The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (15 page)

Peter Gordon of Columbia University has studied the Pirahã tribe, which lives along the Maici River in Brazil. The Pirahã are known to the scholarly community because of the years of fieldwork carried out by the linguists Keren and Daniel Everett, the latter now professor of linguistics and anthropology, and chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, at Illinois State University. There are only about two hundred Pirahã, who live in groups of ten to twenty and maintain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, resisting assimilation into mainstream culture. They are completely monolingual and only occasionally communicate in a primitive pidgin with outsiders. There is no precise number system in the Pirahã language, which relies instead on a “one-two-many” categorization, distinguishing merely between amounts that are not much and those that are larger. For example,
hoi
means “roughly one” or “small”; there is no word for a singular amount. Spoken in a different tone,
hoi
can also mean “two,” as distinct from “one.”
Baagi
or
aibi
designates amounts that are a few or larger. (This kind of system is not uncommon in many languages of the world.)

Gordon carried out a series of experiments on Pirahã speakers that were designed to test their numerical abilities.
¹⁶
In one, he sat across from his subjects, with a stick dividing his side from theirs. He positioned a line of evenly spaced AA batteries on his side and asked the Pirahã to place a similar array of batteries on theirs, matching each of his with theirs in a one-to-one correspondence. With each successive repetition of the task Gordon made it harder and harder by asking his subjects to match clusters of nuts to the batteries, or match orthogonal lines of batteries, lines that were unevenly spaced, or lines on a drawing. He found that the Pirahã were successful with two to three objects but had much more difficulty with larger numbers from eight to ten, where their success rate dropped to zero. The exception to this result was the test that asked the Pirahã to match unevenly spaced clusters. Although they had trouble with between three and six objects, they were almost perfect in matching seven to ten. Gordon suggests this was because the uneven display essentially allowed the subjects to break the larger amount down into groups of two and three.

The Pirahã’s numerical abilities were consistent with the way infants and certain animals can make relatively accurate estimations of small numbers of objects—up to three—concluded Gordon. Beyond this, if a person’s language does not contain a number system that labels quantities like four and five, he may not have the ability to identify or use these numbers. The underlying concept is that languages that contain terms for higher numbers basically teach the learner-speaker to count at this level.

As experimenters become more sophisticated in their methods, it’s reasonable to imagine that the ways that thought is ramified by the complexities of language will become more apparent. In the meantime, the work of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices. And if there is one aspect of language that appears to be a uniquely human and relatively recent innovation, it has to be the sheer size of our vocabulary. It’s thought that speakers can have a vocabulary of sixty thousand words. But how old are words, exactly? Do animals have them? And if they do, does that mean that words have been around longer than humans?

I
n the 1980s two researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, published some attention-grabbing data about the communication of African vervet monkeys.
¹
The researchers confirmed a 1967 discovery that the monkeys made specific, wordlike warning calls in response to particular predators. In a vervet group, all the animals are consistently looking around, and in a group of ten to twenty individuals someone usually spots any nearby predators. When it does, it gives an alarm. If the monkey making the alarm call saw an eagle, it would make one kind of cry sound; if it saw a leopard, it would make another; and if it saw a snake, it would make a different sound altogether.

Not only did the vervets produce different cries, the rest of the group reacted differently to each type of signal. If the lookout monkey made an eagle call, then all the vervets would take up the cry, echoing the sentry, while running beneath the cover of trees. Being under foliage was the best hiding spot in case of an aerial attack. If the lookout’s alarm cry indicated the sighting of a snake, the vervets would do the opposite, climbing up into the trees and repeating the call—Snake! Snake! Snake! Up off the ground, in this case, was the safest place to be. If the sentry monkey spotted a leopard, it would make the leopard cry, and the vervets would likewise leap into the trees, but now they would climb out onto the narrowest, most lightweight branches. These were the perfect place to be if a hungry leopard was prowling, because the lighter branches wouldn’t support the weight of the predator if it followed them up into the tree. In 1967 the vervet behavior was only observed. Seyfarth and Cheney replicated the observation of the vervets’ different responses in experiments using alarm call recordings.

Each type of warning cry was consistently the same sound. It was as if there were three words that had been agreed upon by the whole monkey community, in the same way humans agree upon the arbitrary words of each human language (“eagle” if you speak English;
aigle
if you are French).

There was great excitement at these findings, which suggested that we’d finally found evidence of an animal word that worked the same way a human word does. The last common ancestor of vervets and humans lived around thirty million years ago. Was it possible that all you needed to achieve the complexity of human language was a proliferation of words, some syntactic rules to make them all work together, and thirty million years? And did this mean that words preceded humans?

