Evolution of Language and Symbolic Function

8/3/2019 Evolution of Language and Symbolic Function

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Language Development

The Evolution of Language and Symbolic Communication

Imagine that you are attending a corporate meeting about a new product. Even if this is your firstsuch meeting, you know how to behave. You take your cues from the people around you andmuch of it seems like well-practiced ritual. There are no surprises about how you are dressed, theway you move and sit, the tone of your voice or the general flow of the proceedings. Someaspects, of course, are strictly of the moment: a rumbling of hunger in your stomach, a gesturedrequest for the water pitcher, the poor ventilation that prompts you to loosen your jacket, yourdisagreement with a colleagues opinion. Nevertheless, the interactions, the environment and the

business at hand all seem smoothly integrated into a single event, the meeting about the product.

Visual symbols and numbers

As unified as the event might seem, your participation has required you to understand

information of many different kinds, communicatedin widely different forms, such as writtenand spoken language, body language, group behavior, numbers, visual symbols, pictures andslides, charts, electronic sounds, an analog clock on the wall, and a physical model of theproduct. How did these vastly different forms of communication come to be, and how have theydeveloped over the course of human life on earth? What do they reflect about our genetic andcultural heritage?

Language, Communication and Experience


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Cuneiform was the firstknown form of written

language, but spokenlanguage is believedto predate writing by tensof thousands of years.

What is language? We will use the word language broadly to mean any system ofcommunication; any system for transferring information from one party to another. This wouldinclude body language and mathematics, not simply the customary notion of speech or writing.Likewise, we wont restrict the idea of communication only to humans; there are many examplesof communication among animals, and also between humans and objects such as clocks orcomputers.

People use languages to express their experience. However, each language is uniquely adaptedfor expressing only certain parts of our experience and is less effective for describing other parts.We cannot completely describe a painting in words, or describe emotions with numbers. Andbecause experiences differ widely from one culture to another, we cannot completely express theconcepts and nuances of one culture in the languages of another. For example, the OhloneIndians of the western United States, who had a stable population for 5,000 years before theSpanish arrived, had no word for famine, presumably because they had never experienced thatcondition.


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To refine the notion of language further, we call symbolic a language that represents informationin the abstract, outside of its immediate context. For example, we can understand the word fiveas a symbol for a group ofideas that have to do with quantity, size, order or appearance,regardless of whether we are counting, measuring, comparing or describing anything at themoment.

Symbolic languages can be multi-layered or interactive in complex ways. Consider the symboliccomplexity of a system like Morse code, which is transmitted as auditory signals. The signalsrepresent our alphabet and can be translated directly into letters or written down in Morsenotation and translated later; the letters represent the sounds of spoken language, which can becombined to form words, which in turn stand for ideas; and so on. We will discuss symbols morespecifically in the sections below, but for now the point is simply that using a symbolic languageadds abstraction and extra dimensions when we express our experience.

Episodic Experience and Behavioral Language

Our most basic type of awareness can be called episodic. This is when we perceive ourimmediate environment and events as they are occurring, without reflection. This simpleawareness in humans probably corresponds to a similar kind of experience in other animals andearly hominids. We often use behavioral language to communicate this kind of experience, eitherintentionally or unintentionally. For example in the corporate meeting, unbuttoning your jacketshows others that you feel uncomfortably warm, whether you are aware you have done this ornot. A gesture toward the water pitcher indicates a request, frowning and shaking your head mayindicate disagreement.

Representations of emotional states

When primates and other animals use behavioral language, they communicate information thatpertains to the here-and-now, such as warnings, requests, commands, mating desires and

emotional states. This immediate behavioral language is not symbolic in the sense of being usedoutside its immediate context. Many species have languages for warning each other of danger,but these would not be considered symbolic communication unless they could also be used toexpress danger in the abstract, for example to report about past events, formulate plans or teachskills. Humans, on the other hand, can quite readily use the very same actions symbolically thatthey used behaviorally during an event.


