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I was reading "The Origins of Language: A slim guide" by James R. Harford for probably the last two years. It's not a long book, I just don't read non-fiction often, so I open it up every now and then.
I came across and interesting theory in the book that I wanted to share.
Some context: human history has always fascinated me. People get so short sighted forgetting that we as a species have been around for 300,000 years or so but our lineage stretches way further and things like fire use and tool use came long long before homosapien. Hell, even other human evolutionary lines coexisted with modern humans even as recent as 11.5k years ago (technically, due to being usually in isolated areas).
This whole thing fascinates me. I dive into the internet on sleepless nights, visit the human history and evolution section of the museums on trips. I love our ancient history.
One of the most fascinating part of our evolution is language
In this book the author explores how human language, may have, come to develop. And something I was always curious about was "when is a 'call' or 'signal' a word?"
You can see in other animals signalling or calling, using specifc sounds to denote different meaning. Mailing call versus a warning call.
He touched on in one chapter this exact question. But addressed another curiosity of mine: would our first "words" be objects like 'deer' or larger meanings like 'let us go hunt deer'.
Part of the reasoning for why it's more likely they're the former 'object' words is due to how modern human children learn language:
When a child is shown a teddy-bear, the bear is likely to be in someone's hand, or being moved in some way. Why doesn't the child assume that teddy means something like MUMMY-SHAKING-ATOY-BEAR? Psychologist studying word-learning in children have concluded that they make 'Whole Object Assumption'.
That conclusion really stuck out to me. I find it fascinating and something I had always been curious about. What can we learn from ourselves? But also what is lost to time? What can we never know about our past selves? How different is a modern child learning langauge than a child 100,000 years ago?
I studied linguistics in college but stopped due to conflicts with my computer science courses and not wanting to stretch myself too thin (I transfered majors so had some catching up to do in CS anyway). But it's something I'll always regret not pursuing it further.
I decided two or so years ago to try and develop my own conlang. I always knew they existed, having learned about Esperanto in High School, but never thought to find resources and tools online to make my own. I had been working on my own world building exercise for two stories I was trying to flesh out and felt exploring their language would be an interesting diversion.
In this fantasy world I was creating I tried to start their language from the ground up. How did this race of people come to be. Did they live in caves? By the sea? On the steppe? Fun questions like that to start with what a core vocabulary would be. And in my world tracing the lineage of the race through to see if I should have other languages be part of the same group or unrelated.
I stopped once the pandemic began since most of my time in this space was on the train to work. But finding similar topics on gemini has resparked my interest. I have a few other hobbies to pay attention too in my limited free time. So I decided to start reading again at least!
I have no idea how accurate or up to date any of this information is. But it's an interesting thing to think about so I wanted to share it. What topic fascinates you? That pulls you deeper into wiki source links when you can sleep at night?