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Foreword 'The origin of human language is truly secret and marvellous' wrote Jacob Grimm in 1851.'And unravelling the beginnings of speech is at first sight as daunting today as in Grimm's time:the echoes of time are lost and its lips are dumb'as R.L.Garner commented around a century ago.2 Inevitably,no records of sounds or writing remain from the early beginnings of language. The fragments of evidence are all indirect:prehistoric bones,the behaviour of our ape relatives.linguistic theory,and various other sources all provide clues (chapter 1).Yet in recent years.huge steps forward have been taken,as this book will explain. The topic exerts a perennial fascination:almost all cultures have legends about how speech began.In China,a demigod gave names to plants and animals.in India articulate speech was attributed to the god Indra.and in Greece,to the god Hermes.In the western Christian tradition,God,after forming 'every beast of the field,and every fowl of the air,brought them to Adam,the first man,to see what he would call them.But where did Adam get his inspiration? The answer is unknown.Either he gave plants and creatures the names which were 'their own'in some sense,or he invented arbitrary ones. Yet in spite of the unsatisfactory nature of the biblical account, many respectable scholars in the past were unwilling to go against it(chapter 1).Only in the twentieth century has religious dogmatism declined sufficiently to allow serious work on the topic to proceed unhampered. However,the restraining effect of religion never truly damped down the numerous bizarre speculations which sprouted up like F43
Foreword weeds.The biblical story itself spawned a variety of odd beliefs,the most pervasive being that Hebrew was the original human language.In the seventeenth century,Francis Mercury van Helmont,for example.argued that the tongue naturally forms sounds which were identical to those uttered by Adam in the Garden of Eden.and that natural Hebrew was older even than Adam,having been used by God for summoning creatures into existence. The cascade of weird.wild and woolly ideas perturbed the linguistic establishment.They dismissed the whole topic as a playground for cranks.and declared it a'no-go'area(chapter 1):in 1866,the Linguistic Society of Paris,the foremost language society of its time.banned papers about language origin.And this disapproval continued for over a century.in line with the linguist William Dwight Whitney's comment:'The greater part of what is said and written on it is mere windy talk.' All this changed in 1990,when Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom published an influential paper entitled 'Natural language and natural selection'alongside a commentary by over thirty peers in the respected journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.This paper 'demolished some intellectual roadblocks in progress in under- standing the relation between evolution and language'.7 Pinker and Bloom emphasized that language evolved by normal evol- utionary mechanisms.and commented that 'there is a wealth of respectable new scientific information relevant to the evolution of language that has never been properly synthesized'.s This book attempts to provide such a synthesis in a form accessible to the non-specialist:no prior knowledge of language or evolution is required.The book could also be regarded as an informal,readable introduction to linguistics.It summarizes the basic underpinnings of language:the human mouth,ears,brain. and so on.Then it discusses how single words might have arisen. and eventually strung together.As the chapters proceed.more information is added,following as far as possible the path taken by our ancestors as they elaborated language over the millennia. Of course,advances in our understanding of the nature of language over the past half-century have helped us to look in the right directions.The linguist Noam Chomsky has directed attention F44