The Creation and Development of Human Language

by Mahavir Saran Jain

translated from the Hindi by Stephen Durnford
for the original text see http://www.rachanakar.org/2014/10/blog-post_87.html#ixzz3I2Tw3n5j

Just as communication is achieved by very many animals and birds using sounds, so, too, would the
primitive ancestors of humanity have communicated by means of innate and involuntary sounds in the
same natural way. Given that situation, one is of course curious as to how true human speech could
have come into being as something able to be deliberately composed, in contrast to those spontaneous
and automatic sounds.
The only language taken into account in linguistics is human speech. Chomskys interpretation is that
human-kind possesses an innate and fundamental property, which, within that early language-like
environment, was able to take root and expand until it succeeded in emerging as true language.
Some creatures are indeed able to articulate certain sounds, but that is not language. Theories about
the origin of language were much debated in linguistic circles up to 1960. When we were studying for
an MA degree in Hindi in 1958-59, linguistics courses started with the origin of language. Various
doctrines or theories of the origin of language were taught. These were:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

The divine origin theory

The imitation-based theory
The echo-based theory
The attraction/revulsion theory
The effort avoidance theory
The verbal root theory
The social decision theory

The theories listed above cannot explain the origin of language in an authentic and scientific way:
1. The divine origin theory is based solely on blind faith.
2 Even if a child is born with an innate facility for language learning, it is nevertheless not born
knowing any particular language, and it draws upon whatever speech its social environment uses
so as to conform to that environment.
3 The echo-based theory may be considered as merely based on the etymology of some words,
examples of which are found across the worlds languages, such as the cats miaoo or the
bow-wow of a barking dog, but the quantity of words of this kind is very limited. The
quantity of words capable of being formed this way is also very limited. For example, the
promoters of this theory have to demonstrate that, if some branch should fall from a tree, then
the noise of it will lead people to create a word like crash, or if timber should catch fire, then
the sound of wood burning will lead them to create a word like crackle.
4 The claim by the promoters of the emotional expression theory is that words evolved from the
spontaneous shapes of mood-related sounds for expressing dismay, amazement, joy, pain, etc.
Words built upon the sound of a shout or boisterous laughter are examples of these.
5 The promoters of the theory based on avoiding effort state that words evolved from the
involuntary sounds from the mouth of a person engaged in hard work. Examples of such sounds
arising from hard manual labour are those voiced by workers straining to lift a load, bearers
hoisting a sedan chair, washermen thrashing garments vigorously on stones, women in villages
grinding flour on querns, and so on. It is the claim of this theorys proponents that the formation
of words was built upon those sounds.
6 The verbal root theory was first proposed by the German scholar Professor K.W.L. Heyse.
Later on, taking as his basis the languages of the Indo-European family, Sanskrit, Greek and
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Latin, etc., Max Mller proposed that mankind had built up 400 to 500 verbal roots and that
words later developed from these. The work of Alexander Johnson took this idea further.
Taking the reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European family, he sought to show a
consistent relationship between a roots meaning and the point of articulation of its initial sound.
For example, he proposed that the roots starting with a labial sound developed into words
denoting speaking, expressing and emitting. In a similar way verbal roots starting with a dental
went on to become words of touching, grasping and spreading. However, we do not find any
consistent similarity across the worlds languages in words for root-based actions.
7 The view of the promoters of the social decision theory is that the creation of language came
from social decision-making. Community members working together gave an object a name,
and that then became the designation of that object. This theory is consistent with the others. It
also casts some light upon the arbitrary nature of the link between word and meaning.
Each of the foregoing theories has shortcomings. The range of theories 2 and 3 will be discussed
further in greater detail. Some theories have had fresh light cast upon their formative processes, in
relation to a limited number of words in certain languages. In connection with theory 7 the present
article considers actions from which humans alone are capable of creating and developing language.
We will review the place of the limited and mostly hypothetical theories of language origin within the
broader context of language creation and development.
The human race is more characterised by its production of artefacts than simply by the effects of
natural processes upon it. Humankind has learnt, by means specifically of the actions of imitation and