For a number of reasons, it turns out, the answer is probably no. But it is a gray kind of “no,” and the reason the vervet cries are not satisfying candidates as animal words is not the most important thing about them.

Vervet alarm-calls-as-words had such appeal in the scientific community and the popular press in part because these animals are relatively close kin to humans. If you think of chimpanzees and bonobos as our brothers and sisters, and gorillas and orangutans as our aunts and uncles, then the vervets might be third or fourth cousins. Alarm calls from vervets were much easier to imagine as the antecedents of our language than if they had been coming from, say, a chicken.

But alarms calls are ubiquitous in the animal world. Monkeys have them. Ground squirrels have them. Meerkats have them. As recently as 2005, researchers in the journal
Science
discussed the complicated and clever alarm calls that chickadees make. And, yes, even chickens make alarm calls, distinguishing between terrestrial and aerial predators.

“Most birds,” said Tecumseh Fitch, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “have a sort of generalized alarm call and an aerial predator alarm call. It is by no means unusual in the animal kingdom to have at least two different kinds of alarm for two different types of threat. Ground squirrels have about eighteen calls, and meerkats have more alarm calls than vervets simply because they have more predators than vervets.”

Even though humans are more closely related to vervets than vervets are to chickens, it appears that vervets and chickens have converged upon a common tactic for survival. The forces that led them both to this strategy are powerful, but alarm calls were probably not bequeathed to them from a common ancestor. In fact, the most important thing that they share with all the other alarm-call-making animals is that they are small and delicious. Fitch explained: “The things that have alarm calls are little tiny guys who get eaten by lots of things, and the common ancestor of chimps and humans wasn’t in that category. Humans don’t have alarm calls, and apes don’t have alarm calls. It’s not that they don’t have threats, but they don’t have all these different threats where it pays to be able to refer very rapidly to aerial threat versus ground threat. Whether you’re the Snickers bar of the Sahara or the Snickers bar of South Dakota, you’re going to evolve alarm calls.”

Fitch discusses the evolution of communication with enormous energy. He was named for his great-great-great-grandfather William Tecumseh Sherman, who ended the Civil War with his famous march from Atlanta to the sea. (His ancestor, in turn, was named for the Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh, who traveled up and down the East Coast, uniting tribes in opposition to the spread of the United States.) Fitch himself occupies a unique spot in the new field of language evolution. He studied under Lieberman, writing his Ph.D. thesis on the evolution of speech. And in 2002 he collaborated with Noam Chomsky on the first paper Chomsky wrote about the evolution of language.

“Alarm calls seem to be a prime candidate for language evolution,” Fitch said, “but they are not.” The calls aren’t like human words, because they are genetically preprogrammed: animals will produce them even when raised in isolation. “What vervets have is the ability to communicate a very limited set of meanings,” he explained, “and because that’s genetically determined, there’s no way other than genetic modification to add new units into the system. Each call type has to evolve over Darwinian time, and you can’t evolve limitless meaning, as you have in human language, in Darwinian time.”

What would English speakers look like if they inherited sixty thousand words genetically? It’s hard to imagine. Babies would presumably be able to talk from birth, and they’d have an enormous memory capacity. Most animals that have a lot of information genetically coded are born looking fairly well developed. Our nine months of pregnancy might be considerably longer. New words—and the ideas or innovations they represent—would have to propagate through the species genetically, so adding a single word or idea like “wheel” or “fire” or “cooked meat” would take a few thousand years. Science, art, and McDonald’s would just never get off the ground.

If alarm calls aren’t words, then what are they? “They’re not words in the same sense of language,” Fitch explained. “They’re more like laughter and crying, which are also calls that are innate. You don’t need to hear your mother crying to learn how to cry. Deaf children make these sounds, too.” And as you grow, you learn that when you laugh, people nearby can safely assume that something you find amusing has occurred. If you burst into tears, they can likewise guess that something you find upsetting has happened. “No one has to have any recourse to words to make these sounds or to interpret them,” Fitch said.

We don’t know exactly how these calls evolved, but it’s not hard to imagine that if you were a vervet monkey with a tendency to laugh hysterically and run up a tree every time you saw a leopard heading your way, then you and your troop might end up more likely to survive and to reproduce. When you did reproduce, you’d pass on that genetic predisposition to at least some of your children. The stoic monkey would be a dead monkey.

Instead of seeing alarm calls as a primitive form of language, we should look at them as a communication device that many animals share. Across a wide swath of life, animals as genetically distant as birds (famously descended from dinosaurs) and mammals have evolved distinct units of sound that act as pointers to things in the real world.