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As far as we know for sure, animals in the wild only communicate behaviorally about immediateexperience. However, we do know that some primates can communicate abstractly with humans;apes who have been taught sign language can communicate about past events, future plans andabstract ideas with their trainers, as well as interpret pictures, enjoy humor, make up nicknames,and other human-like mental skills. We dont know whether they have any kind of symbolic

language native to their own species that would allow them to communicate these kinds of ideasin the wild.

There is a distinction between what individuals can think aboutand what they can communicate.How and how much do those two activities affect each other? It seems unlikely that a gorillawould develop a vast new set of mental skills simply by learning sign language, so it seemsreasonable that she already could think about some concepts she could not communicate. Shemight also have learned some new modes of thinking in the process of learning the newlanguage. For parties to communicate they must share a common language and enoughoverlapping experience to be understood. Once the language is established, it can broaden anindividuals experience so that new thoughts can be conceived, these thoughts can enable others,in a cyclical process.

Organizing Experience into Mental Models

As we mentioned above, we can recognize a distinction between what a group can communicateamong themselves (which determines their culture) and what they can think about individually. Itis reasonable to assume that many of the higher animals can think and understand well beyondtheir immediate episodic awareness. At the very least, survival would depend upon the ability toremember past experiences and organize those memories into useful knowledge.


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Thor's battle against the giants(1872) by Mrten Eskil Winge

Individuals organize information into mental models, which are perceivedpatterns or scenariosthat can be used to make sense of their observations. For example, I might organize two eventsinto a cause-and-effect scenario, by which I believe that one of them causes the other, andthereafter I will expect that if the first event occurs, the second one will also occur. (If I step on aburning ember I can expect to feel pain.) This kind of learning seems so basic in higher speciesthat calling it mental modeling might seem pedantic. However, in human thought there is oftenan array of models to choose from, and which model an individual selects will affect his

memory, response and expectations with regard to the information. In other words, he will viewand understand the very same piece of information differently, depending on the mental modelhe has chosen to interpret it. When we hear thunder, do we explain it as the anger of the gods, thenoise made by an atmospheric event, or some other model?

Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case

One of our extraordinary human capacities is to rapidly sort through numerous possible models,select relevant details, and keep multiple models in mind simultaneously. Humor, in fact, is often


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based on setting up the expectation of one scenario and then switching to another by surprise, orexploiting an ambiguity. Pinker gives many examples of humorously ambiguous newspaperheadlines such as, Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case. The humor in this example, ofcourse, comes from two widely different interpretations (models) of the phrase violin case, and

recognizing that one scenario is plausible in this context while the other one is silly.

Consider the following exchange: John asks, Should I light the candles? and Mary responds,

Well have cake and ice cream after the children have washed their hands. On the literalsurface, Marys response does not answer Johns yes-or-no question at all, and could becompletely unrelated. However, you can come to some quite detailed, reasonable conclusionsabout this exchange using a particular mental model: The setting is a childs birthday party andthe candles are on a cake. John is not asking Mary if he should light the candles at all, he isasking if he should light them now. Her implied answer is that, no, he should wait until after thechildren have washed their hands, which he knows from past experience will take a few minutes.Then he should light them, the birthday child will blow them out, and the cake will be cut up andserved with ice cream.

Should I light the candles?

We could continue in this vein to make a wealth of other reasonable conjectures: John and Maryare probably adults or older children, since they seem to be in charge and are allowed to handlefire; they are likely to be relatives or friends of the birthday child; John is probably male andMary female; there are fewer than 15 candles on the cake; and so on. Do we know these thingsfor sure? Certainly not, but we are hard pressed to find alternative models that produce such aplausible interpretation. If it werent for mental models, this brief communication would bemeaningless without a large amount of additional detail spelled out explicitly.

As you can see, the communicative power of two sentences is increased enormously through theuse of models. Not just one but many models are invoked by this example: birthday parties,

social conventions, child behavior, names, safety, hygiene, candles, time, and so forth. Eachword or phrase generates its own scenarios which, in turn, evoke new details. And the humanbrain miraculously manages to sort and select among these in the blink of an eye.

