The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From

by Michael C. Corballis

Evolutionary science has long viewed language as, basically, a fortunate accident—a crossing of wires that happened to be extraordinarily useful, setting humans apart from other animals and onto a trajectory that would see their brains (and the products of those brains) become increasingly complex. But as Michael C. Corballis shows in The Truth about Language, it’s time to reconsider those assumptions. Language, he argues, is not the product of some “big bang” 60,000 years ago, but rather the result of a typically slow process of evolution with roots in elements of grammatical language found much farther back in our evolutionary history. Language, Corballis explains, evolved as a way to share thoughts—and, crucially for human development, to connect our own “mental time travel,” our imagining of events and people that are not right in front of us, to that of other people. We share that ability with other animals, but it was the development of language that made it it led to our ability to imagine other perspectives, to imagine ourselves in the minds of others, a development that, by easing social interaction, proved to be an extraordinary evolutionary advantage.Even as his thesis challenges such giants as Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould, Corballis writes accessibly and wittily, filling his account with unforgettable anecdotes and fascinating historical examples. The result is a book that’s perfect both for deep engagement and as brilliant fodder for that lightest of all forms of language, cocktail party chatter. 

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Science, Nonfiction, Philosophy

329 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 31, 2024

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book strongly reminded me of James Flynn's What Is Intelligence? , which I read a few years ago. Both are written by distinguished New Zealand academics of the older generation (Flynn was born in 1934, Corballis in 1936); both are rather distressingly disorganised; but both manage to redeem themselves by saying some extremely interesting and important things.

Flynn is hunting for big game - are people becoming smarter or stupider? - but Corballis is addressing an even bigger and more ambitious question: how did human beings originally develop language? On reading the book, I was surprised to realise how little I had thought about it. For my money, there are three really interesting unsolved problems about origins. We can ask where the whole universe comes from; we can ask where life comes from; and we can ask where language comes from. It is indeed odd that I'd read a fair amount about the first, and at least one excellent book about the second, but virtually nothing about the third.

Given my general ignorance here, it's possible that Corballis is stacking the deck, but it sounds like he's got a point when he says that the current mainstream position, Chomsky's Universal Grammar, doesn't make sense. We're all supposed to be born with this innate "language organ", which lets us acquire language as infants, but where does it come from? Chomsky is notorious for changing his position every few years, and I haven't taken the trouble to follow him closely, but Corballis's presentation of Chomsky's "origin" story makes it sound like it's only a couple of jumps short of creationism: fifty thousand odd years ago, by some fortuitous mutation, one individual acquired the language organ in more or less complete form, then passed it on. Well, that can't be right. Evolution doesn't work that way. Our ability to use language must have developed incrementally, like everything else.

So, how did it happen? What plausible evolutionary pathways are there? I had unreflectingly assumed that there must be a continuity with the noises other primates make: the small repertoire of squeaks and grunts used by chimpanzees somehow expanded into the rich and precisely controlled linguistic behaviour we see in humans. I'm sure it's possible that this is the correct story, but I hadn't realised how many things there are that need to be explained. Non-human primates, I was surprised to learn, have almost no voluntary control of the noises they make: they are automatic behaviour produced in response to the animal's emotional state, like laughing or crying in humans. A related problem is that other primates also lack "mirror neurons" for verbal behavior (we have them), so they aren't able to experience a neighbor's language as though it might have been produced by themself. This makes it hard to figure out how language could be transmitted from one primate to another.

But it turns out that there is another feasible path, which I'd never heard of before. Primates don't have mechanisms for transmitting verbal behaviour, but they have mirror neurons for hand movements: so an ape can watch another ape doing something with their hands, and copy it. Corballis and his colleagues suggest that language got started by exploiting (exapting) this capability, and thus that the original language was not spoken language, but sign language. In the beginning, linguistic behaviour consisted of making iconic gestures which mimicked the objects and actions they were intended to represent; signs became conventionalised/ lexicalised by repeated use, and smoothed into abstract representations; common patterns of combined signs turned into syntax; and, at some point, protohumans started making noises to accompany the signs, mirror neurons developed for the verbal behaviour too, and the noises gradually took over because they were more convenient.

He evidently has a bunch of important questions left to resolve here. (How did the initial iconic signs become conventionalised? How did the transition from sign to speech work? What evolutionary pressures produced the new mirror neurons?) But I can definitely see his point: even if there are a lot of holes in the story, this doesn't fit too badly with what we know about primate biology and sign language, and the Chomsky account seems to have even bigger holes to fill. It's also attractive that he's using the strategy that's working for the other two origins questions. If the universe got bootstrapped by inflation and life by the RNA world, neither of which are around any more, perhaps language also got bootstrapped by a form of communication that's no longer what we think of as language.

