From Protolanguage to Language

In other words, all human languages are equally far removed from the ‘protolanguage’ stage we must have passed through in the early evolution of homo loquens. But as to exactly how the protolanguage may have evolved into a language of the type represented by all languages today, we can say very little – because here even the developmental evidence is lacking.

The reason for this is an interesting one. If we are right, then for the first 6-9 months after creating his first symbolic signs, a child is in some sense recapitulating the history of language. But then he takes a leap. There is, after all, no need for him to go through the whole process, step by laborious step; as soon as he is ready to take up the mother tongue, he can do so. He has in fact been listening to it for a long time; when he has reached the point where he can understand how grammar works – typically a few months into the second year – he can start building it up for himself. (Some children like to think about it for quite a long time before actually plunging in, and worry their parents by remaining quite uncommunicative till they are three years old; but provided they show understanding of what is said to them, the development is still taking place.)

Since there was no more advanced model around when our ancestors were evolving language, presumably they did not take any such leap – although we cannot be sure. There is a critical difference between a protolanguage and a language, a threshold that has to be crossed; there is no intermediate stage. (There can be a mixture between the two, and typically there is with children; the first features of ‘language’, in the adult sense, may appear quite early in the proto-linguistic phase, while equally, protolanguage features may continue well on into the development of language. Some are in fact still present in adult speech: so-called ‘interjections’ like Ah! and Ow! are in fact relics of protolanguage that have survived in adult speech.) So it may be that there is a leap at this point in evolution as well.

What is significant for our present discussion is not how the transition was made, but the nature of the transition itself. What is the essential difference between language and protolanguage?

Essentially, the difference is this. A language is a three-level (‘tristratal’) system. It consists of meanings, which are coded in wordings, which are then recoded in sounds. In technical linguistic terms, it consists of three levels, or ‘strata’: a semantic level, a grammatical (strictly, ‘lexico-grammatical’) level, and a phonological level. It does not code meaning directly into sound.

A protolanguage, on the other hand, is a two-level (‘bistratal’) system. It consists of meanings that are coded directly into sounds. Or rather, we should say into ‘expressions’, since as we have seen, the protolinguistic sign may be expressed either in sound or in gesture. (When language evolved, sound took over as the primary medium of expression – it has the obvious advantage that the receiver does not need to watch what the sender is doing, or even to be able to see the sender at all.) So let us say protolanguage consists simply of meanings and expressions.

As far as we know, all communication systems in species other than man are protolanguages. It may be that, as claimed in some of the studies referred to earlier, chimpanzees or gorillas are capable of operating with language; but this is doubtful – none of the examples given is conclusive in this respect, and it seems strange that if their brain is capable of doing so, they have not in fact begun to evolve any such system among themselves. Nearer home, we find protolanguage in our pets: cats and dogs communicate in this way, at least to us (apparently rather less among themselves). In all these species, the basic unit of communication is a protolinguistic sign: some unanalysed semantic bundle (for example, ‘I’m hungry – feed me!’) coded into some fixed expression (for example, a particular miaow, or a rubbing of the head against some object).

A system of this kind is subject to various limitations, the principal one being that it is impossible to mean more than one thing at once. To do that, it is necessary to be able to take the elements of a message apart and recombine them in all sorts of different ways; but the constituents of a two-level system are fixed and immutable, like a system of traffic signals – they have to be, otherwise the system would not work. They cannot be taken apart and recombined. (They can be strung out in a sequence, which gives an appearance of flexibility; but falsely, since the meaning of the sequence is simply the sum of its parts.) To be able to signal ‘My friend here is hungry’, or ‘Are you hungry?’, or even ‘I’m not hungry’, you have to have a three-level system, in which the various components of meaning can be teased apart, coded separately by different devices (selection, modification, ordering, prosodic modulation, etc. – all the paraphernalia of grammar and vocabulary, in fact), and then recoded into a single integrated output.

There comes a point, therefore, in the life of the individual, when the protolanguage can no longer serve his needs; and the same thing must have happened in the history of the race. It may be possible to use tools, with only a protolanguage; but it is certainly not possible to make them. To become toolmakers, we had to have language.

For a diagrammatic representation of the difference between language and protolanguage, see Figure 3.1.

The theory described above is only one in a series of many others striving to explain the origin of language in a specific speaking subject. Later in the course of Linguistics, you will learn about another famous hypothesis, the so-called innatist theory of language development, worked out by H. Chomsky. Below are given fragments describing a yet another version of language acquisition process. We hope that acquaintance with them will stir up your own interest in the fascinating field of language development.

From: P.J. Farris. Children’s Language Acquisition // Language Arts. Indianapolis, Oxford: Brown and Benchmark, 1993. - P. 103-108.

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