How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

by Daniel L. Everett

Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today.


Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup.


Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect.


In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator.


How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language, History, Science, Anthropology, Audiobook

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2017

About the author

Daniel L. Everett is dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University. He has held appointments in linguistics and/or anthropology at the University of Campinas, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Manchester, and Illinois State University.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

In order to get into this one, one has to understand that everything we know on the topic, is a conjecture. There is no hard and absolute proof, and can't be with all the distance in time and space with our ansestors.

Yes, many scientists, including paleoanthropologists and the like would go butt heads with me on this one. See, it's their job making their research 'proof-based and scientific and on...'. Still, one has to be realistic about things, including the veracity and interpretation and perceprion and the role of imagination in the research of things that are long since gone and erased by time.

So... That taken into account, this piece of lit reads very thought-inducing. Loved it.

As far back as the work of psychologist Kurt Goldstein in the early twentieth century, researchers have denied that there are language-exclusive cognitive disorders. The absence of such disorders would seem to suggest that language emerges from the individual and not merely from language-specific regions of the brain. And this in turn supports the claim that language is not a relatively recent development, say 50–100,000 years old, possessed exclusively by Homo sapiens. My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.

Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’, and suggests, erroneously as we see, that modern humans (we are all Homo sapiens) are the only wise or intelligent humans. We are almost certainly the smartest. But we are not the only smart humans who ever lived.Erectus also invented the other pillar of human cognition: culture. Who we are today was partially forged by the intelligence, travels, trials and strength of Homo erectus. This is worth stating because too many sapiens fail to reflect on the importance of earlier humans to who we are today.


Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories.


But each language satisfies the human need to communicate. While many people in today’s world are tempted to spend more time on social media than perhaps they should, it is the pull of linguistic intercourse that is mainly driving them there. No matter how busy some are, it is hard for them to avoid entering into some ‘conversation’ on the screen in front of them to opine on issues about which they often know little and care less.

Language is the handmaiden of culture.

But what is an invention? It is a creation of culture. Edison alone did not invent the light bulb; he needed Franklin’s work in electricity nearly 200 years before him. No one person invents anything. Everyone is part of a culture and part of each other’s creativity, ideas, earlier attempts and the general world of knowledge in which they live. Every invention is built up over time, bit by bit. Language is no exception.

Conversations are the apex of linguistic studies and sources of insight particularly because they are potentially open-ended in meaning and form. They are also crucial to understanding the nature of language because of their ‘underdeterminacy’ – saying less than what is intended to be communicated and leaving the unspoken assumptions to be figured out by the hearer in some way. Underdeterminacy has always been part of language.

Based on the evidence of Homo erectus culture, such as their tools, houses, village spatial organisation and ocean travel to imagined lands beyond the horizon, the genus Homo has been talking for some 60,000 generations – quite possibly more than one and a half million years

Underdeterminacy means that every utterance in every conversation and every line in every novel and each sentence of any speech contains ‘blank spots’ – unspoken, assumed knowledge, values, roles and emotions – underdetermined content that I label ‘dark matter’.

Language can never be understood entirely without a shared, internalised set of values, social structures and knowledge relationships. In these shared cultural and psychological components, language filters what is communicated, guiding a hearer’s interpretations of what another is saying.

One proposal I discard is arguably the most influential explanation of the origin of human language of all time. This is the idea that language resulted from a single genetic mutation some 50–100,000 years ago. This mutation supposedly enabled Homo sapiens to build complex sentences. This is the set of ideas known as universal grammar. But a very different hypothesis emerges from a careful examination of the evidence for the biological and cultural evolution of our species, namely the sign progression theory of language origin.

The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the genus Homo and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but surely progressed until humans achieved language. This slow march taken by early hominins resulted eventually in a yawning evolutionary chasm between human language and other animal communication.

Language is a gestalt – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining its individual components.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone with an interest in both science and language, How Language Began seemed an ideal combination - which managed to intrigue and disappoint me in equal measures.

Let's get that disappointment out the way first, as it's hardly the fault of Daniel Everett. This isn't really science (and so the title of the book is rather misleading, but I suppose 'One possibility for how language began' wouldn't be as punchy). It's hard to see how this could be science. Our ideas on the exact detail of hominin/hominid development aren't 100 percent clear - how much more vague are we inevitably about something that leaves no direct traces whatsoever: the beginnings of language?

Because there is so little evidence to base arguments on, what we end up with is far more like a philosophical debate than modern science. Ancient Greek philosophers would have been totally comfortable with this battle of ideas with very limited recourse to data (and would also have been very familiar with the feel of Everett's barbed attacks on Noam Chomsky). I shouldn't have expected anything different - but it was still a disappointment.

Given that proviso, there is a lot to like. Everett does make very impressive arguments for the early nature of language, gives those of us not familiar with the field a strong introduction to the likes of indexes (not the familiar meaning), icons (ditto to some extent) and symbols and makes it feel very likely that language was not a sudden genetic switch-on, but a gradual accretion. He also seems very convincing when telling us that the primary role of language is communication. This probably seems a common sense observation, but contrasts sharply with the strongly held hypothesis that it emerged as a tool for thinking, leaving communication as a secondary use.

Best of all is when Everett gives us examples from his experience of working in the Amazonian jungles of Brazil, using the different approaches to spoken language there to try to tease out truths about the development of language in general. Both Everett's writing style and the reader interest spring to life during these segments. He is also good at showing how language is more than words - gesture, for example, playing an important part.

Elsewhere in How Language Began there is a degree of repetition - the book doesn't seem ideally structured, and covers some secondary topics at too great a length. And given the philosophical cut and thrust that is clearly present in the field, I would rather have seen a neutral bringing together and comparison of the different viewpoints, rather than a very one-sided view that gives us the opposition's position only in order to pull it apart, without giving the opposing arguments any substance.

Overall, then, an interesting venture into a fascinating topic, but one that left me feeling a little frustrated.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the beginning was the Word." John 1:1
"No, it wasn’t." Dan Everett
That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Genesis 11:9

Our human ancestors Homo Erectus invented language and culture. We, Homo Sapiens have just made them better.

