratio.
Something that occurs to me in the search for arbitrariness is that it may not be possible for us to know what is arbitrary for non-human animals. When a vervet monkey makes a call to warn others of the presence of a snake, how can we be sure that the non-descript screech isn’t a very snakey sort of sound to a monkey? And even for humans, sound symbolism can be quite abstract. When learning ideophones in other languages, they’re often quite opaque until they are explained by a native speaker (“tobo-tobo” is the sound of stomping in Japanese, “cock-a-doodle-doo” is the call of a rooster in English). Even when directly imitating a sound heard in nature, different animals or different human cultures will tune in to different aspects of it, and that will require some knowledge of context to decode the meaning.
All that to say, even the first “word” in the sense of an abstract relationship between signifier and signified may rest on top of countless generations of pseudo-abstraction that would be very difficult to untangle.
Either way, I’m extremely grateful that we have moved on from the days when it was common and even socially acceptable to assume that one day a freak baby was born with a language gene, and was somehow sexy enough to outbreed the hooting morons in their cohort.
I haven’t yet read the review or the book, but does it make any reference to signed languages? There are dozens of documented sign languages which were created de novo, some recently enough to have been observed as they evolved from the purely iconic to the more arbitrary and abstract.
[minor rant warning]
true symbolic language is unique to the human species… [or] the human lineage
as i think i’ve said here before, i think this a priori core assumption of these arguments is at best unproven – indeed, untested, in any genuine sense – and more likely simply incorrect. if humans’ communication systems are so thoroughly of a more complex cognitive order than those of other species as to be different in kind, humans should be able to learn to communicate perfectly with other species using their own systems. that has not proven to be the case, even for our longest-standing comensal and domesticated species.*
sure, humans have been able to establish minimal degrees of communication with a number of species, but our failure at actual fluency is so thorough that cats have managed to create a human-oriented language that works on our terms (and appears to have only a very tangential relationship to their intra-species communication), while we have managed no such thing in the 5000-9000 years we’ve cohabited with them**.
further, as MK said above, we have absolutely no basis for the assumption that other species’ languages are purely iconic. what would that even be like for, say, crows, who we know can recognize individual humans, announce their presence, and respond to such announcements based on other crows’ past history with that specific person? at the barest of bare minimums, until someone can convincingly demonstrate the meaning to crows of different caws that identify different people*** – and then show that the semantics correspond to specific crow lexemes (or morphological, phonological, or syntactical elements) in a way that demonstrates systematic mimetic matching – there’s no evidence for iconicity.
and that would be comparatively easy with crows, as a fairly closely related species whose sensorium is not that different from ours – more similar, likely, than even closer relatives like cetaceans. cephalopods (for example) are a whole different kettle of fishiness and handwaving.
on all the various “sides” involved, it’s just axiomatic human chosenness all the way down – otherwise known as Bereshis/Genesis 1:26-28 with the serial numbers filed off.
[this minor rant brought to you partly by a subplot in natasha pulley’s The Mars House]
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* i won’t make any arguments based on it, but i do want to point out that the extremely widespread (if not universal) presence of folklore that involves members of other species being able to talk to humans or/and vice versa hints at the recentness of the concept that only humans have “genuine” language.
** it’s a rare human who can successfully put across even the most common cattish utterance for humans to attempt, the slow blink. and we learn that with the help of friends or books, while cats raised alone from early kittenhood manage to, on their own, develop individual lects for communicating with the human part of their households! if a species involved in that has a “language instinct”, it sure isn’t humans.
*** which could be damn near anything for the same human referent (referand?), since we haven’t learned their language(s) well enough to know what matters, or even registers to crows: “shoots at us sometimes”? “wears a red hat”? “often accompanied by a dog”? “shorter than the other monkeys”? “maronite catholic”? “intense blaschko lines”? “fashy haircut”? “that asshole we last saw august 23rd, 2021”? “hums in Cm with A=440Hz”? “smells like midlife crisis”? “type B24§q human on the krȓrȓkh-xśśshȶ scale”?
otherwise known as Bereshis/Genesis 1:26-28 with the serial numbers filed off.
[Awesome.]
