Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

7. Language Metamorphosis

CHAPTER 7 Language Meta1norphosis M y ORIGINAL IDEA that signing can be language has grown into a belief that language began when a human species interpreted gestural signs both semantically and syntactically. The latter is particularly important, for gestures have syntactic power; they are not just visible movements that represent something else. Early humans saw the hands standing for things or creatures and the movements representing actions or changes. And as hands are physically, visibly, and cognitively connected to their movement, so are the hands' and movements' meanings symbolically (if not quite literally) connected to their meanings-hence, syntax. A species already in command oflanguage in kinetic and visible form had hundreds ofthousands ofyears to adapt guttural, oral, and nasal physiology for making sounds different enough to represent each visible sign and its meaning. Using this dual-channel system ofsigns and speech, they would have connected the vocal signs and the visible signs to the same meanings. The conventional association ofaudible sign to meaning then survived the gradual disuse of the visible sign. Hands were now freed for other tasks, and speech predominated. The earliest language signs surely referred to their makers and signified objects in the world around them. What they were seen to be doing or had done or should do would make up the primary content of their discourse. To the first creatures with our kind ofbodies, they themselves, 103 104 Language Metamorphosis their world, and what happened in it would have been salient, highly visible, and increasingly intelligible. Less formidably equipped with canine teeth than earlier primates, our ancestors needed to see and understand the world as it related to them in order to survive. By helping each other consciously, they thrived and populated many regions of the world, and they changed the environment for their own benefit. Mike Beaken has conceptualized this pooling of resources and cooperation as a force moving toward the beginning oflanguage.1 Jonathan Kingdon thinks that early humans may have hunted, trapped, and driven large mammals to extinction and, intentionally or not, burned forests, with the result that grassland replaced woodland and attracted easier-to-capture grazing animals -some of which were ultimately domesticated.2 It is hardly possible that early humans (before the era of articulate speech) could have accomplished all this without a visible language. Vision may be the master human sensory system, but in order for seeing to make the difference it did, humans had to be equipped with the means to make use of the information acquired by way of their vision .3 Early human activity required constant use of uniquely structured human hands and arms.Vision guided this activity, and mental categorization , learning, and memory aided by perceptible representations made this guidance more effective. There is a subtle but important difference between banging noisily with a stick, a threat behavior that chimpanzees engage in, and using a stick to strike a tree branch to dislodge unreachable fruit or nuts or using it to point to various directions that members of a foraging party should take.Vision-guided hand and arm use with a clearly conceived purpose was certainly part of early human behavior. One cannot overemphasize the significance of human hand-arm anatomy, both for doing things and for representing things.4 An experiment demonstrates the uniqueness of this anatomy. Hold an arm out supinated (palm upward). Now bend the hand edgewise away from the wrist-it will make an angle of about 45 degrees, leaving the thumb prolonging the line of the forearm and wrist. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates cannot do this. Next clamp the fingers against the still angled-out palm. Chimps cannot do this either, but a hand like this can hold a screwdriver or a scalpel, a sword or a plow stilt, a hairbrush Language Metamorphosis 105 or a club. When our ancestors carried this hand-arm configuration to the vertical and the hand was holding a spear, they found that evolution gave them another ability that other primates do not have. Chimps can hold a rod with fingers bent toward the palm, but their thumb is not involved and cannot be used to add strength and direction; likewise , chimps' hands cannot angle away from the line of the forearm as ours can. Human arm anatomy allows the back stroke of a spear throw or stab to reach further, thus imparting more muscle force to the implement's use...