It could even be argued that human calls—laughter and crying, which certainly intersect closely with language—are a degenerate form of the alarm calls of prey species. When people hear you laugh, they know you are laughing at something, but don’t necessarily know anything else about it. When vervets make the eagle call, other vervets know that something scary and aerial is headed their way and that they should look up, as opposed to around or down on the ground. In this regard, they make more reliable and specific inferences than we do.

Some researchers still think it’s possible that alarm calls are a kind of protoword—that we somehow broke the link between the vocal token and the DNA, retaining the ability to use freely a sound token to refer to things in the world. There is some interesting neurological evidence for this possibility. Chris Code, a research fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Exeter, points out that it is possible neurobiologically to separate swearwords from other words in language. Swearing actually uses parts of the brain that support language and also parts of the brain that are used when laughing and crying. Often people with severe brain damage remain able to swear even when they are unable to produce other language. Perhaps swearing is the remnant of an evolutionary step at which cries were some mix of automatic and voluntary articulation. While the possibility cannot be ruled out altogether, the safest conclusion at this stage is that alarm calls are probably not the antecedents of words.

The vervet story invokes many of our muddled ideas about animal communication and how it compares with human communication. A few themes crop up again and again. There is the notion that animal vocalizations are just gibberish, the opposite of language, and much like what we produce if we cry out nonverbally—informationless sound that provides a crude guide to an emotional state. And there is the contrary idea that animals use a code to communicate with one another, as we do, but we just haven’t cracked it yet. Both these approaches assume that animal communication will be recognizable in the terms we use to understand our own language, that it has words, or it doesn’t. It has syntax, or it doesn’t. It is full of meaning, or has no meaning and no reference whatsoever.

Another suggestion is that other animals may communicate using degenerate, primitive tokens of our own language. This is part of the broad assumption that humans are intellectually and communicatively superior to all other animals. The vervet alarm calls seemed to fit nicely into this concept: the monkeys had words, but just three of them.

It is true that the complexity of human language is without parallel. It enables us to connect with one another in a virtual world and together invent agriculture, construct buildings, send airplanes through the sound barrier, and shoot satellites into space. But assuming that the most salient thing about human language is that it is
the
superior form of animal communication doesn’t get you very far. It doesn’t tell you what parts of language may have been positively selected. And it can’t tell you about how language evolved. It implies that anything can be expressed by human language, when we don’t know if this is in fact the case.

This approach also implies that human language is the communication tool par excellence, as opposed to a communication tool that developed in a certain niche. But assuming that language is the best possible communication tool is a little like saying that the human brain is quite simply superior to all other brains, as if our brain was an all-purpose machine rather than a device that does some jobs very well and others less so. Such evaluations take the trait, like language, or the organ, like the brain, out of the context of the body and the niche, as if evolution acted independently of the needs of the organism in its environment.

Indeed, saying that the only important thing about language is what it does better than other communication systems is as nonspecific and unhelpful as saying that humans are the most intelligent species—which is itself like saying humans are the best-looking species. If you understand this sentence, then you already belong to the species that agrees with the sentiment.

What matters about the alarm calls is surprisingly obvious but until now has rarely been commented on: when vervets and chickadees and chickens make their alarm calls, they are connecting a particular sound to a referent in the world. Whether the animal arrived at this behavior genetically, somewhat genetically, or not, it appears that it is a widespread, easily evolved, and useful trait.

“Every species where researchers have tried—and that includes dogs, dolphins, parrots, and chimps—can link sound and a reference,” said Fitch. “I don’t think this is some sort of special human ability. It’s a pretty general ability. What else is your brain for? If your brain can’t link two stimuli in the world, one which is visual and the other which is auditory, then what good is it? I wouldn’t be surprised if fish could do this, but no one has really tried to see if they can.”

So the act of hearing a particular sound and making meaning out of it is not particularly human; it’s ancient. Animals like vervets use the connection between a sound and a visual signal in one way, and humans have built on this ability in another way, using it as a platform for human language.

In order to progress, science has to focus closely on some areas to the exclusion of others, which sometimes means that the most obvious facts of our daily lives are ignored. For instance, humans communicate with dogs. That observation is so mundane it hardly deserves mention, but this ability is relevant to understanding what evolved in order for us to evolve language and how the platform for understanding a word is ancient. Philip Lieberman spoke about the relevance of this ability in dogs in his 2000 book,
Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain,
but only in the last few years have other researchers begun to actively investigate it.