Darwin's "Musical Protolanguage" (hypothesis)

Darwin's model of the phylogenesis of the language faculty, like most models today, posits that different aspects of language were acquired sequentially, in a particular order, and under the influence of distinguishable selection pressures. The hypothetical systems characterized by each addition can be termed "protolanguages". Darwin's first hypothetical stage in the procession from an ape-like ancestor to modern humans was a greater development of proto-human cognition. The mental powers in some early pro'genitor (предок) of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use. He elsewhere suggests that both social and technological factors may have driven this increase in cognitive power.

Darwin also outlines the crucial second step - musical protolanguage. Having noted multiple similarities with birdsong, he argues that vocal imitation, was driven by sexual selectionin producing true musical cadences, that is in singing. He suggests that this musical proto-language would have been used in both courtship and territoriality (as a challenge to rivals), as well as in expressing emotions like love, jealousy, and triumph.

The crucial remaining question is how emotionally-expressive musical proto-language made the transition to true meaningful language — how, in Humboldt's words, humans became "a singing creature, only associating thoughts with the tones" (Humboldt, 1836). This leap, from non-propositional song to propositionally-meaningful speech, remains the greatest explanatory challenge for all musical protolanguage theories. Darwinsuggests that articulate language "owes its origins to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries". Darwin thus embraces all three of the major leading theories of word origins of his contemporaries.

“Once,according to Darvin, proto-humans had the capacity to imitate vocally, and combine such signals with meanings, any source of word forms and meanings would suffice, including onomato'poeia (an imitated roar for "lion", or "whoosh" for wind), and controlled imitation of human emotional vocalizations (mock laughter for "play" or "happiness"). The attachment of specific and flexible meanings to vocalizations required only that some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey … And this would have been a first step in the formation of a language.

From Protolanguage to True Language

Derek Bickerton’s(2009) most important contribution to the study of language origins was the idea of a protolanguage that was spoken before full language appeared, and it remains the most important idea in his new book, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans.

Our ancestors began life on the African savanna in the evolutionary process of environment. They were searching for foodas low-end scavengers (стервятники). Later they madea step up and turned to a power scavenging which means they switched from breaking bones and sucking marrow to eating meat of (say) a dead elephant or mammoth.

Our human ancestors faced an enormous food source, which other scavengers could not eat because an elephant skin was so tough. The new idea was to jump in with a sharp rock, cut the skin, and take a piece of meat. But to do that, you would need a small army to fight off the saber-toothed tigers and that lot. So,they learned to go back to their clan and shout "Dead mammoth! Let's eat!was the beginning of human language, and the rest of it developed very slowly indeed --- over the next two million years.

We were not simply shaped by our environment. We chose our environment. (Or we chose our "niche"). We went from savanna foragers to low-life scavengers to high-life scavengers to hunter-gatherers to herdsmen to farmers to "the present." And at every step along the way, language grew to help us. But our progress was not uniform. Two million years of apparent stagnation was followed by a series of startling leaps forward.

Put simply, protolanguage is a simple language,it evolved from a prior system. His solution suggests that first came a protolanguage, that’s a language without syntactical or word-construction rules. When the protolanguage began, it used words to express thoughts that apes were capable of having. The use of these words themselves made the speakers aware of their limitations leading to an understanding of words that enables them to be used in compound or syntactical form.

The formal difference between protolanguage and true language is that protolanguages put words together like beads on a string, without rules. In both languages, words are combinable.Languages combine lawfully and protolanguages combine lawlessly” (Bickerton),

In Bickerton’s theory the human lineage began with talking, using protolanguage. It lacking rules, it does not require merging. Over time (and this time could be two million years), talking itself turns a lawless speech into the lawful speech.

In response to this change in concepts, the brain is rewired to a better handling linguistic rules, however it seems plausible.With the development of linguistic organization complex thoughts and planning become possible. Modern humanity has been arriving.

Chomsky’s theory has many of these same steps but they are not dynamically arranged. A mutation simply transforms animal concepts into mergeable concepts. Another mutation rewires the brain so that complex thoughts and planning become possible. Then still another mutation makes people start expressing their thoughts  aloud, i.e. they start talking.

You can see from this that both Bickerton and Chomsky are trying to explain the same thing—how to get from animal thinking to linguistic thinking—but only Bickerton approaches it as an evolutionary process. So that gives him a leg up, but at the same time, he does not surpass the limits of his field.

It should be obvious that the origin of language is a multi-disciplinary subject. If you want to put forth an account of how language began you have to broaden your scope and think about questions that don’t come naturally to a person of your inclinations, interests, and training. Everybody, of course, has to look into the story of evolution, but that should be just the beginning. There is by now a very long list of things besides language that distinguish humans from apes:

Anatomy: upright biped, hairless, eyes white instead of black, different hyoid bone, lacks chest air sac, brain enlarged and moved above brow…

Life cycle: breast-feeding period reduced, childhood period between infancy and juvenile state, adolescence between juvenile and adult state, elongated post-menopausal state in women…

Social structure: identity goes beyond self to membership in larger communities; relationships between community members include duties, trust, support; mothers care for infant; adults and infants play together; joint attention and emotional bonding activities common, etc.

Monogenesis was dismissed by many linguists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the doctrine of the polygenesis of the human races and their languages held the ascendancy (e.g. F.de Saussure 1916).

The best-known supporter of monogenesis in America in the mid-20th century was Morris Swadesh. He pioneered two important methods for investigating deep relationships between languages, lexicostatistics and glottochronology.

In the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Greenberg produced a series of large-scale classifications of the world's languages. These were and are controversial but widely discussed. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated in 1987 "The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family."

Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be reconstructed by comparing different members of the language family through the comparative method. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it. Some of the many unattested proto-languages for which reconstructions have been devised are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian.

In other cases, the proto-language is attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries.