Language By Evolution? No.

Q

How did humans communicate before the existence of language?
https://www.quora.com/How-did-humans-communicate-before-the-existence-of-language/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl

Hans-Georg Lundahl

I speak two langs, Latin and Germanic. In a few dialects.

5 years ago

Let’s define language, as linguistics understands the word.

A bird can express one emotion or social positioning or whatever by “riririririririri” and another one by “riree, riree, riree” and as it is all about not just expressing but even emphasising “the statement”, repetition is often used.

OK, a threat may not be repeated if it is effective, so there for instance a harshly barking dog will wait before the next bark.

Now, man can make statements that are notional propositions, and those that parallel the above animal ones take a form very peculiar to notional statements as used among men, and very unlike above animal types.

1. It is about infinitely many notions, not about a finite number of emotions.
2. It involves no or very little and subtle mimicry of what is expressed, instead there is a double articulation:
   
   
   • a) the statement is articulated into morphemes, one or usually more than one, and often enough morphemes with independence to each other, different words (a Greenlandic sentence would often just be one, even if including many morphemes).
   • b) the morphemes are articulated into phonemes, one or very much most often more than one, each phoneme being usually a sound or a modification of a neighbouring sound or a combination of sounds (in Cyrillic alphabet of Russian, C is a sound, Ь is a modification of previous consonant, and Ц is a combination of sounds, each or at least first and last being phonemes).
   
   
   
3. Instead of repetivity for emphasis, you have infinite recursivity for added notions, so a genitive phrase can be added on like “this is the mouse of the cheese of the housewife of the house of John” or a more free phrasing can go to This is the dog that worried the cat “That killed the rat that ate the maltThat lay in the house that Jack built.”
4. By adding some kind of negation morpheme or morphemes, a morpheme may serve to denote the opposite or absence of what the morpheme normally denotes “milk” vs “no milk”, “white” vs “not white”.
5. Human language can speak about future, about past, about unrealised conditions and about the things that are remote. And about statements not here and now endorsed.

No animal signal system has these characteristics, and man did not exist even a day, probably not even an hour, before God had given him this.

This is one thing Evolutionists have a real hard time to explain, and gradualism is really not a good try. Each of the differences to animal language is atomic, each contributes to a human language and any human language lacking any of the five points would be a peace hasard. Imagine you had insulted someone inadvertedly, he misunderstands it and is aggressive, you can’t say things like “I didn’t say, I actually said, because I thought” and you had to use as only excuse possible the animal gestures of capitulation, I think that would make you resentful. And perhaps unwilling to make an excuse at all.

So, half a human language is worse than no human language at all.

That is why there is no such a thing as half a human language.

That is why gradually acquiring human language is one of the major impossibilities for evolution.

Milos Markovic

5 years ago

lol, impossible… sure. You’re making up an irreducible complexity argument on the linguistic front and you made a strawman by implying that the only way we communicate is via words (no emotions, no gestures, no anything) and by implying that “half a human language is worse than no human language”. Your entire argument can be debunked by anyone with a fair grasp of how evolution works, similarly to how the “eye is irreducibly complex” argument was debunked ages ago.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

27.VIII.2033

“You’re making up an irreducible complexity argument on the linguistic front”

Absolutely yes.

“you made a strawman by implying that the only way we communicate is via words”

No, I did not. I identified human specificity as the capacity of communicating notions.

“and by implying that “half a human language is worse than no human language”.”

I not only implied it, but reasoned it out:

// Imagine you had insulted someone inadvertedly, he misunderstands it and is aggressive, you can’t say things like “I didn’t say, I actually said, because I thought” and you had to use as only excuse possible the animal gestures of capitulation, I think that would make you resentful. And perhaps unwilling to make an excuse at all. //

“anyone with a fair grasp of how evolution works,”

At least if he has no notion at all of how language (the one communicating notions) works.