For communication to occur, the parties must not only share a common language andoverlapping experience as we mentioned above, but they must also share the same mentalmodels for interpreting the language. The types of models available to an individual will beinfluenced by his genetics as well as his culture. Merlin Donald believes that animals, early


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hominids and humans probably differ in the types of models they can construct, based on thetypes of awareness they are capable of. For example, animals that are capable of episodic, butnot reflective, awareness could construct action/event models like cause-and-effect, but theywould not be able to conceive of mythical explanations for why events occur as they do oranalytical theories based on rules of evidence and logic.

Symbolic Language Begins with Mimesis

According to Donald,Homo erectus (beginning 1.5 million years ago) made a qualitative breakwith other primate cultures when he began to use the most basic form of symbolic representation,pantomime or mimesis, to reenact events outside their immediate context. Mimesis undoubtedlyincluded the same movements used for behavioral communication, but the difference came inusing them separately from their real-life situations. With a sufficiently elaborate mimeticlanguage,Homo erectus could create a culture that was intermediate between apes and modernhumans, with complex rules, social structures and highly cooperative forms of behavior. Rituals,games, sports and dance all grew out of mimesis. Skills like coordinated hunting and warfare,

which already existed in hominids and other species, could be taught mimetically, away fromtheir normal, problematic contexts.

Rules of movement

Mimesis is still very much in use today. Particularly in our group behavior we follow ritualisticrules of movement, action and dress that are conveyed and reinforced mimetically. Each culturealso has its own repertoire of hand and body gestures that accompany speech or stand on theirown: gestures like clapping your palm to your forehead, scratching your head while scrunchingyour face, or folding your arms across your chest while tightening your lips are understood tohave certain meanings. Chances are that nobody has ever explained these meanings to you, but

you have learned them through observation. Actors rely on the common recognition of specificmovements to convey a broader picture of their characters than words alone could deliver, andcomic actors often use a conflict between mimetic and spoken meanings for humorous effect.

Ideas Precede Symbols, Symbols Generate Ideas

In order for a symbol, such as a gesture, word, picture or number, to represent an idea, it seemsobvious that the idea must have preceded the symbol. When the symbol is introduced, it must


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identify something that both parties recognize, and it must be agreed upon and rememberedbefore it can become a useful communication tool. Donald makes a strong case that humans musthave invented symbols because they neededthem to represent ideas they could already thinkabout but could not communicate effectively.

Once a symbol or symbolic system is in use, however, it can have profound influences on thegeneration of new thoughts and new kinds of models. For example, the Arabic number systemintroduced a symbol for zero. Although the concept ofnothing was previously understood, it hadnot been explicitly expressed in a concise numeric notation. Once this system with zero was

available, it led to mathematical discoveries, new ways of using numbers that would not havebeen possible using a system without zero.

The symbols available in a culture serve to focus communication and social reliance on certainforms of thinking. Interactions are affected, and new areas of understanding will arise whileother areas may be limited or obscured. For example, the thought processes that are mosteffectively expressed with mimesis are action based, ritualistic and socially interactive. WhenHomo erectus developed mimetic language, therefore, they could move beyond the limitations ofbehavioral language, and could go on to form societies that were more highly cooperative.

Oral Culture Takes Off

Some of the areas of the brain involved in languageprocessing: Broca's area (Blue), Wernicke'sarea (Green), Supramarginal gyrus (Yellow), Angulargyrus (Orange) and Primary Auditory Cortex (Pink)


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We dont know exactly when hominids began using speech, but it may have been as early as

200,000 years ago, and almost certainly had progressed by 50,000 years ago. When modernhumans entered Europe about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, Neanderthals were already there. Thetwo groups lived side by side and competed for the same resources until Neanderthals died out,about 35,000 years ago. Some scholars believe that speech was the primary advantage modern

humans had over Neanderthals, based on skull differences in the basicranial line, nasopharynxand upper vocal cavity (Donald, 1991, pp. 206-7).

During the period between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, genetically modern humans achievedwhat Marvin Harris calls cultural takeoff, which he associates with linguistic takeoff. It was atime of enormous cultural changes, and likely was also the time that we acquired the capabilityfor fully developed speech, based on anatomical evidence including a new, descended larynx andchanges to the suboral cavity and tongue. Both Harris and Donald believe that the culturaladvances of this period were linked to linguistic developments. If this is true, what were thespecial benefits of speech over mimesis?