We are the crown of creation
Humans have become, for better or worse, lords of the planet. If the dinosaurs were still alive today, humans would kill them for trophies, or eat them, or put them in parks and zoos. They would be no match for sapiens. Humans, not they, are the apex predators of all time on this planet. This success has much to do with the fact that, though sapiens are small with soft skin, no claws or serious strength, they talk to each other. Because humans can talk they can plan, they can share knowledge, they can even leave knowledge for future generations. And therein lies the human advantage over all other terrestrial species.

If Africa had all we needed, then why did we leave?
Initially erectus and other Homo species were hunters and gatherers. As such, they needed to move frequently as they exhausted the edible flora and fauna of a given region in a relatively short period of time. Hunter-gatherers usually move a bit further each day from their original village. They may sometimes return to an established camp, but as food becomes ever scarcer in the area surrounding the original village, hunter-gatherers move to establish new settlements closer to their fresher sources of proteins and plant foods.

The average forager travels just over nine miles (fifteen kilometres) per day. Assume that they move communities around four times per year and that each new village is a day’s foraging from the last village. That is thirty-seven miles (sixty kilometres) per year. How long, at that rate, would it take an erectus community to travel from Africa to Beijing or Indonesia, both locations where erectus fossils were found? Well, if one divides 10,000 kilometres (roughly the distance from East Africa to where erectus fossils have been found in China) by sixty (the number of kilometres erectus would, under my extremely conservative calculation, move in a year), then it would take only 167 years for erectus to traverse Eurasia, moving at a normal pace. But if erectus populations had other reasons to travel, such as to escape hostile neighbours or climatic events such as flood or drought, they might have moved even more quickly, potentially reducing the time needed in the extreme case to as little as a year. Likewise, if they moved more slowly due to, say, the discovery of rich food supplies in a place along their route, then a larger period of time would elapse. It was, in any case, easily within the grasp of erectus to settle large regions of the world within only a thousand years, a trivial amount of time from an evolutionary perspective.

Language can be so very simple and yet convey a great deal of meaning
Newspaper headlines, store regulations, movie titles and other unusual forms of modern language are occasionally reminders of how simple language can be. There are some famous examples of languages reminiscent of possible early languages in the movies:

You Jane. Me Tarzan.
Eat. Drink. Man. Woman.

And in store signs:
No shirt. No shoes. No service.
No ticket. No wash.

These examples can even be found on billboards: You drink. You drive. You go to jail.
In spite of their grammatical simplicity, we understand these examples just fine.

We owe our modern life to our ancestors
Erectus societies had culture. From the very first, humans, with their larger brains and new experiences, built up values, knowledge and social roles that allowed them to wander the earth, sail the seas and build the first communities in the history of the earth. And from these cultures built more than 60,000 generations ago we emerged. Our debt to Homo erectus is inestimable. They were not cavemen. They were men, women and children, the first humans to speak and to live in culturally linked communities.

Each human alive enjoys their grammar and society because of the work, the discoveries and the intelligence of Homo erectus. Natural selection took those things that were most effective for human survival and improved the species until today humans live in the Age of Innovation, the Era of Culture, in the Kingdom of Speech.

Enjoy!

[Keith Swenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started the book with great expectations, but that was dashed before page 135. Could not finish it (and that is rare for me).

The Author has a habit of making broad generalized claims without backing them up. For example he dismisses Wernicke's area and Broca's area as not functioning on language by simply saying "they don't" and then going on to a vague statement attributed to "several researchers ...".

He says "the brain does not appear to be organized into separate modules" without explaining why there is a cerebellum, cerebral cortex, and many other named parts of the brain. And he simply brushes away centuries of evidence of how various parts of the brain work. He is either completely wrong, or he is writing in such a style as to be completely incoherent.

When reading, you need to trudge through statements like "It is always best to consider learning as the reason for any information found in any part of the brain." Well, duh! The verb "learning" is literally defined as the way that information is collected in the brain.

Many statements like this appear: "Language, as we have been seeing, is not that difficult, in spite of a long tradition going back to the 1950's telling us that it is extremely complicated, a veritable mystery." No, he had not demonstrated that language was easy. The fact that nobody, not even the author, agrees on a clear simply theory of language is all we need to know that this statement random gibberish.

One star or two stars? One star means the book is wrong or harmful. That might be the case for this, but it is more likely that there is a hint of truth, but it is too poorly organized and too badly written to get the idea across. So two stars it is.

Don't bother reading this unfortunate collection of random, unguided statements.

[Lis Carey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is such a frustrating book.

Everett has a lot to say, that's of interest, about the history of human language, and makes an interesting, and to me persuasive, case that language goes back to Homo erectus, if not further. One thing he points to, hardly the only one, is the H. erectus population on the the island of Flores. They must at some point have arrived in numbers sufficient to establish a viable population, which would mean a minimum of fifty men, women, and children arriving together or in close succession. This isn't likely with accidental rafting. It suggests more sophisticated skills, to build craft capable of crossing that distance in sufficient numbers intentionally--which would probably require language.

He's also quite, quite certain that language is an invention, not an instinct. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. Completely wrong. Oh, and he really thinks Noam Chomsky is completely wrong, and doesn't seem to concede him any significant contributions on the subject of language at all.

Chomsky in 1957 published Syntactic Structures, arguing that human language flows from an innate instinct, a universal grammar at the base of how humans think. An important part of his argument is that since only humans have language, it must have emerged fairly recently, due to a single mutation, perhaps 50,000 years ago. There's more to his theory, including the idea that universal grammar didn't develop for the purpose of communication, but instead was originally used to facilitate complex human thought, with language a later effect.

That's not remotely a complete explanation of Chomsky's theory, but it's a good-enough starting point for a review of Everett's book. Everett says, not quite in so many words, that Chomsky is an ignorant fool. Language is obviously an invention, not an instinct, not a mutation, and he has demonstrated this by...as far as I can tell, by asserting it repeatedly.

That's very sad, because there are some obvious weaknesses to Chomsky's theory, starting with the fact that complex features are essentially never the result of a single mutation. This involves a far greater knowledge of genetics than we had in 1957, of course, but it's not surprising that sixty years of research result in some significant damage to a theory grounded in areas we had not yet made major progress in.

