THE VOICE OF THINGS: THE REVOLUTION OF HUMAN LANGUAGE AND ITS ORIGIN FROM SOUND IMITATION.

GIUSEPPE MAIORANO Euromedia Italia srl, via Lupatelli 56, 00165, Rome, Italia

The true primeval origin of human language is regarded as a keyissue both in historical linguistics and in overall scientific research. An increasing interest is registered in recent times about this topic, and different, even conflicting proposals are presently on the ground. Which are the main difficulties about achieving a convincing ultimate solution? Arent we late about the understanding of how, why and when human speech emerged, especially if we consider that more than 150 years have passed since the Darwinian Revolution took place? But probably the solution is very near and, actually, it has been already proposed with parallel, although different, formulas which can be today fruitfully revised and emended. Among the classic glottogenetic theories, the less welcomed onomatopoeic and sound-symbolic proposals are mainly considered here. Nevertheless, these theories, for which sounds for themselves give rise by imitation to analogous meaningful oral sounds, are taken here as the only acceptable proposals for the origin of human oral language although first anticipated and then paralleled by gestural communicative behaviour and acts. Examples of such proposals are the works by F.W. Farrar, Field-Marshal Montgomerys grandfather: Origins of Language and Chapters on Language, which go back to 1860 and 1865 respectively. However, it seems necessary to simplify the whole question and reconsider it from the beginning. In fact, major misunderstandings and biases still exist which need to be cleared, namely: - misuse of terms related to communication, language, speech, natural languages, and similarly to iconicity, onomatopoeia, soundsymbolism, whose employment indeed seems sometimes abused; - shift of meaning and overlapping between the notions of origin and evolution of human language, possibly with misleading consequences for the whole argumentation process and its results; - lack of proper time and space location when dealing with the origin of human language in prehistoric ages and consequent loss

of references to the coeval climatic conditions, basic human needs, health risks, group dimensions, hunting rules, technology level; - asymmetrical evaluation of experimental results from apes, birds and other animals tests in relationship with their reduced communication faculties and speech capabilities, compared with the current human highly developed linguistic infrastructures, which are often overestimated when dealing with language origin; - highly reduced and misunderstood role of the imitative/iconic sources in the foundation of the primitive human language and formation of the first words in prehistoric ages, when the situation was very far from the advanced mature state of natural languages, when sound imitation and human auditory/vocal channel began to replace gradually the pre-existing visual/gestural channel as the main human communication tool; - agreed unavailability of the primitive phonemes and morphemes, due to the absence of material evidences and a huge time gap; truly, first human speech and later natural languages lost large part of their original features and underwent progressive sound, meaning and structure changes, meanwhile the natural sounds/noises have remained almost unchanged in time. In the second part, the main research purposes are discussed: - origin of human language from natural and man-made sound imitation, based on sound-meaning correlations, paralleled by a mapping of the sensorial inputs from the environment and by the existence of a large archive of sounds, built-up in the human brain; - comparison between language and writing, as to their origin and evolution, from the imitative beginnings to later less iconic forms (ideograms, cuneiform writing etc.) up to abstract alphabetic symbols, which still retain residual iconic traces; - analysis of natural sounds, man-made noises, animal cries, and processing of linguistic data from different subjects; examples of archaic sound-meaning pairings like Lt. aqua, water, whose watersound root /kw/ acts as the first equality or equivalence mark. As to the misuse of terms, this attitude can be referred, for instance, to language in its wide sense of communication, and viceversa, but mainly to language, meaning both broad communication and just only vocal communication at the same

time; that is, often in the beginning of a text dealing with the emergence of human language, this very term language may indicate essentially human capacity of verbal communication, but in the following parts, the same term tends to stand for primates or animals intentional communicating acts among conspecifics. Similarly, some confusion can be observed between onomatopoeia and sound-synbolism, or other similar but not synonymous terms. In this instance, onomatopoeia is, ethimologically, the word-making or creation of words from the imitation of environmental, animal and man-made sounds and noises, obviously referred to their respective sources, in a way that sounds and noises are transformed Id say translated - into verbal linguistic items. Definitely, onomatopoeia cannot replace or be replaced by the concept of sound-symbolism, meaning the latter a linguistic phenomenon or tendency by which single sounds both vowels, consonants and their combinations - convey meanings or suggest sensorial experiences to the listeners or readers, such as smoothness, brightness, smallness. Onomatopoeia can be taken as an extreme instance of sound-symbolism, but in order to admit sound-symbolism as a linguistic phenomenon, it is necessary that a human oral language be highly developed and be able to carry sensorial synaesthetic charges. Misleading effects are also provoked by similar slips from the search of the true language origins to that of the progressive evolution of an existing proto-language, to the analysis of the basic features, main advantages, language acquisition, speech disorders. This attitude can be motivated by the fact that, after some general statements, the glottogenetic topic shows so complex to cope with, that the main intention is almost abandoned. The questions of human language origin and its further evolution cannot be absorbed or compressed into each other. One of the main biases is the fact that most features of the imagined proto-language are searched within our historical spoken languages, and viceversa: an ingenuous belief we ought to avoid. Another rather urgent question is the widespread tendency to space and time indefiniteness as to geography, environment, climate, life

conditions before 50.000 BC, before the crucial maturity phase, when oral language began to show its efficacy by displaying such a power as to alter the biological and ecological balance on earth within few thousand years. Beyond the clear traces of abstract thinking and applied arts, the strongest evidence is the end of a rival species, Homo Neandertalensis, which, although well adapted to climatic conditions of the last ice age, could not withstand the expansion of modern Homo Sapiens, equipped with the most powerful endowment: oral language. Any possible evidence of Neandertals linguistic abilities or abstract thinking didnt have enough time to reach useful results. Stone technology, food and water supply, hunting techniques, environmental risks, personal security, are among the main factors which have constrained the existence of modern Homo Sapiens before 50.000 BC, but especially hunting practices, group organization and camp location have been always critical elements in everyday life. Possibly, animal cries imitation has been a constant training which may have contributed both to improve sound imitation capabilities and to refine body parts in the speech anatomy of modern Homo Sapiens. Inappropriate time and space location of linguistic phenomena can be highly misleading. Such coordinates could also be similarly lost when comparing communication abilities in animals, like apes and birds, with the highly developed human vocal and mental capabilities, which have evolved during thousands of years, matched the writing revolutionary phase and reached the new complex and fast ICT current standards. Results from tests, obtained with animal species more readily apt to human language learning, are sometimes evaluated with too hard criticism in relationship with the less developed communication infrastractures both physical and mental of all tested animals, which are thus subject to huge evolutionary steps within relatively short times. Actually, these linguistically trained beings show unexpected linguistic capacity and potential, even if they could not develp physical, mental and cultural features, like modern humans.

But a widespread mistake is assigning a minimal or even null glottogenetic role to imitative, expressive, nursery and other similar forms almost unanimously traced in most existing languages and largely accepted as a structural feature of human language. Also here, the usual comparison between the law percentage of such forms in modern languages and the unknown situation in the primitive vocabulary of human proto-language, is arbitrary and misleading. On the contrary, if we consider carefully some old or new linguistic roots and global etymologies, they show a prevailing structural principle of the most ancient linguistic formations, based upon the imitative reproduction of human, animal and natural noises. One of these ancestral forms is related to the water-sound and will be better discussed ahead. Clearly, the original function of the imitative principle, as one can see in the primitive embryonic phase, is very powerful and rather crucial when compared with later or currently weak although still productive linguistic role. Paradoxically, in the ongoing debate about the global etymologies and their hypothetical worldwide validity in establishing the existence of a unique human protolanguage, such forms are considered by definition useless as indicators of linguistic genetic kinship. Why do we need to leave them out? Arent actually these largely spread expressive and imitative formations what we are just looking for? What is particularly interesting in the said imitative glottogenetic theory, is the fact that most archetypal oral units should derive from coeval environmental, animal and man-made sounds, which basically do not differ from current natural sounds and from noises produced by traditional human working activities. As a consequence, such noises could be possibly reproduced, recorded and analyzed thanks to modern appropriate instruments and to suitable experimental archaeology research projects. Therefore, the commonly accepted idea of the unavailability of evidences from the original speech and its archaic phonemes and morphemes, could be partially overcome and, despite the huge time gap, a series of features of the human proto-language be reconstructed.