experiment, to make food and fill the stomach, to build houses and form settlements, to make and
wear clothing. Each of the worlds peoples has its own version of food, clothing and shelter.
Nevertheless, if we look closely enough, we can detect underlying linguistic commonalities between
them that arise, not from a desire to learn language as such, but from the desire simply to learn.
Rather, its basis is mental, abstract, personal and directed towards efficiency and practice. I am a
Hindi speaker, while another person may be, let us say, a Tamil speaker. In such a situation, if I am
not already a Tamil user, then I cannot understand the language and cannot learn it without practice.
Once people had learned to live together socially and then, one day, adopted the process of calling
some object by a word symbolic of its form, on that very day was laid the foundation stone upon
which language was to be built. That is also the reason why no word in any language is simply the
instinctive product of the nervous system. The key factors in the consolidation of language are,
firstly, the frequent and consistent articulation of forms by an individual and, secondly, their
acceptance by other members of the community with the same range of meaning. Even today words
created this way by a child can be taken into the vocabulary of the people around. The noise of a car
horn repeatedly voiced by a child, lexicalised as beep beep and widely uttered that way within the
group, may well become the accepted term for the object itself within the local speech community.
It was stated above that the way in which many creatures communicate by means of sounds is the way
in which humanitys primitive precursors, too, would have communicated by means of natural, innate
and involuntary sounds. The relevant and significant factors to bear in mind at this juncture are:The prerequisites and outcomes of mankinds social activities;
The physical configuration in human versus non-human creatures for the production and
perception of sound;
Humanitys advances in mental development and the capacity to develop symbolism.
Given the ability of animals and birds to emit and hear sounds, it is nevertheless notable that lots of
these creatures are more efficient at producing sound than many are in listening to it. It is our daily
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experience that a dog in our homes is more proficient in producing sound than responding to it. In
people, however, the proficiency in listening to sound is as great as in producing it.
Taking this thought as a starting point, answering the question about the origin of speech is greatly
helped by studying the structure and function of the relevant physical organs in human beings in
comparatison with corresponding ones in non-human species how the function of the vocal cords
and of the dynamic positioning of the tongue relate to the structure of the auditory system. This is a
matter in which biologists and linguistics should work together.
The mental development of human and non-human creatures
Human beings possess not only the ability to produce and hear sounds, but also an amazing ability to
memorise words. The brain is organised for the speech organs to function in mutual concert. In view
of this, mankinds mental development has led to the accumulation of a multitude of remembered
words, and, via the deployment of only a limited set of speech sounds, permits the articulation of
virtually limitless thousands or millions of words in their correct form.
At this juncture it is noteworthy that anatomical analysis shows the utterance of automatic involuntary
sounds to be performed via the Medulla Oblongata part of the brain stem, but control of the utterance
and of the conduct of deliberately intentional sounds is via the Motor Speech Centre in the Motor or
Excitable area of the Cerebrum. This region, located near the front branch of the Fissure of Sylvius, is
also called Brocas Centre or Brocas Area and controls the various physical movements for specific
speech sounds, determining also the actions performed and their sequence and duration.
From the physical point of view a few species of bird, including parrots, are known to be able to
mimic human and animal sounds uncritically, but are unable to articulate deliberately intentional
sounds. Also the subject of research, therefore, is the physical comparison between the human brain
and those of non-human creatures, including the amount of commonality between them.
It is beyond dispute that cerebral development in mankind was greater than in other creatures, and,
because of this, the effort put into making voluntary utterances is correspondingly greater too. Output
is therefore not limited to simple, unarticulated vocalisation and would thus have contributed to the
founding and development of spoken language. What had to be learnt was the positioning of the
vocal cords in various ways, the articulation of contrasting voiced and voiceless sounds, the
production of specific tones at various pitches, and so on. According to Noam Chomsky, these arose
from mankinds mental talent and matured to completeness. They were then incorporated into
competent and effective speech. Linguistic ability is tied to the mental talents of humankind, so
anyone can learn any of the worlds languages, whereas no non-human creature can learn any.
(http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_rouge06.html)
