How Language Began
Page 11
Intentionality is the property of being mentally directed towards or about something and requires a mental operation or ‘stance’ of attention directed towards something. Intentionality is a property of all animal minds. Iconic signs, paintings, pebbles that look like faces, bones that resemble penises and so on, entail intentionality in representations of meanings because they are interpreted (and usually designed) to look, sound, taste, feel, or characterise the things they represent. These icons, such as the Makapansgat pebble or the Erfoud manuport or the Venus of Berekhat Ram, show some of the earliest steps from non-intentional indexes to the intentional creation of signs. The object is seen through a physical resemblance. The icon is ‘about’ something even if it was not intentionally created. Even non-iconic art, such as the geometric shell carvings from Java on page 95, shows the merger of intentionality and representation that is vital to all human languages. As intentionality meets representation in icons, humans were able, in principle at least, to begin to communicate more effectively. After all, modern day emojis are able to act as a kind of icon-based language. However, emojis depend on the modern grammars from which they emerge for complexity of interpretation and their organisation.
The next step is the most important of all the signs for language – the symbol. By being both intentional and arbitrary, the symbol represents a much longer stride towards modern language than either the index or the icon (although both are still found in all languages). Though symbols are often thought of as words, they can also be entire sentences.
Because of this evolutionary progression, which is gradual and spread across Homo species, no one woke up one day talking a modern, complex language, just as no ape woke up one day as a man or a woman. Nor, I believe, did anyone instantly acquire the ability to do recursive grammar-building operations in their head, in search of words to supply to such an operation.
Icons can shape languages in ways beyond mere images or onomatopoeia, however. There are areas in which iconic sound representations are non-arbitrary, culturally significant components of human languages. These suggest that icons played a role in the transition to symbols that was so crucial to the invention of language. An example from the language spoken by the isolated Pirahã people indigenous to Amazonas in Brazil, which involves differences between men’s speech and women’s speech, helps to illustrate this.
First, Pirahã women use a more impressionistically ‘guttural’ speech than men. This is produced by two culturally motivated uses of the Pirahãs’ vocal apparatus. One is that most Pirahã women’s sounds are articulated further back in the mouth, relative to men’s speech. Where a man might produce an /n/ by placing the tongue just behind the upper teeth, in women’s pronunciation, an /n/ places the tongue further back, to just before the alveolar ridge at the roof of the mouth (which can be felt by running the tongue just behind the upper teeth).
Also, Pirahã women have one sound fewer than the men. Whereas Pirahã men have the consonants /p/, /t/, /h/, /s/, /b/, /g/ and /?/ (glottal stop), the women use /h/ instead of /s/. For men the word for manioc meal is ?ágaísi whereas for women it is ?ágaíhi. This use of different articulation along with a different number of phonemes is a way of representing iconically via sounds the social status and gender of speakers. University of Chicago anthropologist Michael Silverstein has studied these kinds of language phenomena extensively, referring to them as ‘indexical’ markers of social relationships.
When using sounds, indexicals are part of a larger phenomenon known as sound symbolism, which has also been studied for quite some time. The Max Planck Institute of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, has dedicated an entire centre to it.
The relevance for language evolution of sound symbolism, indexicals, Pirahã men’s vs women’s speech contrasts and so on is found in at least two potential stages of that evolution. The first stage is imitating sounds. This imitation can create words. Second, the use of sound symbols can build cultural relations and understanding of nature. While conducting research among the Banawás, I recorded a couple of men imitating (that is, using sound symbolism) the sounds of the animals that they hunted. Weeks later I played this tape for the Pirahãs, an unrelated hunter-gatherer group. Their response was ‘Banawás know the jungle. They do these right.’ This sound symbolism can be cultivated (as can the recognition of all indexes of the animals and other components of the ecological niche in which a group is found). The playing of the Banawás’ sound symbolism for the Pirahãs was sufficient for the Pirahãs to know that the Banawás are more like them than Americans (whom they have never heard imitate an animal of their environment with accuracy).
According to the theory of Peirce, however, indexes, icons and symbols are still insufficient for language to get off the ground. One needs something in addition, which Peirce referred to as the ‘interpretant’. This is in essence what makes it possible to use a sign so as to understand its object. Interpretants depend on certain aspects of a sign to work. As an example, consider the symbol ‘eye’. This written word-symbol has two components – the letters ‘e’ and ‘y’ – that are separately usable, but here combined into a single English word to refer to our visible organ of vision. Written words are constrained by cultural conventions on the shape and order of the letters, e, y and e, that compose them. For this reason, if one rotates an /e/ to give its inverted mirror image, /ә/, then the interpretant of the letter, and ultimately the word it is part of, is lost. But write either a tiny /e/ or a ten-foot tall /e/ and nothing of the interpretant is lost. Thus size is not part of the interpretant of ‘eye’, though the directional orientation of the letters is. From this, it is seen that the symbol is itself analysed into meaningful parts that produce the interpretant.¶ Peirce was right again.
