Part-1 The wagging of tongue (The origin of a language): 336 A

Me and my friend were strolling down the road, hearing the animated chattering of school children. The mix of languages in different inflexions drew our attention. Our conversation turned towards the topic of mother tongue and father tongue. But my friend was not so convinced about the concept of a father tongue. I asked, “When foreign tongues, and work-space generated technical tongues (jargon-sprinkled with jargons of professionals) are readily accepted, why not a father tongue?”   

His face clouded with doubts, he replied, “You are a glib talker. Can you explain all these points on record?” 

Accepting, I replied “The first part will take you to the very origin of a language and the second and third parts will bring you to the stage of printed books. In between, I will touch upon the mother tongue and father tongue. Are you ready to hear?”

When he acceded to hear, we parted company. I started thinking about how to handle this task and he, probably wondering, why did not he keep his tongue in cheek! 

Thoughts tumbling in my mind, I spent considerable time twisting and turning on the bed, in an attempt to catch that elusive sleep. Finally, my eyelids started to droop. My subconscious mind, the sleep spoiler, commenced playing some vague video clips to clue in to familiar snippets of information. 

I found myself in the corridor of a hospital, where parents and relatives were anxiously waiting to hear the first cry of a newborn baby. Though asleep, this doubt popped up in my mind - “how can it be parents, should it not be a parent while the other is undergoing the delivery pangs? 

I applauded myself for clearing my own doubt by explaining it away as parents of the husband and wife! After this interruption the dream continued to show how this first cry becomes the wails of a siren. The session ended with a warning - as the baby grows, its market share of the initial welcoming warmth will go down with these ‘sleep spoiler spells. 

When this vivid dream ended, I woke up bedraggled with this doubt “Did I over play my hand promising to easily trace the evolution of a language right from the beginning.?” My inner voice added a twist and asked, “A doubtful promise or a promising doubt?” 

Next day, my friend brought his august presence, whether to hear my insight or to watch me squirming uncomfortably, to my house. In all seriousness he asked, “How did they manage it?” He has the knack for asking open ended questions without referring to a subject matter and leave others in confusion. 

How could I forgo an opportunity than this to test the strength of our friendship? Chuckling to myself, I decided to test him with my thoughts. 

“Let me start with an overview. Later on, I may use some of these points, to buttress a specific context.

Unmindful of inconveniences, the mother becomes the only linguistic expert to decode the cry as expressions of wants and feelings of the baby, till such time the child starts to mouth the sounds and syllables to convey its wants, pleasures and displeasures. Growing older the baby starts to blabber in strings of syllables and body language to communicate. If annoyed, the child did not hesitate to belt out the strings of syllables with raising crescendo. 

The present-day mother has the ability to speak whereas the first humanoid species did not have that faculty.  Then how did those mothers manage the situation? Did those mothers used sounds without definitive structure to communicate? Due to the newborns’ proximity to mothers, did they simply inherit it by mimicking?   

Though successive generations must have felt the necessity for a better means of communication, they could not have done anything but to look at the sky in despair and keep their thoughts imprisoned in a wordless world. Their plight, inability and anguish had kept me busy on a thinking loop. 

I asked, “Can you guess how the evolution of tongue or language, as we call it started? How the mothers of our ancestors managed the tantrums and with what secret formula?”

He chose silence instead of speaking out his mind. He knows that I know that he knows the answer. I also understood his reservations on the explanations I would be making. A cautious fellow with an impenetrable silence as armour!

Answering my own question, I continued, “Unable to speak like a present-day mother could do, the mothers of our ancestors only could have made pseudo-speeches (sounds without definition) in the form of clicks or clacks”.  

My friend asked, “What is this ‘click’ and where from you have imported it?” To tease him I quipped, “from my bag of guesses!” This sarcasm was my attempt to evade answering how sound becomes speech and to hold back some of the scientific findings on this, for appropriate use later.

Not to be sidelined, my inner voice joined issues with a growl and prodded, “Why this sudden interest in trying to fathom the origin of a language? Do you have the requisite expertise to understand and then to proceed forward? Be warned.  If you are planning a write up, it will get scrutinized and maybe, you will be crucified on the literary stakes.”

Out of my friend’s hearing, I managed to post a silent reply, “I am only trying to imagine how all these things would have evolved. Like great Scientists standing on the shoulders or building upon the theories of their predecessors, I will be looking over the shoulders and building upon the theories of archaeologists and borrow their assembled dates, artifacts and other evidence. Have they not constructed a picture using their imagination? Likewise, I am just trying to add a little humane touch and colour on to the canvas. Will you withdraw your earlier warning?