Writing in 1971, he observed that i and ee sounds are preponderant in words signifying ‘small’ (for instance ‘tiny’, ‘light’ or ‘wee’), like ‚giant’, ‘mighty’, or ‘enormous’ ’and suggested that the round-sounding vowels a, o and u are associated with things that are large and slow (as in ‘vast’, ‘huge’ or ‘sluggish’).’dwarf’, ‘ant’, or Latin ‘parvus’
Obviously you can think of counterexamples to almost anything. The real question is has anyone actually done a rigorous statistical analysis. And given the global cross contamination from Indo European, Semitic and Sinitic languages over the past several thousand years, how can you possibly make a conclusion about iconic elements in languages that were spoken 50,000 years ago?
I’m not sure I follow the point about cat blinking. Is the assumption that if human language is a more complex version of that, we’d expect anyone able to master the more complex version to also master the simpler version? I’m not sure that’s a sound assumption, if so. In any case, doesn’t pretty much everyone assume that human language is both more complex than *and* qualitatively different from other forms of animal communication? I’m not going to defend the “language instinct” idea (my personal guess — just a guess — is that it has elements of truth, but is mostly false in the Pinkerian sense), but this all seems rather beside the point. One could even argue that it supports the idea that humans are specifically primed to deal with human language to such an extent that they can overlook non-linguistic communication (which, if one were Pinker, could maybe even be leveraged to claim that human communication doesn’t just utilize general cognitive architecture, since then the expectation might be that humans would cat-blink as easily as they phonologize the distinction between [t] and [d]).
For what it’s worth (probably not much, but I like talking about my cat), me and my cat have a much wider range of communication than blinking. I can interpret a lot from his body language and facial expression (leaving aside his very, very rare meows, and his more common murbles), and I can communicate with him using some noises and a lot of gesture. Based on personal experience, this is all par for the course in human-cat interaction.
“folklore that involves members of other species being able to talk to humans or/and vice versa hints at the recentness of the concept that only humans have “genuine” language”
Or, alternatively, that’s just run-of-the-mill human projection and anthropormorphization. Part of the reason so many people are taken in by LLMs and think they’re “AI” is precisely that we’re so ready to see ourselves in the universe. Anyway, we still have all sorts of stories about talking animals, which apparently coexist entirely comfortably with the idea that human language is something “different” than non-human communication.
The famous ban on speculation about the ultimate origin of human language in the regulations of the Société de Linguistique de Paris apparently dates (the internet advises me) to 1866. Saussure (born 1857) wasn’t the first one to think it profitless.
The “out of the Stone Age” subtitle of Mithen’s book seems unhelpful, both since we probably would not have gotten into the so-called Neolithic without language and because the various human societies that never (at least until quite recently) exited the Stone Age all already had quite sophisticated languages. Indeed, some will tell you that the indigenes of Australia never quite transitioned to the Neolithic but that wasn’t for want of language.
The “out of the Stone Age” subtitle of Mithen’s book seems unhelpful
I imagine it was chosen by the publisher (publicity dep’t), since those people care more about catching a potential purchaser’s eye than about accuracy.
Lack of motivation to even try.
Yeah, it’s not just YouTube title images that are routinely much worse than the actual content.
Though if the first step of getting out of the Stone Age was getting out of the Old Stone Age, the subtitle works.
Lack of motivation to even try.
Well, some people, such as Nelson Goering, have motivation, but it doesn’t come from a desire to be fed every day.
Also, if any genetic evolution was involved, cats’ short generations would have helped.
I was wondering about the origin of the name Mithen (/maɪðən/). The family-name sites implausibly suggest that it’s from the place name “Mitton” or that it’s Norman. The pronunciation seems to give the lie to both, though as a proud scion of the ancient Haversedge line, I suppose I must admit that anything can happen with surnames.
“Light” as an example of “i” sound surprised me. The cited article (420 ff) has instead:
@rozele: I read Madeline as arguing against the assumption that animal sounds are not iconic.
To judge by this article (there are probably places other than Forbes), crows have an amazing ability to recognize faces, or rather masks, but there’s no suggestion that they communicate any visual traits of the faces to each other rather than pointing them out as dangerous or benign.
And anyway, can they say, “And naebody kens that he lies there,/ But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair”? I see no reason to think that.
