Dawn: The Origins of Language and the Modern Human Mind

231 Pages·2016·14.336 MB·

by  Rik Smits

Copyright © 2016 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foun-
dation for Literature.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015042434
ISBN: 978-1-4128-6257-8 (cloth); 978-1-4128-6265-3 (paper)
eBook: 978-1-4128-6210-3
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smits, Rik, 1953- author.
Title: Dawn : the origins of language and the modern human mind /
Rik Smits.
Other titles: Dageraad. English
Description: New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, [2016] | “In this
work, originally published as Daferaad, in Dutch, Rik Smits theorizes
that language could not have developed originally as a system of
communication.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042434 (print) | LCCN 2016000129 (ebook) | ISBN
9781412862578 | ISBN 9781412862103 (eBook) | ISBN 9781412862103 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages--Origin. | Language and
languages. | Human evolution.
Classification: LCC P116 .S6313 2016 (print) | LCC P116 (ebook) | DDC
401--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042434
Contents
Prologue vii
1 Night 1
2 The Animal Inside Us 29
3 Goodbye to the Animal Kingdom 55
4 Phantom Limbs and Figments of the Mind 81
5 Shamans in the Shadows 105
6 Voices on the Plains 137
7 Dawn 165
Epilogue 191
Bibliography 207
Index 213

Prologue
The Forbidden Field
Morgan Kavanagh was a man on a mission to whom nobody would
listen. Yet he had solved one of the greatest mysteries in human history,
or so he thought. Buried deep within ancient myths, he had discovered
the divine origins of human language and thought.
In 1844, he published his findings in a hefty tome. He then spent
the next thirty years frantically seeking recognition of his work, but
to no avail. Seven times he competed for the prestigious Volney Prize
for linguistics, but never once was he awarded those wretched 1,200
francs. Worse, his voluminous submissions, some in French, others in
English, soon ceased to be taken seriously.
Kavanagh was first disregarded, then forgotten, like an itch to be
ignored away. This had a lot to do with the founding in 1864 of a select
company of linguists, the Societé de Linguistique in Paris. The Societé
was not meant to be a place for small talk or idle philosophical specula-
tion. It was to be a venue for serious scholars, the kind of association
to which everyone who was anyone in the world of linguistics would
want to belong. It would be devoted exclusively to the study of lan-
guage, legend, traditions, customs, and other matters of ethnographic
interest. At least, this was what it promised in the first of its articles
of association, passed in 1866. But it was the now notorious Article 2
that gave voice to the main concern of the founders: “The Societé shall
not accept any contribution concerning the origin of language or the
creation of a universal language.”
It seemed a strange, illogical ban. Less than seven years after Charles
Darwin had published his revolutionary On the Origin of Species, this
brand new association declared out of bounds the origins of the very
subject it set out to explore. The impact of Darwin´s book, which
turned the spotlight on evolution as the driving force behind all life on
earth, had been felt far and wide. It had given new impetus and focus
to semievolutionary ideas that had been floating around for more than
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Dawn
a century among naturalists, as scientists were called in those days.
And it had finally freed people from the time-honored fetters of faith.
At long last, one could publicly dispense with paying lip service to the
biblical story of Adam and Eve and the six days of creation, some six
thousand years earlier. On the Origin of Species had sent into turmoil
all thinking on how man and beast and their defining characteristics
had originated. So how could the Paris Societé slam the door on the
question of origins at that very moment? And why did its London
counterpart follow suit in 1872?
The reason was the very climate of tempestuous debate that had
followed in Darwin’s wake. Suddenly the world abounded with fasci-
nating mysteries, but there were no reliable data or valid methods to
solve them. That deficiency was readily made up for by the optimism
and enthusiasm of both professional scholars and often quite colorful
amateurs. The temptation to speculate to their hearts’ content was all
too great to resist, not least among those who tackled the most essen-
tially human quality of all: language.
This temptation was understandable. People trying to unravel the
ontogeny of our purely physical properties could turn to an ever-
growing number of fossils, but the explorers seeking the sources of
human language soon found themselves wading through quicksand.
Language simply does not solidify: it involves only highly perishable
tissue, like brains, small muscles, and cartilage. What is more, it would
be many years before Karl Popper would force scientific practice into
a rigid methodological corset, insisting on transparency and verifi-
ability of method. This made it even harder to separate the wheat from
the chaff, and meant that much so-called research into the origins of
language comprised little more than religious ravings, naive delusions,
and sometimes highly complicated fantasies. There were Kavanaghs
everywhere, each with a theory more sprawling and ill-founded than
the next.
When it came to the age-old idea of a universal, “ideal” language, the
situation was just as dire. In biblical terms, this would be the language
that people spoke before the Tower of Babel was built. The desire to
rediscover it was nearly as old as the mythical, primeval language itself.
The world’s first known historian, Herod, reported on an experiment
conducted by pharaoh Psamtic I as early as 650 BCE. Psamtic ordered
that two newborn babies be brought up in isolation, with no human
contact except each other. The clever king reasoned that this would
leave them no option but to develop a language of their own, which
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Prologue
would logically be the coveted original language. And, as Herod has it,
he turned out to be right. When the infants began babbling, the first
thing that came out sounded like bekos. Psamtic’s scholarly advisers
recognized this as the Phrygian word for “bread,” and concluded that
the first language had to have been Phrygian.
History has seen many more such crude attempts at discover-
ing the primordial language, experiments that all ended badly. The
children would die, whereupon the instigator would lose interest, or
vice versa. But that did not stop all kinds of dreamers, fantasizers, and
amateur linguists from concocting their own holy grail of historical
linguistics—men like the sixteenth-century luminary Goropius
Becanus, for example. Becanus was a sensible man who rose to the
exalted positions of personal physician to King Philip II of Spain and
city surgeon of Antwerp. But after that he somehow lost his way, taking
it upon himself to prove that Adam and Eve had spoken Flemish in the
Garden of Eden. That placed Paradise firmly in Flanders, which just
happened to include Becanus’s own native village of Gorp, nowadays
part of the Netherlands.
Just as numerous were those who endeavored not to find the long-
lost first language, but to create the perfect language themselves. These
were idealists, hoping that a single world language would unite all man-
kind. Rare exceptions aside, such as Ludwik Zamenhoff, the Pole who
invented Esperanto, they and their languages have all been forgotten.
Upstanding nineteenth-century linguists abhorred such activities.
In 1786, the former chief justice of Bengal, Sir William Jones, had
already shown that languages like English, Greek, and the extinct Indian
language Sanskrit must have sprouted from a single source. Despite
their obvious differences, in crucial respects they accorded with one
another in deeply meaningful ways that simply could not be accidental.
Languages, it transpired, were organized in families, and once that
idea had taken root, professional linguists devoted themselves first and
foremost to the construction of family trees, in particular the pedigree
of Jones’s so-called Indo-European family. Their vision of a primeval
language was the ancient language that had fathered all known Indo-
European languages, and their object was to reconstruct it. They called
it Proto-Indo-European.
These linguists were bent on reasoning back through time as far
as the available written sources, logic, and, if all else failed, conjec-
ture would let them. They were systematic workers who loathed the
romantically or religiously inspired figments of the imagination of the
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