Little Gestures

Language and its roots in gestures.

Posted Apr 18, 2017
Michael C. Corballis, Ph.D.
From the Bible to Chomsky, it has been held that language arose suddenly in our
species as a single, one-off event. In my new book The Truth About Language, I
try to develop an account more compatible with the Darwinian theory of
evolution. One of my claims is that language emerged, not from animal calls, but
from manual gestures. Our predecessors communicated in intentional, often
playful, fashion with their bodies, not with their voices. Primates also indulge in
this kind of communication, often in play, but their calls, in contrast, tend to be
fixed and stereotyped. Their gestures, I think, are more like language than their
calls are.
Yet we talk. The question then is, how did speech come about? How did our
forebears move from hand to mouth, from sight to sound?

Source: Hma with Permission

Part of the answer lies in understandingthat even speech is fundamentally
gestural, made up of movements of lips, tongue, and larynx. Since you cant see
these gestures apart from lip movements, we evolved the capacity to add sound,
so that the gestures can be picked up in the way the gestures alter sound
patterns. But theyre still gestures. So language may have progressed gradually
from manual gestures to vocal ones. Here is an extract from the book:
The gradual transition from body to face to mouth is an example of
miniaturizationa common feature of communication systems, as evidenced by
present-day cell phones and microchips. My first lab computer was the size of a
home refrigerator. Speech is of course much more compact than pantomime and
much more energy efficient. I have been told that instructors of sign language
often need massage after an exhausting day of moving their arms and bodies. In
contrast, the physiological costs of speech are so low as to be nearly
unmeasurable. In terms of the energy expended, speech adds little to the cost of
breathing, which we must do anyway to keep alive. Some people never seem to
tire of talking.
With the production of language neatly tucked away into the mouth, the rest of
the body, and especially the hands, were largely freed for other activitiesa
second freeing, as it were, after upright walking relieved the hands from
locomotory duty. So the devil again found things for idle hands to do. These no
doubt included the making and use of tools and weapons, writing and drawing,
and gentle evening games of tennis. These activities would have been inhibited,
or perhaps would never have evolved, had we persisted with manual language, a
point that did not escape the attention of Charles Darwin: We might have used
our fingers as efficient instruments, for a person with practice can report to a
deaf man every word of a speech rapidly delivered at a public meeting, but the
loss of our hands, while thus employed, would have been a serious
inconvenience.
If wed kept our mouths shut, though, we might have lived in a much simpler
world.