@JF:
i don’t think either assumption is particularly defensible; i understand MK’s
“it may not be possible for us to know what is arbitrary for non-human animals. When a vervet monkey makes a call to warn others of the presence of a snake, how can we be sure that the non-descript screech isn’t a very snakey sort of sound to a monkey?”
to be saying basically that if we can’t know what’s arbitrary, or contrapositively (i think) what’s understood as resemblance, we can’t know either way about its iconicity.
@NG:
from what i understand, the folks who study felines say that that whole complex of cat-to-human communication is quite separate from what they use for cat-to-cat communication. it’s also, supposedly*, fairly consistent among cats, which argues for cats teaching it to each other. i named the slow-blink because it’s the one that non-cat-people are most likely to have heard of. but what i’m pointing out is that humans haven’t done the equivalent with any of our domesticated or commensal species.
to my eye, the idea that humans’ communicative capacities are of a different order than those of other animals in practice translates pretty directly into an assumption that other animals’ communication systems can be modeled as simpler versions of human communication, lacking that certain je ne sais quoi, that ineffable etcetera. i think that’s because presuming inherent human superiority combined with accepting the reality of evolutionary processes more or less requires positing a ladder-type series of states of being, with magical transitions between them. the supposedly different sides are quibbling about whether how the magic works – is it AD&D magic? or mercedes lackey magic? or nevèrÿon magic? or tolkein after all?
stories about talking animals, which apparently coexist entirely comfortably with the idea that human language is something “different” than non-human communication.
but do they coexist horizontally? or is the latter a new narrative that has managed to largely displace the older one, except in cultural works (old or new) that retain it as an axiom, and remain wildly popular because the new narrative doesn’t match people’s actual experience of other species? it’s kinda perfect as an example of one way fredric jameson’s residual/dominant/emergent analysis of cultural forms can play out.
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* i fully confess to going by popular press renditions of this research.
” iconic words remain dominant in the vocabulary of children until around the age of six, ”
I’d like to see the details supporting this claim. I’m sceptical.
@rozele:
Evidently, human beings are uniquely gifted at whatever it is that human beings are uniquely gifted at.
@rozele: If you look at Madeline’s whole comment, I think you’ll see it’s about what your excerpt from specifically mentions: she’s questioning the assumption that animal communication is not iconic. She didn’t say anything about the opposite assumption, which I’ve never heard anyone make. I agree with you that neither assumption is warranted.
i named the slow-blink because it’s the one that non-cat-people are most likely to have heard of. but what i’m pointing out is that humans haven’t done the equivalent with any of our domesticated or commensal species.
I’ve certainly seen people do the equivalent with dogs, such as the “play sign” (as a friend called it in the ’80s–forelegs or arms extended, lowering the head and upper torso, and incidentally his dog outweighed him). I don’t quite remember how another man demonstrated the way he reinforced his dominance over his dog-wolf hybrid. I don’t know of any examples with other domesticated or commensal species, but anyway I don’t see the relevance to the argument about whether non-human animals have language.
lacking that certain je ne sais quoi, that ineffable etcetera
I’d say it has quite effable je le sais bien components: a vocabulary of thousands of words, and grammar that takes a thick book to describe. (And being able to talk about grammar.)
i think that’s because presuming inherent human superiority combined with accepting the reality of evolutionary processes more or less requires positing a ladder-type series of states of being, with magical transitions between them.
The problem exists even without presuming inherent human superiority, since we’re undoubtedly descended from organisms that didn’t have language, even if that phase was a billion years earlier than we think, and I don’t think we know much if anything about the transitions.
The problem exists even without presuming inherent human superiority […] I don’t think we know much if anything about the transitions.
certainly! but there’s no reason except Bereshis 1:26-28 to place the line between humans and all other species. and the a priori placement of that line is very transparently shared by all sides of the supposed “debate”.
to evaluate your proposed criteria of an extensive vocabulary and a grammar would take achieving a level of fluency (call it duplication or mimicry if you want to beg the question) in another species’ communication system that humans have simply not achieved. plenty of human lects have been dismissed as “not real language” with those very criteria as the stated reason, because the a priori line-drawing was between white christians and everyone else and few people like to challenge an axiom that has strong social support, no matter how falsifiable it is.
Re “no reason except Bereshis” I’m a bit skeptical. Every other human society ever all lived in groovy peace and harmony with the rest of nature and had no sense of a weird/radical/unbridgeable disjunction between humanity and the rest? That was just a uniquely Jewish-et-seq. (“Abrahamic”) thing?