Cognitive psychologists no longer believe that a human baby's brain is like a blank slate upon which
what is to be learnt may then be imprinted, but, instead, that particular brain-resident chromosomes
are inherited for the purpose. This idea has been further enhanced by Steven Arthur Pinker.
(How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7).
The evolution of the human race and symbolism
In addition to the development of these abilities to articulate speech, the great variety of words needed
to express the various materials, goods, persons, scenes, situations and emotions of daily life had to be
both created and linked to the entities denoted by them. Symbolic designations of these various
entities were thus enabled to become realised as distinct words. In language the articulation of
meaningless sounds does not occur. The words created within a language are meaningful. The
smallest units of which a language is composed are themselves meaningless, however. No meaning is
attached to them. It is characteristic of language that a meaningful utterance is composed of units
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which are inherently without meaning. The key point is that, in language, the use of words is for
revealing meaning. The meaning of language is symbolic. In other words, a languages words and
sentences outweigh any of those natural sounds that are merely automatic and inarticulate.
A word is not a direct image of an entity, but a symbolic token that is closely tied to the outward
shape of the word, on one hand, and inwardly, on the other, to some intrinsic facet of the entity that is
denoted by the token. The token thus acts as the outward identity of the entity, although the physical
attributes of the symbol itself bear no relation to the attributes of the entity, although the symbol in its
function as a token is indeed treated as though denoting the entity directly.
Inarticulate, instinctive utterances are not symbols, because they are natural and spontaneous, being
not shaped deliberately. In contrast, the words of a language are symbolic tokens that denote entities.
Whichever word gets accepted as the token for a given entity in a communitys own language by a
given speech-community, that is the word which that community becomes accustomed to as the
designation of that entity in that language. This is the reason why the acoustic make-up of a word is
nothing more than simple sound, but as a token it is deliberately structured and meaningful.
Whenever a person accepts any sort of gesture or signal that stands in as the indicator of some event,
situation or emotion, on that day is symbolisation born. Symbolisation is what happens when one
entity is arbitrarily linked to another one in order to act as the outward symbol of the latter.
Hayakawa, writing about the uniqueness of the human world, has stated that, whenever two or more
people communicate ideas to one another, then they are readily able to reach mutual agreement on
using symbolic entities that act as tokens for other entities.
Symbolisation is of necessity inherent in a person for social communication and social development
and confers the ability to construct an effective set of symbols that denote basic actions like eating,
seeing and walking, etc. This mechanism is fundamental to human mental processes, and civilization
continues to grow steadily on the back of it.
A languages words are symbols
This is the reason why, when one voices meaningfully constructed utterances, there is no natural or
inherent linkage of the sounds with the entities denoted, but only an arbitrary one. By arbitrariness we
mean that the linkage has been created solely by inter-personal agreement. By means of a word we
become aware of the entity, i.e., of the meaning by then already attached to the word. The word is not
itself the entity, and there is no natural, integral, mutual connection between the name by which we
call any given entity and the entity itself. The validity of their relationship is maintained by consent.
That is why the mental lexicon is not a spontaneous product of the mind, and, instead, we have to
learn language as a social activity.
Whatever name a given society bestows upon a particular thing, that name for that thing becomes
institutionalised in that society. This is the reason why the very same objects name in widely
differing languages is generally different. If a natural, integral, mutual connection between the word
and the entity were to exist, then each entity would be designated in the same, single way across all
the worlds languages. We know that this is not so. The same object is called by many names. Thus,
what is called dog in English is kuttaa in Hindi, gou in Chinese, cane in Italian, perro in Spanish,
Hund in German and sobaka in Russian.
Even among just the languages of India a single entity is denoted by many terms. Wheat in Hindi is
g h , in Panjabi kaak, in Gujarati dha , in Bengali and Assamese gam or gm. In Hindi eye is h,
but is realised as in Marathi, kamai in Tamil and
in Kannada. Neck in Hindi is gardan,
h
but d au in Panjabi, m in Marathi, dii in Assamese, b in Oriya, while it is
in Tamil and
Malayalam. In Hindi one makes bh
, food, but in Marathi and Gujarati one makes
or
m . Conversely, the same word in different languages is used in differing ways.
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Word
mrig
i
anargal
b