It seems far more likely, in light of what we now know, that language emerged more gradually, as mutations, and natural and sexual selection among the natural variations in genus homo, led to the development of language.

Unfortunately, Everett rejects that, too.

Language, he says, is just a straight-up brilliant invention, coming straight from the clever brains of Homo erectus, or Homo habilis, or Homo ergaster, or possibly even Australopithecus afarensis, whoever came up with it first. Also, there was never any proto-language. The very first language was fully functional, able to do everything its users might need language to do.

Because every brilliant invention is perfect when first invented, right? That's normal, isn't it?

Everett also says there are no inherited language defects, which there ought to be if language is an instinct, written in the genes, rather than an invention. This would be persuasive, if true. Alas, other scientists seem to disagree, finding genetics-based language impairment not common, but nevertheless real. Here's a link to one example of a scientific paper discussing it. Full text is pricey, but if interested, your public library may be able to help you.

Genetics of Speech and Language Disorders Changsoo Kang and Dennis Drayna Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 2011 12:1, 145-164
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs...

There's also the awkward fact that every human population, no matter how isolated, has language. Why is this awkward? Because things invented in one place, don't automatically spread to other populations the inventors' population isn't in contact with. Every culture has language. Not every culture invented written language, even though it's incredibly useful, once you have spoken language and a moderately complex culture. Invention of an alphabetic-style written language is even rarer.

And the wheel appears to have been invented once, in Sumeria, and spread from there. There's one exception; ancient Mexicans, but no other New World cultures, did invent wheels--and use them only in what appear to have been either toys or cult objects. Yet these were advanced, complex, sophisticated cultures, arguably more complex and advanced than the Spanish who arrived to conquer them. It wasn't lack of brains or sophistication that kept wheels as a useful concept from being invented in the New World.

So, why does everyone have language?

Why do two children, kept in isolation from anyone who speaks to them during the entire period they should be acquiring language, invariably emerge from that abuse speaking their own language? Why do twins not kept in that kind of extreme isolation not uncommonly develop their own "secret" language, separate from the one they use with adults around them?

Humans in contact with other humans develop language. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or complex their culture is otherwise. Humans speak to each other. If they're deaf, if there's more than one deaf child even if there's no one around who teaches them sign language, they create their own sign language. It's universal. It's how humans in contact with other humans behave.

It's innate.

It's also quite obviously for communication, another way Chomsky appears to be wrong, so one would think Everett wouldn't need to pound so incoherently on Chomsky rather than more calmly discussing the specifics.

This is an interesting book. I find I've not touched nearly enough on the aspects that I like, or that I found persuasive. Yet the weaknesses are important, and also interesting.

If interested in the topic, I recommend giving it a try.

I bought this audiobook.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Começar por dizer que não sou de Linguística, embora trabalhe no domínio da Comunicação que opera alguns níveis acima na relação com o humano, e por isso possui relação com o conhecimento produzido pela linguística. Dizer que tendemos a conhecer mais Chomsky pelo seu ativismo político do que propriamente pelos seus contributos científicos. No entanto, tendo em conta a envergadura do seu reconhecimento é sempre complicado defender posições antagónicas, contudo, é isso que Daniel L. Everett faz neste livro, “How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention” (2017). Everett doutorou-se com uma tese em linguística, baseada no seu trabalho de campo com tribos da Amazónia nos anos 1970, um trabalho que continuou sempre a evoluir e lhe permitiu chegar a esta afirmação que surpreende muitos linguistas: “Eu nego aqui que a linguagem seja um instinto de qualquer tipo, assim como nego também que seja inata”.
..
Para quem tiver interesse no tema, o texto continua no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

[Mehrsa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why is this book so bad? Let me count the ways:
1. The author assumes the reader to know exactly nothing at all about evolution and so tells us all about evolutionary theory that we already know even though we came here to learn about language.
2. While it is overly simplistic, it is also too academic and seems to be citing everybody's work without actually saying anything.
3. I read the entire book and am still not sure what is new in here or even what the author thinks is new.
4. It needed some seriously heaving editing and revising.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2B0...

How Language Began by Daniel L. Everett

Controversial and revisionist are two words that came to my mind while reading this book.

I can't claim any deep specialty in this area but I've read a few books on the subject of linguistics and thought I was keeping abreast of the subject. I thought that Noam Chomsky was widely accepted as setting the benchmark for linguistic study and that the idea that language developed as a result of a genetic mutation in the last 50,000 years was equally accepted. Likewise, I read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and I was sold on the notion that the human brain has a component for handling language.

Daniel L. Everett's book "How Language Began" challenges those complacent beliefs. Everett comes across as a one-man wrecking crew to set things straight. Everett sets forth his thesis in the preface:

"The story of how humans came to have language is a mostly untold one, full of invention and discovery, and the conclusions that I come to through that story have a long pedigree in the sciences related to language evolution – anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, palaeoneurology, archaeology, biology, neuroscience and primatology. Like any scientist, however, my interpretations are informed by my background, which in this case are my forty years of field research on languages and cultures of North, Central and South America, especially with hunter-gatherers of the Brazilian Amazon. As in my latest monograph on the intersection of psychology and culture, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.
As far back as the work of psychologist Kurt Goldstein in the early twentieth century, researchers have denied that there are language-exclusive cognitive disorders. The absence of such disorders would seem to suggest that language emerges from the individual and not merely from language-specific regions of the brain. And this in turn supports the claim that language is not a relatively recent development, say 50–100,000 years old, possessed exclusively by Homo sapiens. My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.
As such, the hero of this story is Homo erectus, upright man, the most intelligent creature that had ever existed until that time. Erectus was the pioneer of language, culture, human migration and adventure. Around three-quarters of a million years before Homo erectus transmogrified into Homo sapiens, their communities sailed almost two hundred miles (320 kilometres) across open ocean and walked nearly the entire world. Erectus communities invented symbols and language, the sort that wouldn’t seem out of place today. Although their languages differed from modern languages in the quantity of their grammatical tools, they were human languages.
Of course, as generations came and went, Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages."