So many new things to think about! If you're also interested in the fundamental secrets of reality and you don't mind spending a few hours in the company of a charmingly distracted old dude who's forgotten more than you'll ever know, you might want to check this one out. It's different.

[Hamid · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Michael Corballis introduces some interesting ideas about the concept of E-language (external) as opposed to I-language (internal). Chomsky is a proponent of I-language and believes that language was an instantaneous phenomenon that emerged suddenly and was not selected by evolution. Conversely, Corballis tries to demonstrate how language was evolved by natural selection. One assumption, for instance, is that gestures might have been precursors to spoken languages. Corballis says and I quote, "I once had my wine knocked over at the dinner table by a distinguished linguist vehemently denying that gesture had anything to do with language. I was tempted to say “Point made,” but feared a gesticular escalation—and perhaps a further spill". Indeed the word grasp itself is often used to mean “understand,” if you grasp my point. Comprehend and apprehend derive from Latin prehendere, “to grasp”; intend, contend, and pretend derive from Latin tendere, “to reach with the hand”; we may press a point, and expression and impression also suggest pressing. We hold conversations, point things out, seize upon ideas, grope for words—I hope you catch my drift. One critical question is whether chimpanzees or other primates can point to absent objects. A defining feature of language is that it allows us to refer to the nonpresent, the property known as displacement. According to primatologists, animals don't have this ability and it seems to be a unique human feature. Bipedalism may have had an impact too. It freed the hands of our forebears and allowed them to gesticulate and probably tell stories in this fashion. In fact, story telling was apparently a turning point in the history of our species and one key aspect of that was the invention of fire. Fire was a means to cook food, protect our ancestors against potential dangers and of course, it brought members of our species together and acted as a social glue. This is when the story telling most likely occurred. Language also depends on memory—our ability to remember symbols, be they gestures, spoken words, or printed ones. Although speech itself can be regarded as gesture, it seems to differ in another way. Whereas gesture can provide iconic representations of real-world events, speech seems to be made up of sounds that seldom bear any relation to what they represent. Even spoken words, though, are not entirely arbitrary. Words sometimes do reflect the shapes of things they name—that is, there is an iconic component to speech as well as to manual gesture. In evolutionary terms, though, the symbols we use in ordinary language probably originated in mimes, bodily depictions of shapes and actions. Through time, mimes would have been gradually adapted or replaced with more efficient and streamlined forms, at the expense of physical resemblance or iconicity. The approach taken in this book departs from that of Chomsky and others in that language is here regarded as a communication system and not as a system of thought—E-language rather than I-language. Chomsky himself regarded external language as relatively trivial and uninteresting, with internal language as the real challenge. Although the fundamental nature of thought has ancient roots, the imperative to communicate our thoughts and experiences arose much more recently. Nevertheless, it probably evolved gradually rather than in the single catastrophic event envisaged by Chomsky and others. It depended critically on a capacity especially well developed in humans but present well before the emergence of Homo sapiens. This was intentionality, a prerequisite to any communication system designed to convey variable and often novel information. Intentionality implies the capacity to voluntarily produce and understand action. The drift to more complex communication probably began with the Pleistocene, dating from about 2.9 million years ago, as our hominin forebears were forced from the dwindling forest canopy, perhaps initially to coastal areas to forage on the water’s edge and later to the more open savanna and grasslands of Africa. They would have been faced with new threats, including the killer cats of the African savanna, and possibly waterborne threats as well, such as the stingrays and jellyfish that inhabit some of the waters around here. Sharing of information and experience would have been especially critical in adapting to these new environments. Now, why was speech adopted? Probably because speech is the most efficient form of bodily language, using little energy and being available at night or when there is no visual contact with the hearer.

[Louis Muñoz · Rating 2 out of 5]

So: A book about language (and by extension, grammar), and how we came to express ourselves that has almost a dozen typos and grammatical errors before page 50?! Sorry, not recommending it, whatever its merits may be otherwise. Feel free to take me off your Christmas list.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at the possible origins of language. Corballis makes a distinction between “communication,” which is how species talk to each other and to others (whether that’s by gestures, sounds, chemicals, etc.), and “language,” which is a tool by which humans carry on most of their communication. Every species communicates; not all species have language. (Both he and we will avoid getting into the controversy of just how unique language is to Homo sapiens.)

He also argues that language arose in conjunction with gestural communication, and that it's a relatively recent development that vocalization has become the predominant partner in the relationship.

The chief weakness in the book is style. It’s written in that folksy, conversational style that makes supposedly humorous or topical asides that add nothing to the discourse and are just distracting. Oh, how I wish editors could end the practice.

[Utsob Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought Provoking, to the point, funny.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book from the preface on.

Many people know the name of Noam Chomsky, but they may not know that, while he dethroned B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to linguistics, his own theory, which broadly falls into humanist linguistics, has itself become largely passé.

