Some modern considerations for thinking about language evolution: A discussion of The Evolution of Language by Tecumseh Fitch

A little history The question of how humans came to have language has been raised ever since humans first recognised themselves as languaging creatures, and the ability to language has always been seen to be the single most distinctive feature of humaness. No humans have ever been encountered who did not speak, but speaking has never been found in any other kind of creature. Nevertheless, it has always been recognised that other creatures had ways of communicating, especially by means of their voices, and many have sensed that, despite differences, human speaking was related to this. One ancient debate has been, then, whether or not we can accept continuities between animal and human expression, or whether there is an unbridgeable gulf. In the modern era, from the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century, inquiries into language origins were often undertaken. After this they ceased almost completely because, so it seemed, with the expansion of empirical knowledge, the gap between what we could reliably know that was relevant to the inquiry and what we would need to know to ground the inquiry on a solid base of observable facts had become glaringly apparent. Solutions to the problem of language origins, it was felt, could never be more than fairy tales, one person’s views being as good as another’s. Thus Dwight Whitney, writing in 1873, declared that “no theme in linguistic science is more often and voluminously treated...with less profitable result in proportion to the labour expanded.” He judged the “greater part of what is written upon this topic [of language origins]” to be “mere idle talk.” (Whitney 1873-4, as quoted In Jespersen 1922: 412). As a result, the whole topic became disreputable. As it is common to note, in 1865 the Linguistic Society of Paris explicitly banned all submissions on this topic, and the London Philological Society followed suit a few years later. Notwithstanding this, from the late nineteenth century until the beginning of the period when the topic was to become fashionable again, there were scholars, linguists among them, who continued to contribute to the discussion. For example, important ideas were contributed by Charles Darwin and Otto Jespersen, as we shall see. However, these