Everett argues his thesis in great detail, which results in this book being a soup to nuts survey of linguistics, running from anthropology to historical linguistics to the mechanics of how words are formed by the human vocal apparatus.

Everett's position on Homo Erectus is both interesting and idiosyncratic. Everett argues cogently that H. Erectus must have had speech capabilities in order to accomplish the things that they accomplished, particularly building sea going vessels capable of taking their species to offshore islands beyond the site of land. Everett also discounts the trustworthiness of scholarship that identifies other homo species:

"According to some classifications, there were, soon after and before erectus, other species of Homo co-existing or existing in close succession – Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rudolfensis among others. But, again, most of these various species of Homo are ignored here, with the focus kept on Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Most other Homo species are murky, maybe nothing more than variants of Homo erectus. However, the story of human language evolution changes in no significant way, whether erectus and ergaster were the same or different species."

Homo Sapien is simply an improved model of Homo Erectus.

Everett offers this on the sophistication of Erectus:

"This view of human cooperation in erectus is strongly supported by the archaeological record. As erectus wandered through the Levant, near the Jordan between the Dead Sea to the south and the Hula Valley to the north, they came to stop at the site known today as Gesher Benot Ya’aqov. At this site, going back at least 790,000 years, there is evidence for Acheulean tools, Levallois tools, evidence of controlled fire, organised village life, huts that housed socially specialised tasks of different kinds and other evidence of culture among Homo erectus. Erectus may have stopped here on the way out of Africa. Erectus technology was impressive. They built villages that manifested what almost appears to be central planning, or at least gradual construction under social guidance, as in Gesher Benot Ya’aqov. This is clear evidence of cultural values, organised knowledge and social roles. But such villages are just one example of erectus’s technological and organisational innovation."

I didn't know that.

Communication exists in sub-homo species. Non-humans use indexes and icons, non-arbitrary referents that mean one thing only. Humans use symbols. For Everett, the human achievement was a brain capable of using symbols and engaging in recursive thinking. Language is not a product of the wiring of the brain any more than a hammer is; both language and a hammer are inventions or tools of the human mind. Everett notes:

"A startling conclusion emerges from deficits affecting language: There are no language-only hereditary disorders. And the reason for that is predicted by the theory of language evolution here – namely that there could not be such a deficit because there is no language-specific part of the brain. Language is an invention. The brain is no more specialised for language than for toolmaking, though over time both have affected the development of the brain in general ways that make it more supportive of these tasks."

This insight comes after a long discussion of the kinds of ways that things can go wrong in the human ability to talk. Everett's point is well-made. We don't say that a hammer must be "wired" into the brain because someone without thumbs can't use one. There is no genetic condition that effects language - no one is born without an ability to comprehend verbs except insofar as they can also not comprehend nouns and prepositions. Likewise, as a practicing Linguist, Everett has seen far too many grammars to accept the notion that there is a universal language.

For readers of anthropology and linguistics this is a very useful work because it shows how much is still open to debate. I think that for someone looking for a survey of linguistics this is a helpful and interesting book. If you are like me and are intrigued by the "gosh-wow!" ideas of "deep history" and "human evolution," this book is well-worth the investment.

On the other hand, it is not particularly written for the lay reader. Everett spins off idea after idea and the reader has to stay on his toes to keep up. Also, there is a lot of dense and dry material. For example, the chapters on the mechanics of language are important (and I found them interesting insofar as Everett shared his personal experiences in the field), but I found my enthusiasm for the subject lagging at times. I suspect that for others with less background, these are chapters that can and will be skipped.

Obviously, on the whole, I found Everett's thesis captivating and his arguments cogent.

PSB

[Manybooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I of course am very well aware of the fact that linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky’ concept that human language is basically and primarily a biological, a genetical instinct and that there is also a so-called universal grammar to and through which all languages are intrinsically linked is far from being unilaterally accepted, that there are in fact also still linguists who do not consider language as something biological but rather as a specific and deliberate human creation and invention (and with me personally kind of being on the fence a bit here, basically considering that human language itself is probably instinctive like Noam Chomsky asserts it is, but that in my opinion only the very basics of grammar are probably altogether biological and genetically innate, that the more complex aspects of grammar and in particular regarding vocabulary formation, syntax and the more involved and complex verb forms and tenses are more likely to be a combination of biological instinct and deliberate human invention).

Therefore, I actually do not have any issues whatsoever with linguist Daniel L. Everett showing a distinctly anti Noam Chomsky bias in his 2017 How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention (although yes, I do still consider Everett’s perspective that everything human language based is a specific creation, is an invention and with none of it being even possibly instinctive a bit too massively one-sided for my tastes and for my own take on what language is and how human language started). For no, my main problem with How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention is in fact (and equally the main reason for my two star rating) that Daniel L. Everett keeps textually pontificating in How Language Egan: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention over and over again and really almost at nauseum that Noam Chomsky is wrong about language and about language development, but that L. Everrett generally just claims this without providing any linguistic, any actual proof (or even possible proof) exactly and specifically why and how Chomsky is mistaken. And well, for a trained linguist like Daniel Everett to make repeated claims that Noam Chomsky is wrong without providing adequate proof, this in my humble opinion certainly does make How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention not only academically and intellectually lacking, it is also kind of ridiculous that we should even be accepting these types of lacking in academic rigour non-fiction tomes for publication.

For honestly, if at university, I had handed in a term paper where I was repeatedly criticising someone (and especially a published academic) without providing solid and sensible reasons, I would have received a deservedly low mark. But somehow, it is supposedly acceptable for Daniel L. Everett to over and over again in How Language Began: The Story Of Humanity’s Greatest Invention condemn Noam Chomsky attitude towards language without really explaining and telling us why?

[Owlseyes]

"Recursion is not the biological basis for language. It is an enhancement of human thought."
Dan Everett

"Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate."
Dan Everett


https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theg...

[Keith Akers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and convincing book on the invention of language. There are several surprises in this book. First of all, language existed prior to homo sapiens, specifically in homo erectus. Secondly, what language requires, more than anything else, is culture; and homo erectus clearly had culture. Grammar is helpful but comes along later. This book is a bit technical and is not exactly "light summer reading." However, it is clearly written and interesting and does not require special technical training to get the basic points. If I read it again I'd probably understand more, but it was clear enough to see that he has some very relevant points.