Two major newer schools, with a fair amount of overlap but with distinct emphases, are in the lead today: functionalist and Darwinist schools of linguistics. Michael Corballis comes from the later, though he’s conversant with the former. In the same broad train of thought as a Michael Tomasello, he talks in this book about the likely route for development of human language.

Corballis says straight up that he knew he would butt heads with Chomsky, Gould and others. He rejects Chomsky’s massive modularity of the brain (as does most modern neuroscience) and rejects Gould for saltationist ideas about the origin of language.

Corballis says that he sees normal, incremental neo-Darwinian evolution at work.

Early in part 1, chapter 1, he calls out Chomsky for ignoring most of the vast variation between languages in his attempt to posit a universal grammar. He even QUOTES Chomsky to that effect.

“I have not hesitated to propose a general principle of linguistic structure on the basis of observation of a single language.”

This is basically like the old “spontaneous emergence” idea of maggots in rotten meat, Galen’s claiming the human liver has seven lobes because monkey livers do, or similar.

Now, after refuting Chomsky, what ideas does Corballis offer up?

First is that language probably in part evolved from gestural issues. He notes that human babies point to things just to note them as an object of attention, vs chimps who point because they want.

Next, he notes humans’ ability to mentally time travel. Tis true, he notes, that corvids may not immediately revisit seed caches if they think another of their species has been spying on them, but that’s about it as far as looking to the future among animals. Elephants and primates seem to retain some memory of deceased loved ones, but of itself, that doesn’t reflect mental time travel backward, really. Only humans seem to have that in great degree. This, in turn is part of larger “displacement” in language, moving ourselves spatially as well as temporally. Related to that is that, in English at least, many prepositions can have both spatial and temporal functions.

Beyond that, he postulates that humans (and possibly earlier members of the genus Homo) having third-order theory of mind, vs primates (and presumably, cetaceans) having only second-order TOM, and a restricted and species-specific one at that, is probably a big factor in language development. Language recursiveness and nesting would seem to underscore this.

In all of this, though, Corballis notes that primates have some gesture usage, and that even dogs can recognize specific human words.

Next, it’s off to grammar. After a basic look at parts of speech, Corballis notes how and why, in English and other language, some things like “helping verbs” evolved … and then, in some successor languages, devolved again. As part of this, and the idea that languages in general started as noun-verb only items similar to modern pidgins, Corballis notes the role of cultural evolution.

Corballis ends with his “Crossing the Rubicon” of how he things language began. (I’ll end there to avoid spoiler alerts.)

[Dale Muckerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was more fascinating than I would have guessed. Corballis discusses such things as: the relationship (in our brains and behavior) between grasping and speech; mirror neurons in our brains; the possibility that human ancestors lived so much in and around water that we not only lost a lot of hair but also benefited from being able to communicate by sign language; the strong possibility that language emerged first as gestures and sign language; and the uncertainty as to whether Neanderthals had a throat structure suitable for speech. The book was pretty easy to understand even though some of the discussion was directed to linguists and was about linguist Noam Chomsky's belief that language emerged in a single sort of linguistic big bang event rather than through the long process of natural selection. Corballis does a good job of showing how language most likely did emerge gradually through natural selection. Corballis is a good writer and lightens things up at times with a sense of humor.

[Peter]

won't rate it as i don't think i was the intended audience. i recommend just skipping to last chapter. curious what the author has against twitter.

[Alex Meeks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains a great deal of fascinating information. Unfortunately, it's not really organized in the best way. And perhaps I'm being pedantic, but the typos were sort of distracting at points. The content was really good, regardless of structure and the need for more proofreading. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone looking to learn a bit more about the history of language.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite a title that suggests some sordid little secret, New Zealand professor of psychology Michael Corballis relates an engaging, entertaining, and convincing history of the development of spoken language. Rather than some big bang sort of mutation that suddenly granted humans the ability to speak, Corballis presents the case that humans gradually over millennia acquired the ability to speak via bodily activities, such as reaching, grabbing, and manipulating things, that these movements became miming gestures which in time grew to become a combination of practiced signs mixed with vocal flourishes, and that in time these vocalizations became the dominant means of conveying information.

Corballis makes clear that he is speaking only of language as a shared means of communication, not language as thought. Corballis contrasts his concerns with the linguists of the Noam Chomsky school who maintain: 1) there is a universal grammar, an innate ability of humans to use language; 2) humans possess an internal I-language inseparable from thought; 3) this I-language was acquired in a single big bang mutation that rapidly became endemic; and 4) the language of a community replaces a person’s internal I-language. Corballis proceeds in a methodical step-by-step fashion to show how language must have been acquired in a gradual fashion, and in the process shows how logically difficult it is to support a Chomskian perspective.

