How did we go from grunts and “ooh”s and “ah”s to complex modern languages? And why haven’t other animals done the same?
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We don’t actually know. It is thought that spoken (and/or possibly signed) languages came about long before written language did, and so the origin of language itself is lost to history. If any records exist anymore, we don’t know how to read or even recognize them.
This brings us to the story of the Nicaraguan schools for the deaf, which were founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They had a problem: there was no Nicaraguan sign language at the time. Most of the students just had some ad hoc systems developed at home and not much else, and these varied widely between the different students. They were trying to teach the students using spoken Spanish and a kind of improvised fingerspelling, but then something unexpected happened: the children started forming a language among themselves. The teachers couldn’t understand what the children were saying, and brought in linguists from MIT to help. What they found was complex and distinct from anything the teachers were using, but very definitely a language in its own right, with its own grammatical and syntactic structures.
The linguistics community went absolutely *bonkers* over this, because it was a rare opportunity to study how a language could appear almost completely without influence from other existing languages. It doesn’t necessarily parallel exactly how language evolved among prehistoric peoples, but it does represent one way that it could have happened. It is now the official sign language of Nicaragua, and it has kept on evolving at a frantic pace, with the younger generations developing whole linguistic structures that the older generations didn’t use. This is probably something to do more research on if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
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