For one thing, speech does not interfere with other brain activities such as locomotion, manualskills, orientation in space or visual perception, so people could talk to each other at times whenit would have been impossible to use mimesis. Another advantage is the tremendous range ofvocal sounds humans can produce, tens of thousands of distinct sound combinations, which issubstantially more than a usable repertoire of mimetic symbols or the two dozen sounds that apescan produce. And lastly, speech is relatively easy to remember and rehearse, so a group couldproduce a large body of words that were retrievable in memory. For these reasons, speech wasthe ideal medium for developing symbolic communication among people who lived closetogether, without compromising the visual and motor skills they relied on for survival.

Sign languageThe capability and drive for oral expression are innate in genetically modern humans. Allcultures use speech; all babies babble; humans are born with the ability to distinguish thesignificant sounds of their own cultures speech and learn the mental models that make sense outof those sounds. Helen Keller, an American woman who was deaf, dumb and blind from infancy,says in her autobiography that as a child she felt driven to vocalize, even though she could nothear her sounds and didnt know that speech was for communicating. Although her family triedto discourage her from making what they thought of as random noise, she could not resist thesensation of vocalizing. She also relates the incident when, after intensive efforts by her teacherto teach sign language to her, she suddenly recognized what it all meant: that everything has a


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name. This was the very powerful mental model that united sign language and the world ofexperience for her, and it is likely a basic model for the understanding of all symbolic languages.

Early humans could use the spoken word to communicate mental models they could not expresswith mimesis. Specifically, they could communicate about overallpatterns and themes. Donald

believes that the evolution of speech was driven by the minds desire to communicate thosekinds of concepts. Narratives, explanations, rules, collective plans and decisions becameimportant forms of social discourse, beyond the simple relating of here-and-now events andcircumstances. We think of these early cultures with speech as oral societies, because the facilityof speech dominated and profoundly affected the nature of their group interactions.

Mythic invention, the expression of human experience with a unified explanation andsignificance, was an early and dominant development in oral societies. All Stone Age culturesthat have been found surviving into the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries have highly developedmythic/religious systems, which separates them from their ancestors who did not have speech,even though the technology may not have differed significantly. In predominantly oral societies,

myth is the main controlling social force, assigning meaning and place to every act, event,object and creature.

External Symbols, Analytical Thought

Cave painting as visual system.

Writing and other visual systems such as tokens, painting, sculpture and carving can record ideasexternally to human memory, and so they can be used to extend the range of knowledgepossessed by a group. Unlike speech, however, writing is not instinctive; all human cultures havespeech, but many did not or do not have written languages.

The earliest external symbol systems came after speech was developed, but they wereindependent of spoken language in that they represented ideas directly rather than representingspoken words. For example, a counting system based on clay tokens was developed inMesopotamia around 8500 BC. The first known systems of writing were pictographs andcounting methods used in commerce between 4000 and 3000 BC, such as Sumerian cuneiform.Egyptian hieroglyphics date from 2000 to 1500 BC. The first phonetic written systems, whichbegan to bridge the gap between speech and external symbols, started around 1700 BC.


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Written language

Where written language did develop, additional types of mental models could be expressed.Writing lends itself in particular to analytical and theoretical thinking, in contrast to mythicalmodels of explanation. It is not surprising, then, that the advent of external symbol systemscoincided with an explosion of cultural and technological innovation. The use of aphoneticalphabetmade written language even more accessible to the general population, rather thanrestricted to an elite educated class. During the golden age of Greek city-states between 500 and300 BC, for instance, the great flowering of culture may have been stimulated by public studyand discussion of ideas made possible by an alphabetic written language.

Modern Cultures, Symbolic Systems and Evolution

Todays cultures make use of a wide spectrum of thought and forms of expression developed

throughout our history: episodic awareness, mimesis, spoken language and myth, as well asexternal systems like writing, art, mathematics, myriad visual media and increasing varieties ofelectronic representation. All of these systems support specific kinds of awareness and modelingat the expense of others.

