Even with all the archaeological tools we have today, there is still very little evidence that supports a theory for the origin of language. Many hypotheses have been put forth, but none of them are generally accepted as the origin by linguists. You can find many lists of language origin theories that have all failed to take hold. I may not be the first to say all of them are correct, but I will state such a thing anyway, in case it hasn't been put forth already.
I call it panomotopeia: a series of imitation theories that collectively constructed the first language homo sapiens spoke while living in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Like Edward Witten's M-theory, which tied together (no pun intended) all five of the primitive string theories that came out of the 1980s, panomotopeia ties together all the different imitation theories about the origin of language, though far less intricately!
We begin with the poorly named bow-wow theory, which states that the first language developed from humans imitating the sounds animals make. This was often done by humans to warn each other that dangerous animals were in the vicinity. The only evidence we have for this is an inference made from a logical deduction. Since some monkeys will imitate the sounds of animals to communicate with each other, we must have inherited this special ability. For example, there are monkeys that will imitate the hiss of a snake when they hear it in order to warn others that it's approaching. Seeing as we evolved from them, this should be soft evidence that the first sounds we made probably came from imitating animals.
This form of onomatopoeia may have opened the door for other sounds of nature to become part of our first language, and even expressions for more abstract things, like emotions. In the pooh-pooh hypothesis (where did they come up with these names?), linguists argue that expressions for emotions, such as "aw" and "ew" for things like love and disgust, gave rise to the first words in our mother tongue. While it may seem like a more elegant way of describing our first words, it isn't as logically sound as the bow-wow theory. The influence of animals had to have come before the others because monkeys don't imitate the sounds of nature and emotions, they only imitate other animals.
Critics of these onomatopoeia theories have tried to discredit them by saying that our vocabulary today is vastly superior to the words made by these primitive beings, and that not every object in nature can be communicated using such methods. They also point out that modern languages go beyond the ability to communicate using objects alone. For example, we can communicate about abstract things like dreams and numbers, which is nearly impossible to do using onomatopoeia.
While they may be right, we have to consider that the first language couldn't possibly have been complex enough to develop overnight. It had to add different elements of what a language entails in stages, the way a child does in grade school. Think about how a baby learns a language; it uses basic guttural sounds first, and then builds on its vocabulary until it's able to speak in complete sentences. This is much like the way I see our ancestors acquiring language axioms, the only difference being that it took them thousands of years, whereas a baby only needs about ten to reach modern standards.
Thirdly, linguists will say that the word for a particular object isn't inconsistent among all the modern languages, so it couldn't possibly have come from Africa's mother tongue. This must be dismissed though, because the examples they use are from languages that have evolved from countless others. An example would be the differences between Spanish and English, which have different sounding words for many things. This is simply one of the results that come from branching in the Indo-European language group. Just because the word for an object doesn't have a sonic relationship with its meaning doesn't mean it didn't evolve from a verbal icon. It's surprising that this isn't more obvious to some of the top linguists. I suspect that a lot of them just don't like the idea of our ancestors muttering to each other like a bunch of animals, because somehow it makes us look less elevated. I can't speak for them though; I don't even know any linguists.
Perhaps we need to redefine what a language is in order for a theory of one to become fact. If languages need full sentences to be called languages, then no such theory can ever be proven. However, if we expand our horizons to include the way babies and animals communicate as languages themselves, we should be able to develop a generally accepted theory for the origin of it. Do cats speak their own language? Do dogs? Perhaps their language families are even more ancient than ours, yet ours is far more complex.
We've been blessed by being the only species that's been able to use the different sounds of animals to communicate with each other. We're like sponges of noise, unifiers of sound, the natural world's only reproducers of what it can say. The only way we can ever come to a consensus about the origin of language is by using another kind of unification, that of panomotopoeia.
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