Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'. What is still more remarkable is that every normal child learns the whole system from hearing others use it.Īnimal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Speakers can build an unlimited number of phrases and sentences out of words plus a smallish collection of prefixes and suffixes, and the meanings of sentences are built from the meanings of the individual words. Every human language has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, built up from several dozen speech sounds. Unlike any other animal communication system, it contains an expression for negation - what is not the case. It can be used not just to convey information, but to solicit information (questions) and to give orders.
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Human language can express thoughts on an unlimited number of topics (the weather, the war, the past, the future, mathematics, gossip, fairy tales, how to fix the sink.). Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we - and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos - became capable of using language.Īnd what an amazing development this was! No other natural communication system is like human language. The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. In asking about the origins of human language, we first have to make clear what the question is.
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