@Julian, I’m “sceptical” about “learn earlier and more easily”. What you cite is outlandish:/
@JWB:
no, obviously not. i cite that particular piece of scripture because it is the articulation of that belief that is central to the currently dominant roman/christian culture, and profoundly woven into exactly these kinds of supposedly scientific debates. if i were writing about the logics of electoral-roll manipulation in the recent election in west bengal, i’d cite central texts of the hindutva movement. i’m writing about the a priori assumptions of european/euro-colonial academic/scientific disciplines, so i cite the central text of that sphere’s hegemonic religion. i like to nod to the ways that that text is itself stolen, so i almost always use the jewish name alongside the christian one, even in cases like this where there isn’t much difference of content or interpretation in the distinction.
in relation to the subject of this conversation, the specific source of the assumption i’m pointing out and criticizing is hardly unclear. just because the same axiom can be found elsewhere doesn’t make counterfactual sources relevant, so why on earth would i name them?
tl;dr: oyb di bobe hot gehat eyer, volt zi geven a katshke.
Just to throw it in there, there is plenty of interspecies communication (linguistic or not) not involving the people species.
Yeah, but it gives me a headache just thinking down to the level of you Puny Humans.
Several headaches, in fact.
(On the Internet, nobody knows you’re an Eldritch Abomination.)
Speaking of the many offshoots of the currently dominant roman / christian culture, is anyone here familiar with the theories on the origin of human language developed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tran_Duc_Thao and thought by him consistent with dialectical materialism? The capitalists at Springer will sell you the 1984 English translation of his Recherches sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience for only USD 109.99 (excluding VAT).
This project strikes me as quintessentially French. Indeed, I dare say that it is impossible to write such a book in any other language. The pages would spontaneously combust if you attempted it.
By the way, the answer to the question of chief difference between humans and other species that you heard in USSR (the only and oft cited one) is “tools”.
Of course, it would be a tautology to tell that that’s why we’re able to build spaceships. Spaceships are tools)
@jwb, de
Hélas,
—
Durant ces années [1981-82 or anyway somewhere between 1975 and 1991], Thảo revient sur la question de l’origine du langage en proposant une théorie complètement différente de celle exposée dans les Recherches sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience (dorénavant RLC). Deux facteurs expliquent l’évolution de la pensée de Thảo : l’apport des nouvelles lectures scientifiques et l’étude de la notion philosophique de « causalité ».
Dans une lettre à Sève, datée du 2 août 1981, Thảo dit qu’il a rejeté la proposition d’une réédition des RLC déjà en 1976. Selon lui, le livre de 1973 serait désormais anachronique à la lumière des données scientifiques recueillies au milieu des années 1960, qui constitueraient une véritable révolution dans le domaine de l’anthropologie. Il considère qu’il n’est pas possible d’intégrer ces nouveaux éléments dans l’ancien projet sans repenser complètement le problème de l’origine. D’ailleurs, les nouvelles données confirmeraient les indications d’Engels sur l’origine de l’humanité et la dialectique de la nature avec encore plus de précision.
—
Les derniers travaux de Trần Đức Thảo sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience (1975-1991). Les Recherches anthropologiques
Jacopo D’Alonzo,
https://doi.org/10.4000/hel.394
https://journals.openedition.org/hel/394
The extract is from the introduction, the article contains a lot more detail.
@pp: Ah, so he became convinced that his earlier dialectic efforts had not been dialectic enough? Engels of course was not himself quintessentially French, and one internet source claims that TDT’s earlier language-origin theories were substantially influenced by those advanced back in the 1870’s by Ludwig Noiré in his _Der Ursprung der Sprache_, a volume that perhaps gets shelved with von Junzt’s _Unaussprechlichen Kulten_.
“the idea that humans’ communicative capacities are of a different order than those of other animals in practice translates pretty directly into an assumption that other animals’ communication systems can be modeled as simpler versions of human communication”
Those two ideas are fundamentally different, so I don’t see how one translates into the other. I’m not saying that some people don’t think human communication is just animal communication plus something, but it seems inaccurate (and perhaps rather unfair) to assume that whenever someone is saying something perfectly reasonable (that human communication is different, in some ways, to anything else we know about), that person must actually be meaning something much less reasonable.
