14th October 2024
My coolness knew no bounds as I decided it was time to get creative. Yet my new swear words never took off. Neither my parents or friends could be fooled. Somehow the melding of letters did not resonate or compute in their puzzled minds. And yet it is quite stunning over thousands of years we have somehow agreed letters pursued by words, which do appeal. And more significantly have common meaning. It must be one of the greatest projects of harmony the world has ever seen….
As you know I am a Linguaphile…and no that isn’t a type of pasta; it is an enthusiast of words. But today I am taking a step back to explore what we understand of the formation of language and how this articulation fused to magically recast itself into the written word.
It bemused me as I’d never ruminated, but it is thought the spoken word came before the written word. There is suggestion of a gap of tens of thousands of years, possibly more before the emergence of the later; where the hardware of symbols or words was an attempt to represent vocalisation. Unfortunately one of the conundrums is a dearth of evidence. Theoretically it makes sense our grunting and physical actions congealed to impart information but as you’d suspect, we have no archeological specimens to fortify our theories and no idea what that first communication encompassed.
In fact when you look into the research on the origin of the spoken word and language, it is remarkable that all we can do is apply conjecture. Clearly we aren’t alone as a species that communicates; most do so whether through sound or physical actions. Yet we have developed our approach into something seemingly more sophisticated as we incorporate composition. How?
Theories abound. The emergence of communication was thought necessary to survive and indispensable for deeper social interaction. As we stayed put in tribes, those demands became inescapable, maturing the complexity of our vocal sounds and gestures. The spoken word therefore was an extension of this progress and learned through social interaction. Another theory advocates this broadcasting essential was a byproduct of our enlarging brains and improved cognition. That is, cultivated pronunciation is innate to humans and our genetics.
Could the 7000 spoken languages of the world have emerged from one source? We don’t know. There are similarities across different tongues in how we structure and combine letters and words but also many dissimilarities.
In the first theory above, language could have developed independently across the globe. If you believe the second theory then it was initially limited to beings cognitively capable. We really don’t know. We have no idea what has been lost through time, what other communication existed, what was language and actually who was it in our genus that took these strides? My brain suggests natural selection played sleight of hand. Today we can identify ancestral sources for groups of languages but as to delving further back? It seems likely to remain shrouded.
Confirmation of when our physical and vocal transmissions were able to be turned into ‘writing’ is also vague. The length of time ‘humans’ have been thought to exist (c300,000 years) and the first proof of a written structure, validates the slow process of adaptation. Yet advance we did and impressively at least in the production of this hardware, independently in various locations across the globe.
Historians suggest before we came to structure in our writing we had stages. Proto-writing was the development of symbols or pictograms – images that conveyed action or an object, reflective of our basic rhetoric and bodily communication. More complex phrases could be visually formed by combining these images. Examples of proto-writing include the Indus script found in Asia, Chinese Jiahu marks, Vinca symbols found in Europe and Quipu which was an arrangement of knots in string utilised by the Inca civilisation in South America.
Later came the written form which was then able to reflect ‘linguistic utterances’ (as Wikipedia puts it). That is the written form corresponded with what was spoken unlike the prior utilised symbols. Numbers were thought to have appeared before letters, which makes sense as writing was anticipated to have firstly been used in agricultural transactions.
Most learned people advocate for Cuneiform which developed in the Middle East (Iraq) amongst the Sumerian and Babylonian people and Egyptian hieroglyphics c3500BC as having evolved from proto-writing and being the first writings with structure. But there are others who propose writing structures were developed earlier in many other parts of the globe as with the existence of proto-writing. The absence of corroboration does not leave us the wiser as to the truth. What we do seem to accept is writing as a representation of the spoken word developed unassisted in many parts of the world, that trade only later infused.
I have a habit of discussing topics for which we understand so little other than our shape shifting has helped to make our past, present and future fascinating. It is I suppose not a surprise the development of the spoken and then written word was so tortuous. Yet today I am confounded daily by my Cost centres and the new lingo I am clearly too uncool to pick up on unlike vast swathes of the population. Some things aren’t meant to be accessible to all; perhaps I am cognitively challenged and yet to accept. Change around us is as ever contradictory and unpredictable in its ‘natural selection’ or resonance. Just when you think you have the best swear words figured out Darwinism bites you in the….
Curiosity and the rascal 