Many of the things we think of as required for language, such as a voice box and a bigger brain, are not actually required. They evolved after language developed. The reason is that language was such a powerful tool, that those creatures who were best able to communicate had a powerful means of surviving and reproducing. Language is much more effective with a larger brain and a voice box, ergo, these evolved when some creatures had slightly bigger brains or the ability to express (and understand) what their fellow creatures were trying to say in a more nuanced way. Grammar is very useful for language but comes along after we have indexes, icons, signs and symbols. The author explains the distinction between these, and the various controversies over where exactly grammar evolved in the process of language development.

Though Everett doesn't discuss this in any depth, it's clearly possible that animals (meaning non-humans) would have language, just because Homo erectus had language. Communication can exist without language, animals do that all the time. If Koko the gorilla (whom Everett briefly discusses), who understands human sign language, were to teach other gorillas sign language (and if we don't totally wipe out their habitat), it's possible that gorillas could have a culture and that this would carry some evolutionary advantages to those gorillas who could master it. Gorilla evolution might then take a completely different path, in which cultural understanding could in some cases replace the instincts on which many animals rely for survival, and gorillas might evolve in somewhat the same way that to be able to better understand language. It's conceivable that they might evolve, for example, to be more nimble and flexible with their hands (the better to be able to sign with, for example), rather than evolve a voice box, but a bigger brain would seem to be indispensable for communicating better with other gorillas.

Those interested in what makes humans "different" from animals, or what it means to be human, will be intrigued by this somewhat technical but quite comprehensible book.

[Anders Brabaek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Primary themes:
1) Language predates homo sapiens
2) Language makes no sense without culture

Sentence to sentence this book is ok, but as a collected whole it was boring to me, and I struggled to get through it.

[Buck Wilde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lemme summarize:

"Nobody knows, but it predated homo sapiens. Also, FUCK Chomsky!"

I like this guy.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked his book on the Pirahã. That was well written and I learned a lot. And I especially liked that he was not afraid to openly say that Chomsky was wrong.
When I heard that he was writing a book on the origin of language I was looking forward to it. I had my doubts though when I heard that he was actually writing two books at the same time.
And reading this book it does seem that he had just one main ambition, somehow filling 300 pages and making the deadline. What a pity.
Like other commenters have said, it is really unnecessary to explain the concept of evolution. His former Christian friends who are ignorant of it will not read this book anyway.
But the book is not only overhastily written there is a lot of evidence of muddled thinking. He tells us that Culture is abstract because it cannot be touched or smelled. (p. 68) Fair enough, but immediately afterward he goes on saying that the products of culture are visible and tangible. Like art, religion, science, style, tolerance or intolerance. Really? Last time I checked I could not smell religion. But only the products of religion. This seems an obvious example of a category mistake.
There are other small things that make me mistrust the guy. Like being told that the past tense of German "spielen" is "gespielt".
But my main objection is, that there is nothing on the connection between language and thought and consciousness. It does seem that he thinks that Homo erectus could think alright and then gradually learned to speak. I find this questionable. (I am prejudiced but I think it is indecent to write a book on language without even mentioning Wittgenstein.)
So okay, what does he say? That homo erectus "invented" language roughly 2 million years ago. It developed gradually not as Chomsky believe by mutation. But at the same time he claims that there was immediately a fully developed language (with a simpler grammar though, no recursions, for example. But who needs this?) There was no proto-language. And the argument for this is cute. Erectus language was a Ford T model, not a Tesla. But it was a car.
Again and again, he states as a fact what he wants to prove, that erectus invented language.
The arguments he gives us are few. Erectus reached islands that could only be reached by rafts. And to build rafts you need language. Maybe, although I am not convinced. And he carried with him art. Stones that looked like faces. These are arguments. But not overwhelmingly strong ones. And one thing he does not bother to explain, why could a species with language dwell on earth for more than a million years without developing a lasting culture?
The last quarter of the book suddenly turns interesting and earns the third star. For example when he explains our desire to put in meaning into everything. (Even colorless green ideas). That language in communication is far more complicated than Shannon thought. When he talks about Grice.
"Thus it is clear that as language evolved, speech acts, indirect speech acts, conversations and stories depended heavily on cooperation, implicit (unspoken) information, culture and context. It is the only way that language has ever worked." (p. 265)

[Ushan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have lived in an English-speaking country for 29 years, from age 16 on. As soon as I open my mouth, people ask me where I am from. I was exposed to Ukrainian in early childhood, and have studied it as a school subject, but almost never used it in conversation. Yet even if I have an accent in the language, it is slight. My daughter knew no English until age 3, when she went to an American preschool, and came back singing "Do you know the muffin man?"; she never had an accent in English since. She also does not have an accent in Russian, although expressing complicated thoughts in it is difficult for her. These facts alone tell me that language is not like any other skill; not like programming, not like operating machinery. Learning one's native languages (someone like Justin Trudeau or my daughter has more than one) from around age two until around age ten is like learning to walk around age one, or developing a sexuality during puberty: it is something necessary for the normal development of a human being, which happens to all healthy humans at a certain age. It is an instinct.

Everett is an anti-Chomskyan linguist who denies that language is an instinct. There doesn't seem to be any area of the brain used only for language. Given how little we know about how the brain operates, I don't think that this proves anything. Everett thinks that Homo erectus had language: skeletons of archaic humans were found on islands that could only be reached by rafts, and building such a raft required cooperation and therefore language. Many species of animals colonize islands by hitching a ride on a floating raft of uprooted vegetation; why not archaic humans? Everett also thinks that early language must have been exceptionally simple, like Piraha, an Amazonian Indian language he studied. An article called "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment" shows that not all linguists agree with Everett about Piraha.

Overall, I didn't learn anything new from this book.