Of course, language evolution is also about biology, not only semiotics or culture. It is biology that underlies human language abilities. Acknowledging this obvious fact, it is perhaps surprising and counterintuitive to some to discover that there is nothing in the body dedicated to language. Not a single organ. Nothing in the brain. And nothing in the mouth (except for the position of the tongue). But this should not be a shock. Evolution always prefers tinkering with or exploiting what already exists over creating the brand new. What underlies our wonderful human voices is a jury-rigged collection of anatomical parts that we need for other things. This tells us that language is not a biological object but a semiotic one. It did not originate from a gene but from culture.
Every part of the vocal apparatus has a non-speech-related function that is more basic from an evolutionary perspective and that is found in other species of primates. Language and speech came later and exploited human bodies and brains as evolution had produced them, altering them over time. Therefore, it is not surprising that mechanisms implicated in human language, like our tongues, teeth and the rest, are not only part of the endowment of modern human biology but also found in other animals. This is a simple consequence of the continuity of evolution by natural selection of uniformitarianism. The single unique aspect of the human vocal apparatus that does seem to have evolved specifically for human speech, again, is its shape, caused by the position and form of the tongue (to which we return in detail later).
Sign languages also have much to teach us about our neural cognitive-cerebral platform. Native users of sign languages can communicate as quickly and effectively as speakers using the vocal apparatus. This means that our brain development cannot be exclusively connected to speech sounds, or else all other modalities or channels of speech would be unavailable or less good for language. It seems unlikely that every human being comes equipped by evolution with separate neuronal networks, one for sign languages and another for spoken languages. It is more parsimonious to assume instead that human brains are equipped to process signals of different modalities and that the hands and mouth provide the most efficient modes of physically expressing language. Sign languages, like spoken/oral-aural languages, also show evidence for syllable-like groupings of gestures. Th
is means that humans are predisposed to such groupings, in the sense that our minds quickly latch on to syllabic groupings as ways of more efficient processing. This turns out to be very important in an understanding of the nuts and bolts of how language operates and how its operations were invented. Regardless of other modalities, though, the fact remains that vocal speech is the channel exclusively used by the vast majority of people. And this is interesting, because in this fact we do see evidence that evolution has altered human physiology for speech. Although humans can produce a rich array of sounds, they don’t actually need to do so. By the use of only a small range of consonants (even just one), intermixed with one or more vowels, all human meaning can be communicated (and in fact could be communicated with only one vowel). We know this because there are modern languages that use very little of the sound distinctions provided by the modern vocal apparatus.
There is a long history to icons in the history of our species. After indexes such as fossilised footprints, icons such as the Makapansgat manuport are the oldest signs we have evidence for – exactly as Peirce would have predicted. These existed before symbols, following the predictions of the semiotic progression. For more than 3 million years visual icons have been collected by hominins, from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. These icons suggest that the icon-possessor(s) quite possibly grasped a connection between form and meaning – what the icon is a visual representation of. In this light, consider the two-by-three-inch stone found in the Makapansgat cave in South Africa (Figure 9).
This pebble is much older than Homo, however. It was collected by none other than Australopithecus africanus. The manuport (‘carried by hand’) stands out among the tools it was found among because it clearly is not a tool, but was brought to the cave from elsewhere, almost certainly because it resembled a human face. And it is a kind of stone different from that of the cave where it was found. This manuport indicates that as early as 3 million years ago early hominins recognised iconic properties in objects around them. Just as one perceives the serpentine iconic properties of tree roots in the Amazon, so the australopithecines of Makapansgat saw iconicity in a rock with two circular indentations above a groove running transverse to them.
Someone might suggest that this manuport’s human-appearing face was not noticed by the original australopithecine collector, but that only modern humans looking at it with our larger brains and language recognise it as symbolic of a human face. This proposition, however, would make for a much more complicated problem. We have a pebble among stone tools in a cave that was occupied by Australopithecus africanus, but although the tools were made there, the pebble wasn’t. Now, either it was intentionally carried to the cave or it was not. If it was, then why? One explanation is the one given – it was carried there because it looked like a face. The other explanation would be that it was wanted for something else. But its appearance looks like the simplest explanation. The proposition that it was taken there unintentionally, perhaps stuck in the mud between the toes of a returning creature, seems much less likely. So, although it cannot be proven that the pebble was brought back because it looked like a face, that certainly seems to be the best explanation available.
Figure 9: Makapansgat manuport/pebble/cobble
Move forward to 300,000 years ago and another manuport appears, this one in what is modern-day Morocco, picked up by Homo erectus, a cuttlefish bone shaped like a phallus (Figure 10).