As for the folklore side of things, I think you’ve framed it so that you’ll see your desired result no matter what. I’ll just offer up my own experience here: I very much enjoy talking animals in fiction, and I believe animals don’t have language in a human sense. Either I’m weird (which I am in plenty of ways, but I don’t think this is one), or there’s not actually any kind of contradiction there. Probably for the perfectly good reason that talking animals are just fun/natural outcomes of human projection, and not a reflection of the idea that humans in the past actually thought bears could really say “someone has been sleeping in my bed, and is sleeping there still”.
Same here – first it was “using tools”, then it was “making tools”…
“Weaseling out of work is important to learn! It’s what separates us from the animals. …except for weasels.”
– Homer Simpson
@jwb
The way I read the article, it seems to suggest that the evolution of his thought regarding causality caused him to recast his model of work = humans acting causally on the environment to a model where work = humans and the environment acting reciprocally according to external tendencies affecting both. He traces this idea of “dialectic causality” to Marx/Engels and Lenin and credits Stalin and others with misapplying the theory and preventing the development from socialism to communism. A similar reciprocal action created a dichotomy between the sign and the thing signified, which has implications for the origin of language.
In addition, there were a lot of scientific findings, which caused him to reconsider his view of early humans and their development of language and consciousness, also to broaden the idea of language to include gesture and movement.
but there’s no reason except Bereshis 1:26-28 to place the line between humans and all other species. and the a priori placement of that line is very transparently shared by all sides of the supposed “debate”.
Sure there’s another reason, in addition to self-centeredness as well: the behavioral flexibility of humans, which is like nothing else we know of.
And there’s a lot of human bias in favor of animals having languages, from people who talk to pets (even I’ve been known to talk to people’s pets, not to mention wild animals of various kinds) to this interesting article about bird alarm calls, including examples of the interspecies communication Y mentioned.
I don’t know how much has been learned since 2016.
to evaluate your proposed criteria of an extensive vocabulary and a grammar would take achieving a level of fluency (call it duplication or mimicry if you want to beg the question) in another species’ communication system that humans have simply not achieved. plenty of human lects have been dismissed as “not real language” with those very criteria as the stated reason, because the a priori line-drawing was between white christians and everyone else and few people like to challenge an axiom that has strong social support, no matter how falsifiable it is.
Books and TV shows about apes and parrots that seem to have surprising communication abilities are quite popular. I think the climate has been favorable for decades for scientists studying cat or dog or whale or bird communication to announce great increases in known animal communication ability, even language ability, if they can find evidence. Yes, they’d get criticism, maybe very strong, but they could also get significant support of all kinds.
Yeah, I just sigh in frustration when I encounter such stories, because there’s so much bias one way and the other that everybody sees what they want to see.
On the subject of myth/folklore about talking animals, I might also speculate that it comes from the possibility of learning things from animals. For instance, I’ve looked for a hawk when I’ve heard bird calls changing, and that and other clues can alert people to predators that are more significant to humans. Watching where animals go for food can show you where the food is, from berries to schools of fish, and likewise for drinkable water and salt licks. I have no evidence, but I wonder.
Well, one obvious point is that animals emitting varying sounds in what sounds like a structured way can’t help but remind people of what they themselves do when they emit sounds at each other; it seems the most obvious thing in the world to assume that the animals are talking, even if they’re just as unintelligible as the people across the river.
But “do animals use language” is like “is there a god,” “is there life after death,” “are there aliens,” etc.; in the absence of irrefutable proof there’s nothing to go on but one’s own preconceptions.
And of course the animals making those sounds, or getting into those funny postures, are communicating with conspecifics and in some cases even with animals of other species. And sometimes it’s obvious that they’re communicating things that humans also communicate, such as “Watch out!” and “Hey, baby.” But I wonder whether people also understood them as communicating other things, such as “This plant is good for you if you’re sick.”
People imagine all sorts of things; it’s what we’re best at. (Do animals imagine? Stay tuned!)
@hat
Animals appear to be dreaming at times and no doubt some bright spark has measured their brainwaves at such times. Also, when a dog is chasing a stick or a cat playing with string or something on the end of it, is it not rather likely they imagine the object pursued to be something other than what it is?
Who the hell knows? That’s my point — we like to imagine them imagining, so we imagine it, and even consider it rather likely, but that has nothing to do with the dog and everything to do with us.