[Peter Herrmann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable. I gave up half way through. Not because it is complex (I read lots of complex books on scientific and related topics), but because it is a collection of assertions with little to back them up. Also it is poorly organized: for example he'll make an allusion to some concept or finding (an allusion that I, and probably many readers, haven't heard before), but then, before elaborating, he goes on to make another point (or two or dozen) ... and maybe 25 page later (or never) he doubles back to the earlier allusion. Ironically, I intuitively feel that his key thesis is correct (namely language grew incrementally from Homo Erectus, and not via some sudden genetic mutation in Homo Sapiens [as he alleges is claimed by linguist Noam Chomsky]) - but he never really proves it to my satisfaction. The book is also unbearably repetitious.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daniel Everett's book is a curious one - at one level, he has a thesis (that 'Homo Erectus' possessed language), at another level it is a succession of basic primers on all the academic disciplines surrounding language and its place in human culture, at a third, it is about culture in general.

The thesis, his McGuffin, you can take or leave. I was unpersuaded. It struck me that he had redefined language as something so simple (perhaps not without cause) that the proposition was close to meaningless. In essence, all that is being said is that language evolves with the species.

The primer aspect is useful though can be over-technical with inadequate explanation of terms in places. At the least he brings the reader up to date with the main findings and debates in each field and one can pick and choose the degree of care in the reading according to interest.

It is the third, cultural, aspect that is most interesting, not because Everett is arguing for something but because he is representing something - a change in the way the social and hard sciences see reality, one that brings them closer to the humanities without losing their rigour.

The fact that his main hypothesis is not entirely persuasive is irrelevant. It is the tone that matters and a methodology that is keen to synthesise many different specialist forms of analysis into some sort of hypothesis about which he gives us sufficient tools to take a reasonable view.

His arguments about culture - which should perhaps have been more overtly the subject of the book - are persuasive, that it is a natural evolved human form of great complexity relating to time and to environment and ever-shifting but with its own observable coherence at any one time.

This is a challenge to the deadweight of radical humanist universalism but also to the sort of cultural relativism that would pickle any culture in aspic. It is a middle way that sees us all as one species but building our realities from the ground up through socialised individual perception.

This is a view that also sees language as weapon or tool and culture as a system of co-operative and competitive survival in which language has a central role. He adopts a holistic approach to the matter of language in which many parts contribute to the analysis of the whole.

In unravelling the basis for the propositions of recent thinkers like Chomsky, he does a great service, restoring some degree of humility within an intellectual class that tends to like grand projects that, on closer inspection, may be neat but do not necessarily accord with reality.

He is also good on restoring us to our animal origins without diminishing in the slightest our achievements as a peculiar and new type of animal. The evolutionary arguments are thus not prescriptive, tending to predestination, but stories about how we became 'free' and conscious.

Our freedom and consciousness is, of course, constrained by biology, environment and (though increasing less so) culture but constraint is not imprisonment by any means. In a way perhaps not directly intended, Everett restores our difference over the machines and our cause for dominance.

Of course, the positioning here is a little inchoate as if it is reflecting the mood of a time that is still in formation but it is one that we will see transforming culture if not in the current generation which seems to be stuck in various forms of utopian idealism or counter-productive self interest.

This is not some fluffy spiritual form of interconnectedness but a scientically justified observation of a process that derives from individual relations to the world and to others within cultural and historical frameworks imposed by the necessity of communication.

This ensures that we can be more confident of having the will to change those frameworks that do not suit us while being aware that you cannot change those frameworks usefully without persuasion of others, that frameworks exist for a reason and such reasons need to be understood.

All in all, not a masterpiece perhaps (the author has a tendency to be repetitive when he moves towards culture and gnomic and under-explanatory when he moves towards science) but a useful book that moves us a few steps forward in understanding what it is to be human.

[mytwocents · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is another pop science, hyped, empty, over-produced, under-researched, non-book that will make your wallet lighter and your brain emptier. Written in the style of a newspaper feature article, this book is just as disposable as your daily tabloid, but with less useful alternative uses.

Anybody picking this book up would be forgiven for thinking that D.Everett was a 21st century prophet, with selected praise including "A book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate" and "Revelatory".

The author begins by giving a fat middle finger to John 1:1 and next cites the Watchmaker analogy as a frequent used argument for a creator deity. At many points raspberries are blown by D.Everett at the dunce of the class, who in his opinion is religion. Unfortunately, this arrogance coupled with a poor style of writing, means you'll soon find this for a pound in your local charity shop.

Ironically, he makes the point that "Underdeterminacy has always been a part of language", which has the effect of tying his shoelaces together before trying to cross the road. There is a bizarre lack of understanding amongst many modern scientists about the historical and scholarly interpretation of God the creator which is summarised in John 1:1. An analysis of religious scripture using the best language hominins have created; mathematical logic, would be revelatory for the author, but would negate a large chunk of this which is just page filler. Any study in the evolution of the abstract languages of Mathematics have been excluded, possibly because they arise out of the natural objectification of our natural world, but develop into a method of transcending it. This is something the author seems opposed to accepting, poetic religious scripture that goes beyond being and non-being, is rebuked glibly.

[Gail Wanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating overview of evidence for language in Homo erectus 2 million years ago! By showing that culture, symbols and language go together and that we have archaeological evidence of culture in several locations inhabited by H. erectus, the author makes a persuasive argument for at least a G1 level language (simple word strings). He also discusses the recent evidence for dispersal of H. erectus from Africa across much of Europe and Asia and to islands that could only be reached by some sort of vessel. There is also much information on the brain and physical side of language development.
When I picked this book up from a library display, I expected an update on the debate about whether proto-Indo-European languages were brought to western Europe by Beaker Folk or Celts. This was much more fun to read and the author's bibliography enables me to follow up on several relevant sites.

[Wout · Rating 1 out of 5]

Everett came up with his idea for how language evolved on a lazy afternoon, drew a diagram of it and sent it off to his publisher.

You don't have any empirical evidence backing up your claim? Don't worry, just ramble about what smart boys Homines erecti were for a few hundred pages and that will do.

You don't understand the numerous explanations for language evolution proposed by hundreds of ethologists, neurologists and linguists backed up by actual experimental evidence? No problem, just ignore them and pretend Chomsky's theory from the 70s is the only thing that's ever been said about the topic.