You can pull in an idea from thin air, but to develop it into something, don’t you need the skills of a language? A Logophilic, who loves words, will easily spans this chasm. A ‘Xenolingohassenist’ will find it frightening and gives up.”. This exercise will also help me to decide whether I am Logophilic or a Xenolingohassenist. Satisfied now?”

My friend with an impenetrable silence has another talent – to read silent conversations. He had unscrambled our unspoken communication and questioned me, “Why do you use Xenolingohassenist, instead of the word lingophobic?  Attempting to overwhelm and confuse me?”  At this point, having done its job, my inner voice quietly withdrew.

Taking the comments seriously, I started digging into relevant archaeological archives and absorb the findings, before embedding them in my, imaginative narration for the limited purpose of tracing the development of a language.  I believed this exercise will please my friend and satisfy my inner voice, if at all they let me to work in peace.

They obliged and left me in peace for a week. Somehow sensing enough time had elapsed, my friend dropped in and straight away declared, “I am ready to hear you”

Not to douse his enthusiasm, I started.  “Remember your question on clicks. It takes us to these important places - Nature’s laboratories. The Nature, being an ultra-utilitarian, had set up these laboratories in caves, edges of forests, on the mountains, on the seashores and by the banks of rivers. This was where our ancestors discovered, improved and delivered the clicks of a tongue or a dialect.    No doubt, their efforts and time spent would have been truly mind boggling and were in no position to judge the importance of their toils, vis a vis humanity.

The different environments must have helped the mothers to pick up sound cues from the cooing of birds, roaring of animals, crashing of waves and thunders must have evoked different kind of feelings, which they could have expressed by mimicking these sounds. Choosing the soft sounds, the mothers might have crooned to communicate with or to lull the fetus or baby to remain calm. Harsher sounds were probably reserved for admonishing a child or to warn of dangers. These sound-tricks were the products of mothers’ instincts!

What else could they do as they themselves were speechless?  As years rolled by, this precursor to lullaby formed the backbone of a language still retaining the sound only tag.  The sole purpose of this vocal-musical language of sound was to offer comfort and safety to the cradlers! Maybe, this sound-tricks had the potential to develop into a soundtrack of a mother tongue.”

To appreciate motherhood, I highlighted their efforts to become composers, song writers and singers, using primeval sounds learned from nature. A plethora of inspired musicals resulted due to introduced variations. The menfolk slowly became attracted by this music to become melomaniacs or melophiles. Many of them later might have turned out their own type of musicals, infusing their outdoor experiences. More about this when we come to the topic of Father tongue. 

After hearing this my friend asked, “You mean to say that the womenfolk played a key role in the birth of a language? Is it why we have the term mother tongue?”

 

“Yes, if we assume that the first mother taught the first newborn, then she played the key role. By association the man in the house picked it up and went about adding more teeth to it. Yes, now we have the fore runner to a mother tongue!” 

He had another question.  “How long this fore runner took to become spoken words? 

“Perhaps, near about 75,000 years ago, these wordless musicals befriended cave and rockface arts to join hands with them. The images carved or painted or drawn on rock faces and walls of caves, reflected the earliest form of pictorial communication to overcome the lack of spoken words.

Over time, these cave and rockface arts too might have inadvertently formed the backbone on which the bare musical sounds used to communicate grew to become a different form of vocalization called music. This could have happened 35,000 years ago, when our ancestors made rudimentary instruments and started to play the musical notes on them! They might have used this crafting skill   as a diversion or as  a path to creativity or to simply express anguish for living in a wordless environment!”

My inner voice chose to interrupt the flow.  “Nowadays, a child starts to speak in a year or two, and why after thousands of years that first cry could not become spoken words?

Silently admonishing it to wait patiently, I continued with my explanation to my friend who was probably searching for a pinch of salt to take whatever I was about to dish out. “Nature was never in a hurry at all. It had the biggest biolab in the Solar system and chose three streams to work with.

One: Working in three domains aquatic, terrestrial and arboreal, it incubated verities of species with unimaginable variations, arranged their food chains and survival mechanisms. Two:  It did not want every species talking at once, so taught them only to make sounds as in the same exact way nature was communicating with them. Howl of wind, crashing of waves, rolling of thunder, crackling of fire, creaking of trees and so on.

Three: It chose the humans as candidates but deferred the initiation of its ‘Project Speech’. What are a few million years to be expended by humans out of a few billion years given to Earth? So far in the story of language, it has not managed to cross the barrier of wordless communication.

The evolution of a mother tongue is facilitated by the mother- child transfer as a major contributor and a commune level collaboration to develop it further. These points along with the time frames involved are crucial to understand the intervening stages of evolution, before the story ends in a printed book.”

Without waiting for my friend’s reaction, which would surely come later, I closed this imaginary journey to   “The origin of a language”