Abstract
Natural language—spoken and signed—is a multichannel phenomenon, involving facial and body expression, and voice and visual intonation that is often used in the service of a social urge to communicate meaning. Given that iconicity seems easier and less abstract than making arbitrary connections between sound and meaning, iconicity and gesture have often been invoked in the origin of language alongside the urge to convey meaning. To get a fresh perspective, we critically distinguish the origin of a system capable of evolution from the subsequent evolution that system becomes capable of. Human language arose on a substrate of a system already capable of Darwinian evolution; the genetically supported uniquely human ability to learn a language reflects a key contact point between Darwinian evolution and language. Though implemented in brains generated by DNA symbols coding for protein meaning, the second higher-level symbol-using system of language now operates in a world mostly decoupled from Darwinian evolutionary constraints. Examination of Darwinian evolution of vocal learning in other animals suggests that the initial fixation of a key prerequisite to language into the human genome may actually have required initially side-stepping not only iconicity, but the urge to mean itself. If sign languages came later, they would not have faced this constraint.
Highlights
The origin of human language is intrinsically interesting to humans
In thinking about the origin of the higher-level symbol-using system in human language and culture, the situation is quite a bit more complex as human language was built upon a preexisting cellular genetic system that was already capable of Darwinian evolution
In turning back to language, many language origins scenarios start with a repertoire of already meaningful vocalizations like those used by many different animal species [39] and attempt to come up with a reason—typically, the semantic urge—for why they might have multiplied [40,41]
Summary
The origin of human language is intrinsically interesting to humans. This difference between humans and other sentient animals must have been obvious to Palaeolithic humans; and the recent resurgence of interest in language origins (e.g. [1 –10]) has been little hindered by the paucity of hard evidence (a Pleistocene video would be nice)—or sensible admonitions to attend to more tractable problems. Two insights reached in the course of developing that analogy are useful here: (i) the difference between the origin and the evolution of a symbol-using system and (ii) the critical role played at the origin of the system by intermediate strings of ‘symbol-representation’ segments with properties partway between symbol and meaning. This unconventional starting point leads us to a new physical perspective on iconicity and arbitrariness. The central problem of the origin of the coding system in cellular life is to try to come up with pre-Darwinian reasons for how such an intentional system might have arisen out of prebiotic situations lacking intentionality
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