You can't actually write a coherent book with an introduction, main argumentation and discussion? No problem, just blurt out whatever comes to mind and insert random misleading chapter titles.

I would advice Everett (and all those interested in the topic) to visit Google Scholar, type in 'language evolution' and read some real academic work on this fascinating topic.

[Clint Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, so, I always get hooked by these types of book titles, and then am always immediately reminded out how of the shallow end I can find myself. But, here's the thing: I feel like if you have really mastered something, that is shown by your ability to explain it to someone like me, who maybe isn't the smartest guy on the block.

And here's the thing, I spent the vast majority of this book trying to figure out exactly what this guy was arguing. At some points, I was pretty sure he just really bad wanted to explain that he disagrees with Noam Chomsky. Then other times I thought, "oh, maybe this is just the second book of a two-book contract," because he seemed to reference himself numerous times. Maybe one can infer then that his other books are better, or cover the topic pretty much to the extent that it needs covered. I really can't say so I'm not telling anybody to write him off. To the extent that I can say, he seemed like he really knew his stuff, as far as the history of language evolution and linguistic studies goes. But then again, other times I found myself thinking the biggest problem Everett seemed to have was with how people define terms like "language" and "communication" and "culture." And there's a place for that, sure, but I don't know that it was expressed well. Or maybe, like this review, he had a lot of ideas that didn't quite come together in the way he intended. Ironic, I suppose, in a book about language.

But, anyway, like pretty much everything ever, I'm not going to write this off entirely. I did find myself considering culture and language in new ways, and they ties between them, how they play and interact and what that implies about a people group. And that's always good. Other than that feeling you get when you start suspecting that you can't really ever know much about anything without knowing something about everything.

Nevertheless, if I were you, I'd read the two pages conclusion first. It absolutely sums up what he was trying to say in the most straight-forward and clear-cut way. If this strikes your fancy, then absolutely go back and read the book. Just bear in mind that it is exactly represented in this conclusion/summary. The book is exceedingly heavy on human evolution, and pretty much only the last chapter covers the interactions of language. But beware, after 250 pages of him being angry about the idea of a porto-language, he doesn't totally sell you on the idea that it couldn't exist. Or rather, he seems to be upset that people think there could be one, instead of many. And yeah, that carries some weight, but having finished it I'm still not sure entirely how this ties with the other parts of the book. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. (One or two of you have mentioned this before, haha.)

But all that being said, if you are big into archaeology/anthropology, then yes, get after it. He basically moves back the emergence of language a million and a half years or so. I think though, that I didn't have a strong enough opinion on this in the first place to really appreciate the arguments.

So, there ya go.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Summary: This book was a mess of inaccuracies, poorly supported arguments, and logical leaps.

I was excited to read this book about the biological and grammatical origins of language, so it's with great disappointment that I say it's only redeeming quality was that complaining about it with my science nonfiction book club was delightful. The author lost a bunch of book club members very early with some basic genomics errors. He describes the genome as including DNA and RNA, credits histones with gene activation, and acts as though the debate about whether DNA or RNA came first is undecided. Worse, he never even uses the info presented in his genomics primer. This was an entirely unforced error. He didn't need to talk about this field he clearly doesn't understand to make his argument! That gave a lot of us in my book club pause, because it made us question his credibility in areas where we don't have the knowledge to factcheck. There were some complaints about the accuracy of his description of the fossil record as well, but that's one of the topics outside my knowledge base.

Out of the 10ish people at my book club, three of us made it through this. By the end, I was only still reading because I wanted a complete picture on which to base this review. The whole book made no sense. Neither the paragraphs nor the chapters felt logically organized. Sometimes the sentences didn't even flow logically. The arguments the author was making were sometimes clearly illogical. At other times, they were merely unconvincing. Sometimes I felt like his main rhetorical device for convincing the reader was to wear us out through repetition.

Although the author found it necessary to give a genomics primer, there were times that he introduced linguistics concepts without enough explanation. It often seemed that the author was arguing with someone who wasn't present, rather than trying to convince the reader. The way he presented the position he was arguing against made it seem inconceivable anyone could possibly hold the ridiculous positions he was attributing to them. For example, he claims some people think a single mutation was responsible for human speech. I can't imagine that anyone truly thinks such a complex trait can be explained so simply. It made me doubt that he was representing the positions he was arguing against fairly. He also sometimes repeats ideas or large sections verbatim within a few pages.

Obviously, I think you should pass on this one. I considered DNFing it and after having slogged through it for over a week, I have only regrets. On the bright side, I can pass along to you this delightfully gossipy Chronicle of Higher Ed article about the author's feud with Noam Chomsky and the reasons he was banned from visiting the Pirahã to continue studying their language. It was far more enjoyable than the book.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rambling and opinionated. Was hoping for some science and experiment.

[Bart Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

How Language Began by Daniel Everett

How Language Began is an excellent exposition of the possible manner in which language originated. Many linguists believe that the explosion of symbolic art and other artifacts, traced to times between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, signaled the rise of language. The author of How Language Began, Daniel Everett, contrary to this hypothesis, situates the origin of language some 2 million years earlier, in the time of Homo erectus.

He argues that Homo erectus had tools, sailed to far lands, had symbolic thought, and what he calls G1 language. He divides language into the usual categories of linguistics: semantics, the study of meaning; syntax, pragmatics, phonology, discourse conversational principles, and information and gestures; though he stresses that the study of the whole is always more than that of the parts. Language is a gestalt, says Everett, and not innate but an invention. He stipulates that language must always be studied in the context of the culture in which it is used and spends time outlining the mountain of unspoken knowledge that is implicit in any conversation.

He follows Charles Peirce in his study of signs, dividing them into iconic use, indexical use, and finally, symbolic use. Interestingly, however, he departs from Peirce in believing that indexical use is more basic than iconic. Indexical signs are those that generally occur together, like tracks and the creatures that made them, or smoke and fire.