There is fossil evidence that the transitions from episodic to mimetic and then to oral cultureinvolved biological evolution. The transition from speech to external symbols may also havebeen supported by biological changes. In an article about the rate of genetic evolution inrelatively recent times, Karen Kaplan writes,

In the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, as agriculture was able to support increasingly large societies,the rate of evolutionary change [in human genetics] rose to more than 100 times historical levels,


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the study concluded. Among the fastest-evolving genes were those related to braindevelopment (Kaplan, 2007)

Wikipedia spelled inbinary code

Compared to biological memory, external memory is boundless and, in Donalds opinion, it hasbecome thedriving force behind our ceaseless invention and change. This, in his opinion,marks our most significant difference with oral cultures.

The interplay between symbols and models within a culture exerts a subtle and powerfulinfluence on our thinking. As we saw in the birthday party example, a symbol can evoke manymodels, and a model in turn can produce additional symbols; the cumulative effect is far greaterthan the face value of the original symbols or words alone.

The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II ofthe Ottoman Empire was written in Arabiccalligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan sonof Abdulhamid is forever victorious.

As an illustration of the power of models to shape our thinking, consider how much effort amodern corporation or government puts into selecting specific words to use when describing itsactivities to the public. When the United States government changed the name of one of itsorganizations from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, it was probablyfor the purpose of changing public perception from warlike associations (such as aggression,conflict, weapons, death, destruction and suffering) to defense-related ideals (such as home,family, justice, protection and liberty). The important point is that the mental models weassociate with words and phrases can limit as well as enrich our interpretations.


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Conclusions and Ongoing Consideration

Communication has progressed from behavioral forms to mimesis, speech, and most recently toexternal symbolic systems, which can extend the knowledge of a group beyond the capacity ofhuman memory. As each new method was developed, the older forms also continued in use, so

that in todays modern cultures we have a vast array of symbolic systems for expressing ourexperience. However, some forms will be dominant in use over others.

Whenever a new form of communication comes to dominate discourse in a society, certain typesof thought and social interaction will receive focus at the expense of others.

For communication to be effective the parties must share a common language, experience andmental models for interpreting the language.

When we study the influence of a culture on its people it is important to look at the lexicon(symbols), symbolic systems and models that are notavailable in common discourse, as well as

those that are. It is important to note what types of thought are encouraged or discouraged by theprevailing media and vocabulary.

Graffiti in Rome

Human experience is too vast and subtle to be captured precisely by a single symbolic system ofany kind. All symbol systems are inherently limited or ambiguous, and apparently all spoken andwritten languages contain ambiguities that can only be resolved by the use of the proper models.Systems such as mathematics and logic may be internally precise, but they are limited in scope toexpressing only a portion of our overall experience.


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Venus of Willendorf

It is likely that early humans could formulate types of thought, such as narrative, mythology oranalytic explanation before they had the communication tools to share them. In fact, Donaldbelieves that various symbolic systems evolved because of the minds needto express its ideas.

Is this an ongoing process for the human species? Is our inventiveness an effort to express newkinds of models, or are we just catering to a craving for entertainment and new stimuli? Is thisdrive perhaps a biologically driven excess, like eating more than we need because of ourbiological imperative to eat for survival?

Do our mental models generate our outlook, or vice versa, or is the influence in both directions?Can the influence be tracked in examples or experiments?

What role does metaphorical thinking (that one thing is like another) play in our thoughtprocesses and in our culture? Is it the same thing as constructing mental models? Is it a survivalimperative? A springboard of creativity? The basis of art?

Why are we driven to communicate our ideas?

Sources:

Donald, Merlin, Origins of the Modern Mind, 1991.Harris, Marvin, Our Kind, 1990.Kaplan, Karen, Study finds humans still evolving, and quickly, Los Angeles Times, December

11, 2007.Keller, Helen,Helen Keller.Margolin, Malcolm, The Ohlone Way.

Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct, 1994.

Evolution of Language and Symbolic Function

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