Spoken language is an embodied affair. Its origins begin with the human being in space, with the brain actively processing location and movement, gradually becoming more refined, neatly miniaturizing and recursively implementing movements till they become gestures, then utterances, freeing the hands to enable more productive activity. Making communication possible are such factors as the sociability required for survival, mirror genes, intentionality, and a theory of mind. The latter trait entails that we humans are aware that other humans also think and have their own separate thoughts. This knack humans have of being able to perceive others as similar and only slightly different enables the vagueness of pantomime, gesture, sign, and even language to be underdetermined, so that it is a mutual context which helps to facilitate understanding of incomplete/ambiguous “utterances”.

The principle heuristic in Corballis’ discussion is Darwin’s precept: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” Hence, it is the millions of years of evolution that led humans from the Pleistocene to the Middle Stone Age (50 thousand years ago) to baby-step their way to vocal articulation and the development of language. It’s been an accelerating process, as language has made it possible to preserve and transmit knowledge through successive generations. Corballis suggests there is no single proto-language, but that language arose in different human settlements and then ramified as members of those communities split off. The actual grammar of language is variable from language to language, but Corballis notes that the most complex grammars are found in smaller, more isolated communities, suggesting that the grammars of more technological communities (with the need for names for more things and concepts) require a streamlining of language’s grammatical and linguistic properties (which is the case with English, for example).

Another chief voice in Corballis’ thesis is William James, who is cited for asserting that language is primarily discursive (about narrative) and secondarily logical. Even as language was used to tell stories, it has made it possible for humans to think logically. I think of how the hotbed of Western rational thought suddenly emerged in approximately 500 BC, when the Greek pre-Socratics began to use language not just to tell stories but to abstract principles and properties of numbers and events, how they began to speculate on the origins of matter, and the nature of thought itself. Corballis only tantalizes with this point, how language came to be mapped onto thought, but once entangled, both thought and language have evolved simultaneously, each influencing the other.

The chief point to take away from this book is that language has been part of a social evolution of humankind, that the embodied nature of human existence and basic structures in the brain enabled humans to develop means to communicate experience, first with physical pantomime then with the extreme miniaturization of physical gesture, vocally articulated sound.

[Cam · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the tradition of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, who wrote classic 1990 paper arguing language was adaptive, Corballis's book aimed at a popular audience is easy to read.

Similar Pinker's best seller The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, for the first third of the book, Corbalis pushes back at Gould's view that language is a spandrel (or a Skyhook, as Dennet puts it).

He later goes on to emphasise the adaptive role "mental time travel" that humans can do which is improved with language and the critical role of sign in the development of language.

An aside: as I was reading this book, the culture wars were hit the NZ news where some notable academics including Corbalis signed a letter claiming that mātauranga (the body of knoweldge and cultural practice from the indiginous NZ Māori) is not science, in response to NZ schooling agency proposing to change the curriculum looking to "promote parity for mātauranga Māori with other bodies of knowledge".

Of course, Corbalis has been dragged through the media and called a racist for some pretty sober claims, alas.

[Verity Brown]

Interesting ideas, but for scholars, not laymen

Although this book has some fascinating ideas, it is clearly meant to be part of a much wider conversation among scholars, not really for laymen (despite efforts to make the conversation a bit more accessible to laymen). That's why I'm only giving it three stars.

But there are intriguing theories here, as well as intriguing research about apes. The central premise is that language arose initially from gesture (which apes can thoroughly control) instead of vocalization (which apes cannot meaningfully control). Additionally, the theory that humans came down from the trees to the edges of lakes and seas instead of to the savanna makes a great deal of biological sense, as well as providing good reasons for the development of standing upright and the breath control necessary for intentional vocalization.

[Alexander Telfar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read the first few chapters then skimmed the rest.

I had high hopes for this book, the evolution of language is a fascinating topic. But the author did not deliver anything particularly interesting. The book mainly contained a history of developments in linguistics (Chomsky this, Chomsky that -- who cares...) and uninformed speculation (uninformed by evidence, but well informed by past speculation of others...).

I was hoping the book would go into detail on how; body-language provided an advantage to primates. And then ontop of that, the ability to communicate vocally, again, provided an advantage, then merge, then ...? But that didn't seem to really be the focus of the book.

[Jennifer Kowash · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great discussion on early humanity and how that might have shaped our use of language. Since this book mostly covers potential origins of language there can only be speculation, so don't expect a lot of facts. Each part has a page long introduction explaining what each chapter covers making it very speed read friendly. This book is also good for beginners as it doesn't require much background knowledge to understand the points being made. However, this readability may ruin it for more knowledgeable people who may only be interested in the 3rd part.

[Bronwyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my review at --
http://www.flaxroots.com/flaxflower/i...