How Old is Speech?

This blog takes the position that language, in the sense of two or more people focusing together on a topic, is quite old. Archaeologists, Chomskyites and others tend to put it as a more recent in the human lineage, about 100 thousand or fewer years. I put it at approaching 2 million years. My main grounds for thinking such is based on cooperativeness and the idea that it took a long time to create the verbal environment that we now take for granted.Slow evolutionI noticed anarticle from a couple of weeks back about the “truly” bilingual child, and I came across this passage, “Pediatricians routinely advise parents to talk as much as possible to their young children, to read to them and sing to them. Part of the point is to increase their language exposure, a major concern even for children growing up with on ly one language.”It is a familiar sentiment, but it sparked me to think about the days when language was really new. At first people probably did not have too much to say to one another; talking was an occasional thing, and even today verbal richness is impaired if we are not surrounded by words. When language was new our ancestors could talk, but they were still linguistically impoverished when compared to today ’s oral cultures. Their children did not grow up hearing a ceaseless yakety-yak and did not create a rich verbal environment themselves.We can assume that language was first used to relate news of the here and now:there is a carcass we can scavenge yon...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs