lexical items. Given someone who understands no English, you can point to your nose to explain what that noun means. Apes might similarly come to agree on the meanings of grunts functioning as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. How, though, do you explain the meaning of'by', 'because', 'the', and 'did' to someone who understands no English? How could apes have stumbled on such grammatical terms?
Yet another difference between human and vervet vocalizations is that ours possess a hierarchial structure, such that a modest number of items at each level creates a larger number of items at the next higher level. Our language uses many different syllables, all based on the same set of a few dozen sounds. We assemble those syllables into thousands of words. Those words are not merely strung haphazardly together but are organized into phrases, such as prepositional phrases. Those phrases in turn interlock to form a potentially infinite number of sentences. In contrast, vervet calls cannot be resolved into modular elements and lack even a single stage of hierarchical organization.
As children, we master all of this complex structure of human language without ever learning the explicit rules governing it. We are not forced to formulate the rules unless we study our own language in school or learn a foreign language from books. So complex is our language's structure that many of the underlying rules currently postulated by professional linguists have been proposed only in recent decades. This gulf between human language and animal vocalizations explains why most linguists never discuss how human language might have evolved from animal precursors. They instead regard that question as unanswerable and therefore unworthy even of speculation.
The earliest written languages of 5,000 years ago were as complex as those of today. Human language must have achieved its modern complexity long before that. Can we at least recognize linguistic missing links by searching for primitive peoples with simple languages that might represent early stages of language evolution? After all, some tribes of hunter-gatherers retain stone tools as simple as those that characterized the whole world tens of thousands of years ago. Nineteenth-century travel books abound with tales of backward tribes who supposedly used only a few hundred words or who lacked articulated sounds, were reduced to saying 'ugh', and depended on gestures for their communications. That was Darwin's first impression of the speech of the Indians in Tierra del Fuego. But all such tales proved to be pure myth. Darwin and other western travellers merely found it as hard to distinguish the unfamiliar sounds of non-western languages as non-westerners found English sounds, or as zoologists find the sounds of vervet monkeys. Actually, it turns out that there is no correlation between linguistic and social complexity. Technologically primitive people do not speak primitive languages, as I discovered on my first day among the Fore people in the New Guinea highlands. Fore grammar proved deliciously complex, with postpositions similar to those of the Finnish language, dual as well as singular and plural forms similar to those of Slovenian, and Verb tenses and phrase construction unlike any language I had encountered previously. I have already mentioned the eight vowel tones of New Guinea's lyau people, whose sound distinctions proved impercept-toly subtle to professional linguists for years. Nor could we reverse Darwin's prejudice by claiming an
One indirect approach is to ask whether some people, deprived of the opportunity to hear any of our fully evolved, modern languages, ever spontaneously invented a primitive language. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Egyptian king Psammeticus intentionally carried out such an experiment in the hope of identifying the world's oldest language. The king assigned two newborn infants to a solitary shepherd to rear in strict silence, with instructions to listen for their first words. The shepherd duly reported that both children, after mouthing nothing but meaningless babble until the age of two, ran up to him and began constantly repeating the word
When I arrived in Papua New Guinea and first heard Neo-Melanesian, I was scornful of it. It sounded like long-winded, grammarless baby-talk. On speaking a form of English according to my own notion of baby-talk, I was disturbed to discover that New Guineans did not understand me. My assumption that Neo-Melanesian words meant the same as their English cognates led to spectacular disasters, notably when I tried to apologize to a woman in her husband's presence for accidentally jostling her, only to find that Neo-Melanesian
Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It was a subtle language that let one express anything sayable in English. It even let one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun 'we' actually lumps together two quite different concepts: 'I, plus you to whom I am speaking', and 'I, plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking'. In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words
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for colonists and workers who speak differing native (first) languages and need to communicate with each other. Each group (colonists or workers) retains its native language for use within its own group; each group uses the pidgin to communicate with the other group, and in addition workers on a polyglot plantation may use pidgin to communicate with other groups of workers. An illustration of how quickly pidgins may arise is given by my own experience soon after I first arrived in Indonesia. An Indonesian worker and I were dropped together by helicopter in an uninhabited mountain range to survey birds. We had no Indonesian/ English dictionary, knew nothing of each other's language, and could teach each other words only by pointing. Within a week we had evolved a crude
