Chapter 2

The Origin of Speech

Charles Hockett
• Nowhere in the world has there been discovered a language that can validly and meaningfully be
called “primitive”.
• At first, there was some hope that the comparative method might determine the origin of language.
o The earliest reconstructable stage for any language shows all the complexities and
flexibilities of the languages today.
• Human language can be compares as a whole with the communicative systems of other animals,
especially the other hominoids, like the gibbons and the great apes.
o Gibbon calls do not involve words at all.
• 13 Design Features:
o Vocal-auditory channel
 Has the advantage of leaving much of the body free for other activities that can
be carried out at the same time.
 There are systems of communication that use other channels like gestures with
the bee dance.
o Rapid Fading
 The sound transmitted does not linger for reception at the hearer’s convenience.
 Animal tracks and spores linger and do not have rapid fading. Neither do books.
o Broadcast transmission and directional reception
 An auditory/audible human language signal is sent out in all directions, and can
be localized (one can find where the sound is coming from)
o Interchangeability
 A speaker of a language can reproduce any linguistic message he can
understand. (Female animals cannot replicate the male mating call, but can
understand it.)
o Total Feedback
 The idea that we can hear the words that we say.
 It makes possible the internalization of communicative behavior that constitutes
a major portion of thinking.
o Specialization
 The bodily effort and spreading sound waves of speech serve no function except
as signals.
 Dogs pant only as a side effect of cooling their bodies.
• When they pant they are communicating, but they do not have control
of this.
o Semanticity
 A specific signal can be matched to a specific meaning in a language.
 “Salt” means salt, not sugar, not pepper.
o Arbitrariness
 In language the ties between meaningful message elements and their meanings
are arbitrary.
 The word whale is not large, but it represents a large animal.
 The advantage of language being arbitrary is that there is no limit to what can be
communicated about.
o Discreteness
 Each basic unit of speech can be categorized and is distinct from other
categories.
 In human language there are only a small set of sound ranges that are used and
the differences between these bits of sound are absolute.
• “pin” vs “bin”  sound the same but mean different things.
o Displacement
  The ability to talk about things that are remote in space and or time. Humans can
talk about space, time, past present, and even unicorns.
 Occurs in bee-dancing.
o Productivity
 Language is open.
 Humans have the ability to coin new utterances that have never been heard or
spoken before.
 Apes have a closed communication system because their utterances are part of a
finite repertoire of calls
o Traditional Transmission
 Suggests that while certain aspects of language may be innate, humans acquire
words and their native language from other speakers.
 Differs from other animals because many animals are born with language.
o Duality of Patterning
 Humans have the ability to recombine a finite set of phonemes (sounds) to
create an infinite number of words, which in turn can create unlimited amounts
of sentences.
 “Tack,” “cat,” and “act” are all made from the same 3 sounds.
• A system cannot be arbitrary or nonarbitray unless it is semantic.
o Cannot have duality of patterning unless it is semantic.
• Blending: when a speaker blends 2 acceptable words in a sentence.
o “Don’t shell so loud!” is the result of the speaker blending shout and yell.
o Blending might occur in the closed call-system of the gibbons if one signals that there is
danger and food. The two call might be blended into one call of there being food and
danger
• It can be supposed that occasional blends over tens of thousands of years with rarely any
appropriate communicative impact on hearers, before the understanding of blends became speedy
enough to reinforce production.
• One can see how displacement can develop in a call system, too.
o An ape man sees a predator and then goes back to his tribe, maybe out of fear, and waits
a little bit and then tells the tribe of the predator, to give the whole band a better chance
of surviving.
• The appearance of large brains allowed more storage which coincides with the complexity of
language.
• Duality of patterning was the last property to be developed, because of its complexity.