The sound-based language origin theories either imitative, iconic, onomatopoeic, sund-symbolic are ancient and well known and do not need further explanation here, the aim of the present work being basically an attempt to free the theory from common biases. Sound imitation probably enhanced by paleolithic hunting practices is based on easily available sound-meaning correspondences, chosen from a large archive of sounds and noises built up in the human brain with synaesthetic links to other specialized areas and communication channels. It is a simple straight idea which doesnt require too many explanatory steps and adaptations from one communication channel to the other, and the shift is minimal: the shortest in terms of transition model. Obviously, the visual and gestural channel and practices have preceded and then paralleled the oral channel, and then became secondary and supplementary but still helpful for communication purposes, especially for deaf and dumb people. The emergence of verbal human language from sound imitation can thus be explained with a long progressive biological preadaptation and further evolution within a hypothetical series of phases, the last one being the mature oral communication strategy whichc employed clearly perceivable linguistic units, supported by the first basic syntactic rules and devices. Such a long process, implying a slow biological evolution and refinement in Homo Sapiens speech organs which, anyway, all had originally different functions is not far from the so called exaptation, and somehow it resembles later human technical achievements, like the wheel used for transportation purposes: one of the most important mechanical inventions of all times, dating back to the half of the 4th millennium BC. But, indeed, its earliest known use, depicted on clay tablets, has been as a potters wheel, employed in horizontal position, some hundreds years earlier. Later on, it acquired the upright position and changed its funtion, although the potters wheel rimained still in use. The glottogenetic topic has been dealt with by a number of authors since ancient times, but here we like to quote a particular 19th century scholar, contemporary with Charles Darwin: Rev. Frederic

William Farrar, Field-Marshal Montgomerys grandfather. In his work Chapters on Language (Farrar 1865) he states: no connection is so easy and obvious, so self-suggesting and so absolutely satisfactory, as the acceptation of a sound to represent a sound (p.23), if we examine the vocabulary of almost any savage nation for this purpose, what are. we certain to discover? That almost every name for an animal is a striking and obvious onomatopoeia (p.24). The analogy between language and writing has been already proposed by several authors, but it is worth to underline here that the relatively recent achievement of writing can be traced back to the Upper-Paleolithic visual representations, obtained with different types of techniques on various kinds of surfaces, where such drawings and paintings shaw already communicative and maybe true linguistic intentions. They could be assumed as the first evidences of local epic cycles or even small encyclopaedias produced in distant world areas after the emergence of oral language. The abstraction process, spanning from iconic pictorial beginnings to later more conventional codified signs (ideograms, logograms, hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing) and ahead, to syllabic and alphabetic systems, is very similar and show a trajectory from natural to abstract and, only apparently, artificial/conventional items, both in language and writing. But just like many current words, apparently non-iconic, some alphabetic signs still keep a part of their imitative iconic beginnings, like the very first letter of the alphabet A, the Greek Alpha and Phoenician Aleph: both the visual a reversed codified image of an ox-head - and even the acoustic features - imitative lap-sound - are still perceptible. The primitive visual channel of the old gestural communication system and the later auditory-vocal channel of the human language matched into a new refined tool, writing, once again related to the traditional powerful optical endowment. The main research program is based on recording, analyzing and comparing basic natural sounds from environment and atmospheric phenomena, animal cries, man-made noises including rough materials transformation activities, body reactions to extreme

temperatures, strong emotions, interjections. It entails collecting and processing linguistic data from subjects, differing in sex, age, mother-tongue, as in the research work on linguistic categorization of sounds by C. Lehmann (Lehmann 2003) and M. Magnuss unpublished Dictionary of English Sound. Tests with young kids gave interesting results, when dealing with rough materials, such as wood and stone. They show sensibility to the sounding of different types/sizes of timber, to tones, timbres and notes which can be compared with sound-meaning pairings in the range of /t/ and /d/ dental plosives with following vowels. As to English language /ta/, /te/, /ti/, /to/, /ty/ are easily related to a long series of iconic - or semi-iconic, i.e. compound - terms indicating basically wood hand tools or contact actions: tact, take, tack, technique, test, tick, tip, timber, timbre, touch, token, top, tool, type, and similar terms with prefixed IE mobile /s/. The evolutionary trend is towards meanings of wooden fences, boundaries, limits: Etr. tular, Lt. Tiberis or Thybris, O.E. Thule, etc. and from these terms also: Lt. Hiberia, Lt. Hibernia, Gk. Hybris, or arrogance - meaning accordingly Lt. superbia, that is overstepping or passing the limits and finally the adverb/ preposition over, Gk. hyper, Lt. super, probably from PIE *uper. An important ancestral sound-meaning pairing has been detected in terms related to Lt. aqua, water, one of Ruhlens most widespread global etymologies (cf. Ruhlens Global Etymologies, Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994) tied to the concepts of aquatic,liquid, fluid, cooking, whose water-sound root /kw/ has been proposed as the first worldwide equality or equivalence mark, acquiring later a variety of grammatical functions, such as WH- interrogative and relative pronouns, conjuntions, etc. due to the apparent physical property of water: a constantly flat even horizontal surface.
References
Bengtson, J. D. & Ruhlen, M. (1994). Global Etymologies. In M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy (pp. 277-366). Stanford: Stanford University Press Farrar, F.W. (1865). Chapters on Language, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Lehmann, C. (2003). On the linguistic categorization of sounds. Erfurt: University of Erfurt