FROM HAND TO MOUTH
Michael C. Corballis
(1) Imagine trying to teach a child to talk without using your hands or any other means of pointing of gesturing. The task would surely be impossible. There can be little doubt that bodily gestures are involved in the development of language, both in the individual and in the species. Yet, once the system is up and running, it can function entirely on vocalizations, as when two friends chat over the phone and create in each other’s minds a world of events far removed from the actual sounds that emerge from their lips. My contention is that the vocal element emerged relatively late in hominid evolution. If the modern chimpanzee is to be our guide, the common ancestor of 5 or 6 million years ago would …show more content…
Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around 2 million years ago but would at first have been primary gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and emotional. The complex adjustments necessary to produce speech as we know it today would have taken some time to evolve, and may not have been complete until some 170,000 years ago, or even later, when Homo sapiens emerged to grace, but more often disgrace, the planet. These adjustments may have been incomplete even in our close relatives the Neanderthals; arguably, it was this failure that contributed to their …show more content…
In fact, manual gestures still feature prominently in language; even as fluent speakers gesture almost as much as they vocalize, and of course deaf communities spontaneously develop signed language. It has also been proposed that speech itself is in many respects better conceived as composed of gestures rather than sequences of these elusive phantoms called phonemes. In this view, language evolved as a system of gestures based on movements of the hands, arms and face, including movements of the mouth, lips, and tongue. It would not have been a big steps to add voicing to the gestural repertoire, at first as mere grunts, but later articulated so that invisible gestures of the oral cavity could rendered accessible, but to the ear rather than the eye. There may therefore have been continuity from the language that was almost exclusively manual and facial, though perhaps punctuated by involuntary grunts, to one in which the vocal component has a much more extensive repertoire and is under voluntary control. The essential feature of modern expressive language is not that it is purely vocal, but rather that the component can function autonomously and provide the grammar as well as meaning of linguistics
Michael C. Corballis
(1) Imagine trying to teach a child to talk without using your hands or any other means of pointing of gesturing. The task would surely be impossible. There can be little doubt that bodily gestures are involved in the development of language, both in the individual and in the species. Yet, once the system is up and running, it can function entirely on vocalizations, as when two friends chat over the phone and create in each other’s minds a world of events far removed from the actual sounds that emerge from their lips. My contention is that the vocal element emerged relatively late in hominid evolution. If the modern chimpanzee is to be our guide, the common ancestor of 5 or 6 million years ago would …show more content…
Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge around 2 million years ago but would at first have been primary gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and emotional. The complex adjustments necessary to produce speech as we know it today would have taken some time to evolve, and may not have been complete until some 170,000 years ago, or even later, when Homo sapiens emerged to grace, but more often disgrace, the planet. These adjustments may have been incomplete even in our close relatives the Neanderthals; arguably, it was this failure that contributed to their …show more content…
In fact, manual gestures still feature prominently in language; even as fluent speakers gesture almost as much as they vocalize, and of course deaf communities spontaneously develop signed language. It has also been proposed that speech itself is in many respects better conceived as composed of gestures rather than sequences of these elusive phantoms called phonemes. In this view, language evolved as a system of gestures based on movements of the hands, arms and face, including movements of the mouth, lips, and tongue. It would not have been a big steps to add voicing to the gestural repertoire, at first as mere grunts, but later articulated so that invisible gestures of the oral cavity could rendered accessible, but to the ear rather than the eye. There may therefore have been continuity from the language that was almost exclusively manual and facial, though perhaps punctuated by involuntary grunts, to one in which the vocal component has a much more extensive repertoire and is under voluntary control. The essential feature of modern expressive language is not that it is purely vocal, but rather that the component can function autonomously and provide the grammar as well as meaning of linguistics