Meanings per word

deer
animal (in general)
teach
thresh
meaningless
fluent
garden
home

Mahavir Saran Jain

Language
Hindi
in southern languages
Hindi
Marathi
Hindi
Telugu
Hindi
Bengali

Thus, there exists absolutely no natural mechanism which might provide a fixed name for an object or
entity. The name arises within a group of people with an accepted meaning, whether by inheritance or
as an innovation.
Some scholars question the arbitrariness of the link between word and meaning. Accordingly, even if
this link looks arbitrary today, a language is nevertheless based on sounds with meanings expressive
of entities and actions. From this point of view the basis for linking word and meaning seems not to
be arbitrary association but acoustic equivalence.
It is true that some words denoting various natural or artificial sounds are vocal articulations that
imitate or echo those sounds. This tendency can be seen in such words as miaoo, bow-wow,
tick-tock, knock-knock, splish-splash, a horses whinny, the caw of a crow, the frogs
croak, the scrunch when biting an apple, the hoot of a siren or car horn, a motorbikes puttputt, the crackle of a fire, the buzz of a bee, the sigh of a breeze, the thump of a slamming
door, and so on. In this regard we have mentioned earlier that the number of words of this kind in any
language is very limited and sparse, and therefore, with only few forms like these to go on, the general
rule of arbitrariness between word and meaning remains unbroken. Furthermore, given that the namemaking of objects which make a noise can only be applied to those entities able to produce sound, the
name-making of feelings, ideas, and so on, cannot utilise this method.
Imitation-based words can certainly be similar between one language and another, but often they are
not so. Leaves fall from trees everywhere, and the Sanskrit root for this verb is pat, but fall in
English, however. Similarly, a dog barks bh- bh in Hindi, but bow-wow in English.
Thus a word is consolidated on the basis of how it gets heard by the individual user of some language,
in specific psychological conditions, as the sound of some object. It then gets used repeatedly in that
sense. Only when that word with that meaning gains recognition in that speech community does the
word then take off and become part of that languages formal vocabulary. Words capable of being
based on objects that make sounds cannot be isolated from the general process of word-making by the
arbitrary linking of form to meaning.
Of the arbitrary linkage between words and their meanings one might say that societys older
generation bequeaths to the new generation, as its language, the valid meaningfulness of words built
from sequences of sound. The meanings inherited from the older generations words get modified a
bit when passed to the new generation.
Given the arbitrariness factor, one might say that language is a social artefact. We, in daily social
activity, are used to treating not only the great variety of words with their respective meanings as each
being fixed in their mutual linkage, but also each such linked pair as unchanging in relation to the
other pairs. In reality, however, neither is the link between word and meaning fixed, nor the
interrelationships among such pairs unchanging.