Following Deacon’s study, I believe he is incorrect here. Iconicity, as outlined by Peirce and expanded by Deacon, is the basic way that we humans, and other animals, categorize. Iconicity is based upon resemblance, the discussion of which Everett limits mainly to man-made artifacts or coincidence. He hardly mentions categorization at all, though it is the way that all organisms classify food, objects, and threats to survive in their environments. Categorizing a bear as a bear because you have seen one before, and are familiar with how they act, the threat they present, allows you to respond in the best manner, be it fleeing or moving your car. So, in my opinion, categorization comes before learning by association, as with indexical signs. Actually, the indexical elements are usually recognized because they resemble (are iconic) to those seen prior.

And although the divisions of language are classic divisions of linguistic study, my personal opinion is that meaning is the most important aspect of that study, and that it underlies all of the other aspects. We study them because they shed light in one way or another upon the meaning of our utterances.

Everett mounts a convincing argument that language did not develop from gesture, as full-blown sign language would likely have hindered the development of speech. Why develop competing speech if sign language already works for you? But my belief is that gesture probably was very important to Homo erectus, and preceded speech, with speech possibly coming much later.

Everett thinks that tool use and marine navigation indicate the presence of symbolic thought. They certainly could, but objects in the environment can and do have meaning for most creatures without involving symbolic thought. Tools certainly do have meaning for those who make and use them. They likely do bring hunting and other associations to mind.

But is that truly symbolic thought in the systemic sense necessary for language?

Perhaps it is, as outlined by Everett, but not necessarily in the sense used by Deacon in his exposition of Peirce’s icon, index, and symbol. For Deacon believes, (and so do I), the symbolic process in language involves symbolic takeoff, in which relationships are developed between the symbols in use, over and beyond the indexical relationships which first bind them. This is not an isolated change but a systemic change in thought and language. These relationships between the symbols themselves lead from mere indexical relationships to abstract thought. (Bananas, berries, meat, are food. Water and coconut juice are drinks.) Although isolated incidents of symbolic meaning would certainly be a start to this process.

Everett gives the example of mistaking a root for a snake and then having the root become symbolic of the concept of snake. This type of symbolic thought, I think, is quite possible without achieving a complete symbol system such as language, though we lack much artifact evidence that it existed in early Homo erectus either.

So, I would think that the grammar of G1, which Everett postulates as the first real language, could have been, and probably was, not truly symbolic at all, in that sense, but more indexical at first, from associations of words, objects, and events. This would be similar to opinions about the lack of full-blown symbol use by the great apes and others that have been studied. Although they have been trained to recognize symbols and make simple statements, they do not seem to fully grasp symbolic relationships or grammar. The real question is: How long ago did symbolic takeoff happen for humans?

If you accept that it is possible to have language of sorts without full-blown symbolic takeoff, then both Everett and those who postulate that symbolic takeoff was responsible for more abstract thought and artistic representation, almost 2 million years later, could be correct.

I thought the sections on the anatomy necessary for speech, pragmatics, and especially the idea that linguistic utterances are always made in the context of a particular culture, with all the implicit, unspoken knowledge that entails, were insightful and valid. Everett offers compelling, if not completely convincing, arguments that language began with Homo erectus 2 million years ago, and a wealth of information about other aspects of language and culture. His field studies of the Pirahã and others give him perspective and insight others may lack.

Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the most respected sociobiologist of our time, has stated this book will become a classic. And I should say, with all of my caveats and quibbles offered for consideration above, from my perspective as an amateur student of language and mind that I humbly agree. This brief outline of topics covered does not do the book justice. How Language Began is an erudite, well-written, groundbreaking addition to my personal research and library.

[Andy]

DNF. How language ended.

[Artur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Długa i rozbudowana polemika z Chomskym - oraz, co ważniejsze, ciekawa opowieść pokazująca język jako wynalazek, narzędzie wytworzone w długim procesie stopniowej ewolucji, narzędzie służące komunikacji, ściśle powiązane z ludzką biologią i mogące zaistnieć tylko wewnątrz kultury.

Autor szuka początków języka u homo erectus, pokazuje przekonujące dowody na to że ani dostępny współcześnie ludziom zestaw dźwięków, ani skomplikowana gramatyka nie są konieczne do zaistnienia języka.

W lekturze pomaga znajomość angielskiego, zwłaszcza we fragmencie, w którym tłumacz zdecydował się nie przetłumaczyć przykładu rekursji centralnej zachowując rekursję centralną - w imię czytelności. Szkoda, że cały fragment miał tłumaczyć na tym przykładzie nieczytelność rekursji centralnej :)

Poza tym jednym kiksem w tłumaczeniu, całość polecam. Zwłaszcza tym, których interesuje język i którzy lubią się zastanawiać, o czym i jak rozmawiali homo erectus podczas swoich wędrówek.

[Daniel Currie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to the unabridged audiobook version of this (without the bonus PDF).

I have no idea if this is meant as a textbook or not, but it certainly comes across as one. It takes what ought to be a very interesting subject and grinds it down to the point where it is barley listenable. It would be absolutely impossible to absorb everything in this book unless you were already largely familiar of the concepts it deals with.

A large portion of it is also dedicated to what has to be a personal grudge the author has against people who have differing views of the theories involved. There are a fair number of what amount to personal attacks against other experts in the field.

There is a very interesting and listenable book here somewhere, but this isn't it.

[Yauheni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Книга содержит авторскую точку зрения на зарождение и развитие человеческой речи, поэтому другие теории рассматриваются только через критическую призму, то есть это не обзорный труд о началах языка.

Проблема же кроется в том, что автору не мешало бы структурировать массив информации и поступательно изложить свою точку зрения. К примеру, в главе о мозге, описание мозга начинается только на десятой странице, хотя до этого автор уже критикует теории о врождённых речевых центрах. Инфа об индексах, иконический знаках и символах показалась интересной.

Вывод: Лучше посмотреть его выступление на TedX, чем плавать в море этой слабо упорядоченной информации.

[José Angel Hernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book from what appears to be a Linguistic Anthropologist, especially the thesis that language emerged not from Sapiens, but from Erectus...and always contingent upon social and cultural contexts. Also the most systematic critique of Chomskyean linguistics in a very clever and fascinating manner. Highly recommended...

[David Melbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very provocative and interesting. Culture is the defining catalyst in the evolution of language. Fascinating.