May. 14, 2021 , 4:25 PM
One of the hardest questions for evolutionary linguists is why humans speak at all. When people don’t share a language, they quickly resort to using their hands, rather than their voices: It’s easier to mime “drink” than it is to make a noise that sounds like drinking. Those gestures, over time, can easily blossom into full-fledged sign languages. “If gesture is good enough for language,” says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguistics Ph.D. student at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, “why the hell do we talk?”
In a new study, Ćwiek and her colleagues help answer that question: People from very different cultures can understand nonlinguistic vocal clues better than expected by chance, they find. Speakers of 28 languages could all successfully guess meanings in a charadeslike game where other people expressed words like “water” using vocal sounds but no language.
Sonidos icónicos y no gestos como puente a los primeros idiomas
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La Jornada - Sonidos icónicos, en lugar de gestos, ayudaron a ancestros a comunicarse
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Sounds made by our ancestors to describe everything from tiger to water are the root of all languages, and can be understood by anyone, a study claims.
A team from the University of Birmingham tested whether people from different language backgrounds could understand these iconic sounds, some grunt-like and others a mimic of real world things like animal calls and running water.
They found that the missing link that helped our ancestors to begin communicating with each other through language may have been these sounds.
Listeners from each language, ranging from small tribes to nations, were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended meaning behind the sound.