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A words form is not attached to an entity; its meaning alone is what is attached. The concept that a
word conveys persists during the process of translating the literature of one language into another.
With the meaning being held in the mind, we exchange one languages word for the equivalent in the
other. This proves that no fixed linkage exists between a words form and its meaning, nor among
these linked pairs. Furthermore, the meanings of a word keep changing because of the instability of
the relationship between word and entity, though, during the time that a particular word is stable in a
particular meaning in a particular speech community, for that community that meaning is indeed felt
to be constant.
What if word and meaning were, instead, to really be one and the same? Then the tongue would
experience the taste of sweetness by merely saying the word sugar, the stomach would be filled by
just saying food, and the tongue burned by saying fire. Our direct experience, in contrast, reveals
the difference between an object and its spoken name, between a word and its meaning.
When a baby is born, it has no name. At that time we can give it any name we like. We can even
continue to give it no name at all. When family members repeatedly apply the same particular name,
then that is the name the baby will be known by. With that name being used, that little creature,
hearing it in the absence of any alternative, will come to understand it as its own in the course of time
and to identify itself via that name. By this process the meaning of a word becomes institutionalised.
The term itself does not matter.
What the mind fixes itself on is not the object or entity denoted by a word, but the concept attached to
the meaning. Indian and western thinkers are in agreement about this. Ferdinand de Saussure stated
that a transitional concept exists in the mind between a word which denotes something and the object
denoted. The word does not evoke the object itself; it evokes the concept that resides in the mind.
Indian thinkers have investigated this in greater detail in the of the metalinguistic sph theory (that
which bursts forth). This refers to the notional image of the target entity in the speakers mind that
also flashes into the hearers consciousness upon hearing a particular sound pattern. When a speaker's
articulated utterance is heard, an intermediate acoustic representation (madhy m) is produced in the
mind of the hearer. Already residing in the hearers mind is the sph -representation of the meaning,
and this then leads to the meaning that refers to the external world being grasped, as intended by the
speaker.
A grammarian asked what cow equates to as a word (abda) in this context (atha gaur ity atra ka
abda?). Does something that has a tail, hump, hooves, horns and dewlap equate to this word? He
answered this himself, saying that the creature is not itself the word, but it is merely a real-world
material object (dravya).
Again, the making of a signal (thus revealing the intention of the makers heart via the recipients
eyes, etc.,) and the performing of an activity (a bodily movement), even if only the blinking of an eye,
do these equate to that word? To this, too, the grammarians reply is negative. These are not the
word, they are actions (kriy).
So, whatever is white, blue, tawny or grey, do they equate to that word? The answer to this is not in
grammatical terms, however, because they, too, are not the word, but are simply attributes (gua).
Then again, something which is a single feature shared by a variety of real-world objects and, on their
being removed, is not itself removed but remains generic and extant, does this equate to that word?
Indeed, this is not the word, because it is, in contrast, a species or class. So, what is that word, then?
The grammarians reply is Something which is made manifest from uttered sounds, via awareness of
the property of having dewlap, tail, hump, hooves and horns, this is that word.
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Any articulated sound whose meaning enters public usage, that is called a word, but, the meaning
cannot be perceived in the actual sequence of sounds, since each dies away in sequence as soon as
uttered. There is no significance in them. That which affects the ear alone is not informative. A
single firm definition is agreed for a linguistically defined word (in the sense of being lodged in the
mind). This is made manifest via the sounds uttered, and, on being made manifest, the perception of
its meaning that is already lodged in the mind emerges. That is why it is called sph , because it
bursts forth (sph ati). (Patajali, possibly 2nd. century BCE, in Vy r M h hy , Great
Commentary on Grammar, (first chapter), translated by Carud v str, Motilal Banarsidass, pages 3
- 4)
Thus, mankind is the only creature who has managed to tokenise a vast variety of objects by means of
words and, by virtue of having developed this tokenisation, to stand out as different from the world of
animals. Birds and animals make only natural and spontaneous cries. The creation of language in
mankind came about with the expansion of symbolification, arising from human natomical structure
in alliance with mental development when faced with meeting lifes necessities.
Whereas, to this day, birds and animals reveal their state of mind by means of sounds, gestures and
expanding or contracting the body, humanity, in contrast, has, for thousands of years, been able to
make use of arbitrary speech tokens unlike the animal worlds communication tools, thus transferring
each generations continuously enlarging stock of knowledge to the next, culminating in human
speech as we have it. For this reason it can be said without any doubt that the history of humanity has
had, from the very beginning, the foundation, notionally, for a single well-structured language.
Language was not possible without the development of human society. For this reason Vendryes
wrote in 1921 that human administration, if not dependent upon language, could not conceivably have
been achieved to such a significant extent without a rule-based structure. Only by means of thought,
supported by language, self-awareness and mutually beneficial conversation with other members of
society, could humanity have managed to create language, something which provided the only way
that societies could be set up. If such an effective means of interacting had been absent, arrangements
would have remained proto-humanly primitive, a situation which is truly hard to envisage. Coherent
language was in existence at the very beginning of mankinds history, because without language no
development could have occurred. (Joseph Vendryes in Le Langage, translated by Jagv Ki r
Balbr, Foreword, page 1, Hindi Samiti, Information Department, Lucknow, first edition, 1966).
Indian scholars, too, are well aware of the importance of language. The power inherent in words
binds the whole world together ( d ri ir i sysy i
dh ) says Bharthari
(possibly 5th. century CE) in V y p d y , Relating to the words in a sentence, and, favoured by
eloquence, this world is still on the journey. This triad of worlds would remain in total darkness, if
the brightness from words being eternally enunciated was not blazing forth (idam andhatama
ktsna jy ta bhuvanatrayam, yadi dhvaya jy tir sasra na d pyat ) in K y d r , A
model of poetry, faithfully edited by Chand Banerjee, Calcutta University (1939), page 6.
Statements of this type of by Indian scholars on the importance of language are not just emotional
speeches. Because of the linguistic achievement described in them, language holds the very secret of
might be called humanitys well organised (ssktika, Sanskritic!) journey to success.

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