• Question: How did language develop; and how did if one full tribe of people with no integration be able to communicate with another speaking completely differently to them?

    Asked by anon-240740 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 6 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 6 Mar 2020: last edited 6 Mar 2020 3:13 pm

      There aren’t any linguists in here unfortunately, maybe I’d have refreshed this question repeatedly waiting for an answer if there was!

      There’s an insect scientist here though, which means I’ve finally found the other half of this comic:

      https://www.xkcd.com/1012/

      There are a lot of multilingual people around that might be able to answer how they learned two languages (unfortunately I am not one of them, though I’m trying to learn my girlfriend’s native Romanian, so far fairly unsuccessfully), but the history of language itself probably needs a specialist linguist or historian to answer.

      What always made me curious is – Could we communicate with aliens if we ever met?

      This video was dropped by the ornithology (bird science) department of a prestigious university, and the guy in it sounds pretty hilariously confused as to what a lot of the crow noises actually mean, and he’s the expert! Perhaps inter-species communication would always be very difficult, even with super intelligent aliens/robots/whatever. I don’t know!

    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      For the first bit, nobody is really sure. The general background is that people and animals have always made noises to alert others to where they are and to get attention, and obviously the more specific the noise is the faster you get what you want. Babies cry, but parents will generally be able to distinguish between a tired cry and a hungry cry quite early on for example.

      There were two things biologically that had to happen for language to evolve — our mouths/airways/voiceboxes be able to make the variety of sounds, and a change in the brain to attach meaning to those sounds. Researchers think it happened when the new Homo genus emerged, but they disagree on which species of early human began to have a ‘full’ language. It’s very hard to know, because although you might be able to see the physical changes in the fossil record, and make guesses based on comparison between our language and how other animals (especially apes) communicate, there’s no ‘hard’ evidence.

      For the second bit, if you want to trade or collaborate in any way it’s in your interests to make communication easy. Gestures definitely help, for nouns especially you can point and name things.

      I once did a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course, and one of the sessions was a lesson taught entirely in Welsh, which none of us spoke, to show how you’d run a lesson if you had no language in common. There was lots of gestures, and very exaggerated facial expressions. We learned “I like…” with a big smile, and “I don’t like…” looking unhappy, and we did words for food where you can use lots of props.

      So I suppose if you want to make communication happen, you can. You could try this as an experiment actually — try watching a film in another language and see how much you can follow based just on expression, gestures and how people interact. Don’t cheat and put the subtitles on though :p Save that for the second watch through!

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