Again, the icon was intentionally appropriated, recognised and collected, though not intentionally created. ‘So what?’ one might ask. What is the significance of such iconic objects for the development of language? Well, the answer depends on whom you ask. Chomsky’s view of language as the output of a recursive operation, Merge, rules out any significant relationship between such occasional icons and the development of language proper, which is merely a type of grammar. If language is nothing more than a computational system, a set of structures embellished by local words, then clearly a phallic cuttlefish bone fails to move humans any closer to such a system. On the other hand, if language is about meaning and symbols, in which computation is nothing more than an aid to communication, then icons become vital to the reconstruction of the evolution of language.
Figure 10: Erfoud manuport
Art, tools and symbols therefore each contribute to our understanding of the other and to the ‘dark matter’ of culture and psychology that allows each to emerge. Art is a visual form with shared meaning, the communication of emotions, of cultural moments, of ideas and so on via shared tacit cultural knowledge. It is necessary to learn to see in several different ways to appreciate art. If the art is painting, people must learn to recognise two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects. If the art is sculpture they must learn to see in objects that are iconic or objects that are not quite iconic the real-world or imaginary object that the artist intended.
Tools, especially when they are generalised and found in different places, such as the ‘kits’ of early humans, indicate the existence of shared objectives, problems and solutions. For example the 300–400,000-year-old Schöningen spears (Figure 11) are evidence of culture among Homo heidelbergensis, perhaps a form of Homo erectus, and show that these humans hunted, that they used brute force rather than throwing and that they dedicated planning to hunting. Thus the spears represent cultural objectives, cultural knowledge, and cultural techniques. To members of the cultures that use them, they are therefore symbolic of these things, especially in light of the wider body of evidence for erectus culture.
Figure 11: A Schöningen spear
Because tools are symbols, they also manifest a property most theoreticians consider crucial for language known as ‘displacement’. This term refers to the sense of meaning that occurs when the object or referent evoked is not present, such as a song your mother enjoyed that reminds you of her when your mother is no longer around. Tools also have intentionality – they were the result of the mental focus of their creators. As symbols, they have a cultural meaning too, one that represents an activity, displaced from the form and meaning of the tool. A spear means ‘hunting’, even when the spear is not actually being used for hunting. Lastly, tools can show an aspect of Peircean signs – producing the interpretant – in that only certain parts of the tools are meaningfully connected to their tasks. The blade of a knife is more central to its meaning than the colour or material out of which its handle is made. An axe can be hollow, or of various materials. What matters is the quality of the edge for cutting. Thus tools, when examined carefully, show cognitive thresholds of association to meanings that are not entirely arbitrary (since the tool is non-arbitrary to the degree that it has a limited number of design options to carry out the task it is designed to perform) but still sufficiently arbitrary to count as a symbol.
In old Western movies the cavalry scout can tell which indigenous community made an arrow found in a victim. ‘That’s a Comanche arrow, Friend.’ This cultural identification is symbolic, arbitrary, conventional and intentional simultaneously. It is symbolic, in other words. Arbitrariness is found in style, the cultural specificity of their task, or cultural regulations on the use of the tools.
Consider now one of the famous Schöningen spears. For their original owners these would have elicited thoughts of, thus symbolised, hunting, of bravery, of caring for their families and of death. Some of these spears were for thrusting, not for throwing. The erectus (or if one prefers, Heidelbergensis) male had to have his testosterone pumping to use this on a woolly mammoth. Run up there and shove it in! An elephant-sticker. Such a spear is as pregnant with meaning and symbolism as any portrait painted on a French cave wall.
Another example of tools as symbols comes from erectus shell carvings on Java (Figure 12).9 These shell carvings are striking not only because of their age but also because of their location and the Homo erectus artist that made them. Unlike Flores, Java could be reached on foot by the erectus shell-carver across the now-submerged marshy land of the Sunda Shelf.
/> The geometric designs on the Java shell could represent merely a pleasant decoration, shaped in part by perceptual constraints of the brain that perhaps favour geometrical design. Or these marks could be symbols whose meaning is lost for ever. They might even represent something intermediate between icons and symbols, precursors to representation of meaning. I suspect that the first guess is correct. Nevertheless, we know that the designer, a Homo erectus man or woman, picked up a shark’s tooth and pressed very hard and deliberately to record these shapes. Notice that the lines are solid and continuous, without breaks. To make such marks, this ancestral human would have had to press hard enough to cut through both the (now decomposed and missing) brown outer layer of the shell into the hard white shell proper. He or she would have had to carve without stopping or the lines would have some visible breaks in them. There is intentionality in these marks.
Figure 12: Erectus shell etchings from Java
Whatever these designs indicate, they are at least a manifestation of intentional activity, perhaps iconic, perhaps symbolic – maybe they represent the waves of a sea voyage. Fascinatingly, they were made some 540,000 years ago. The shell themselves were used as scraping and cutting tools, perhaps even as weapons, as they were by some Native Americans as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thomas Morgan and his colleagues in a 2015 paper assert a strong link between tool development and the emergence of language: