The Evolution of Language: Towards Gestural Hypotheses

Front matter

DIS/CONTINUITIES TORUN STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE 20

Przemysław Żywiczyński / Sławomir Wacewicz

The Evolution of Language: Towards Gestural Hypotheses

Contents

Introduction „sado Eo 13 Structure of the book eresian EE 15 1.1.1 On the divinity of language, the forbidden Jewish tradition) ssie AE EA 24 1.14 SUMIT sees EE 26 1.2 Glottogenetic thought: A naturalistic concept of language

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1.2.2 Darwin: The beginnings of the science on the

Introduction to the Translation

Tbe Evolution of Language: Towards Gestural Hypotbeses is an English translation of the first Polish book devoted the problems of language evolution, published in 2015. This context bears on the character of the book and its content. The Evolution of Language was written for general audiences, who are not professionally involved in science, including the science of language evolution. Hence, it offers introductory information on topics such as the theory of evolution, the discussion of which serves to bring out the basics of evolutionary thinking, including popular misconceptions about evolution, and stays away from more technical and detailed issues (Chapter 2), elements of linguistic theory (e.g. definitions of language (3.3), universal grammar (3.1.2) or the neural infrastructure of language (4.3) or the signalling theory (5.1)). To further help the reader, we provide a glossary of technical terms at the end of the book. Another limitation of the book has to do with the fact that it was (and still is) the first book on the science of language evolution for the Polish reader who has not had access to the English literature on the subject: excellent introductions by Sverker Johansson (2005) and Tecumseh Fitch (2010) and other forms of secondary and tertiary literature on language evolution, such as a handbook of language evolution by Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen Gibson (2011) or James Hurford's broad-scope monographs — Tbe Origins of Meaning (2007) and Tbe Origins of Grammar (2011). Hence, our presentation is for the most part confined to sketching an outline of the problems of contemporary language evolution, and not an in-depth, extensive discussion of these problems.

Working on the English version, we have decided to reduce the number of supplementary texts, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3. We have also radically shortened the Chapter 1 on the historical context out of which the modern-day science of language evolution emerged. This area is certainly underexplored, but after the publication of Przemysław Żywiczyński's book Language Origins: From Mythology to Science (2018), we felt there is no reason to repeat what can be found there, in a more extensive form.

Introduction

Tbe balf-art, balf-instinct of language still bears tbe stamp of its gradual evolution.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

For Darwin (1871), language was the greatest invention of humankind alongside fire. Maynard Smith and Szathmary (1995) consider the emergence of language to be the last of the greatest evolutionary breakthroughs, and its explanation was called to be the most difficult problem in science (Christiansen and Kirby, 2003b).! Language is a unique communication system in which symbolic units can be combined into larger wholes with the use of syntactic rules, and since it is human-specific, language also defines our uniqueness.

This book is the first monograph written originally in Polish on the evolution of language — a new field of science, which emerged at the end of the 20" century. As a field, it is developing dynamically, which should not be surprising, given that rapid development is an inherent aspect of youth. The evolution of language, by being a thoroughly interdisciplinary enterprise, derives its impetus from other sciences, such as modern evolutionary theory, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeoanthropology, comparative psychology, and primatology, to name only a few. Yet, the evolution of language, as a scientific project, is successful because of the questions which determine the direction of its investigations: “Where does language come from, and why do, out of all living forms, only humans have it?”

Language is the feature that unambiguously shows the difference between humans and other animals. Contemporary science provides a wealth of evidence that other traits, which traditionally were considered to be human-specific, are actually possessed by other species, mainly other apes. We can cite self-awareness, for example. Comparative psychologists have assumed the so-called “mirror test” (developed by Gordon Gallup, 1970) as a rough indicator, which showed self-awareness not only in all great apes — the chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan — but also dolphins and

1 See the beginning of Chapter 3.

14 Introduction elephants. At the beginning of the 20" century it seemed that the ability to use tools, as a non-instinctive, complex behaviour, might also be specific to humans. However, Jane Goodall's pioneering research on chimpanzees in the 1960s put paid to this view. It turned out that the remaining great apes, as well as some Old World monkeys (macaques) and New World monkeys (capuchins), and numerous other species, including birds, can use tools. Chimpanzees do not cease to amaze us: in 1999, the existence of cultural traditions was confirmed in chimpanzee groups, and in 2007 it was established that they use tools in hunting. Even making stone tools can be a problematic criterion for humanness — if the marks on bones dating back to 3.4 million years ago are confirmed as resulting from cutting with stone tools, it would imply that lithic technology predates the emergence of the genus Homo.?

Similar research may soon point to language as the only unambiguous qualitative difference between humans and other animals. The evolution of language takes up the challenge of formulating hypotheses which seek to verify how this human-specific and extremely complex trait could have emerged in the history of our evolutionary line.

2 Gallup test and Great Apes — see, for example, Heyes (1998), in elephants: Plotnik et al. (2006), culture in chimpanzees: Whiten et al. (1999), hunting with tools: Prutez and Bertolani (2007); traces of using stone tools: McPherron et al. (2010).

Structure of the book

The first two chapters provide an introduction to our study. “The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins” report ideas on the genesis of language as it was cultivated in religion and philosophy, and which predate scientific inquiry into the evolution of language. The second chapter “Evolution, Evolutionism, Evolutionary Thinking” explains the notions and terms that are indispensable to understanding the later chapters. We then devote two chapters to the evolution of language itself. In Chapter 3, entitled “Evolution of Language: A Departure from Glottogenic Scenarios”, we discuss the historical and scientific background from which the science of language evolution and its research programme emerged; in the next chapter, “Preadaptations for Language”, we focus on reviewing the anatomical and cognitive dispositions which made the emergence of language possible. We devote the fifth chapter to the most important of these dispositions — cooperation. The concluding chapter of the book, “The Problem of Modality Transition in the Gestural Primacy Hypothesis”, focuses on a very specific issue which concerns one of the hypotheses of language emergence — the Gestural Primacy Hypothesis — and shows how arguments in language evolution are constructed and verified.

To make reading easier, we have compiled a glossary of the most important terms used in the text, and the main part of the monograph is supplemented with secondary texts, which constitute an extended illustration of the issues under discussion.

Chapter 1 The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins

The history of enquiry into language origins shows how the emergence of language was regarded as a key issue from the earliest times — one that is crucial for understanding of what makes us human. Interest in the genesis of language is universal — it appears in various cultural and historical periods, inspiring thinkers to construct scenarios of language creation based on contemporary evidence and ideas. In addition to emphasising the element of universality, this line of enquiry provides inspiration for contemporary researchers: questions posed in the distant past continue to attract the attention of scholars. These include, for example, whether in the initial phase of its development, language imitated the sounds of nature or what the original modality of language was. Our reconstruction also has another, equally important goal, which is to raise awareness of the qualitative difference between speculations about the beginnings of language in even the recent past, and the strictly scientific approach adopted by the contemporary research on language evolution, the modern field of knowledge that deals with the problem of language origins.

This chapter is divided into two parts. In Section 1.1, *Religious beginnings”, we discuss religious reflections on the beginnings of language, particularly the divine origin of language. Drawing on examples from both the occidental Christian and Jewish traditions, as well as that of India, we illustrate the universality of ideas about the origins of language and its diversification. Section 2.1, *Glottogenetic thought”, is devoted to naturalistic scenarios of the emergence of language, which were formulated by European thinkers with the advent of the modern era.

Reflection on the origin of language has always been present in thinking about what makes us human. The intellectual historian Josć Ignacio Cabezón notes that the problem of language is an important motif in religious discourse. Firstly, religious thinkers are interested in language as a medium of revelation, and the typical outlet of these investigations are the conceptions of its divine origin (Cabezón, 1994). The Vedic doctrine of the deification of language (Sanskrit: vāc) or the biblical story of language diversification (Genesis 11: 1-9) are perhaps the best-known attempts in the history of religions to reflect on the nature of language and its origin. The next stage of religious reflection on language, which Cabezón calls “the scholastic phase”, focuses primarily on language itself: scholars are gradually becoming aware of the complicated relationship between language and the reality, which leads to questions about the ontological and epistemological status of language description. Moving these considerations to a more theoretical plane enabled the formulation of more philosophically oriented views on language. In medieval thought, the dispute over universals, or general ideas, led to the demarcation of basic positions in reflections on meaning, such as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. However, theories of meaning were also formulated in India, where the plane of debate was delimited on the one hand by the naturalistic concept of language created by Vedic orthodoxies from the mimdmsa school, and on the other, by the anti-essentialist (conventionalist) doctrine of apoba proposed by Buddhist scholars from the pramana school.

1.1.1 On the divinity of language, the forbidden experiment, and the Adamic language

When it comes to religious discussions that may be valuable to studying the origin of language, attention should be paid to the problem of the innateness of language and the nature of linguistic meaning. In a monograph on the evolution of language, Tecumseh Fitch (2010: 390) quotes the famous verses from Genesis (2: 18-20): Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

Fitch argues that since God did not know how Adam is going to name animals, the biblical author favours the arbitrary Saussurean notion of meaning. Such a definitive statement, without reference to the historical and philosophical context, carries the risk of simplifying the issue, which in the theological traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is known as the problem of the Adamic language (see e.g. Eco, 1995). For example, explanations referring to the Jewish tradition of midrash? state that God bestowed a language upon Adam. This language was Hebrew. Such a conviction of the innateness of language, in this case Hebrew, was also very strong among medieval Christian thinkers, many of whom believed that a child left unattended would naturally speak Hebrew. There was a cruel, quasi-experimental procedure to test this hypothesis, which goes back to antiquity. The test, later referred to as the Forbidden Experiment, involves isolating the child from language stimuli (Shattuck, 1994: 41-46). Probably the most extensive “experiment” of this type was that commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), who deprived an entire orphanage of contact with language (Shattuck, 1994: 41-46). The chronicler Salimbene reported that the imperial experiment failed, resulting in death of the orphans (see, for example, Coulton, 1906: 242-243 or Benzaquen, 2006: 111).

A major figure who contributed to the emergence of non-mythological reflections on language and its origins in Europe was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). In his magnum opus The Divine Comedy, Dante discusses the problems of changeability and arbitrariness that would begin to characterise language after Adam’s fall. Hebrew, argues Dante, cannot be the language that Adam spoke in paradise, but rather a language that emerged from that spoken in Paradise even before the construction of the Tower of Babel:

The language I did use Was worn away, or ever Nimrod’s race Their unaccomplishable work began

(Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XXVI, 124-126)

The poet, probably influenced by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), introduces a naturalistic element, expressing the conviction that while the shape of a given language is the result of historical influences, linguistic ability itself is innate to all people:

3 A rabbinic Judaic method of explaining the Hebrew Bible (Tenach) with the help of sentences and parables (see Rosik and Rapoport Introduction to the Jewish literature and exegesis of the biblical and rabbinic period, 2009: 318).

That he speaks, Is nature’s prompting: whether thus, or thus, She leaves to you, as ye do most affect it. (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XXVI, 130-133)

1.1.2 Language as the object of investigation

The growing interest in the problem of language-to-world relations is characteristic of medieval thought. It became evident in the centuries-long debate about universals (i.e., general concepts) and the meaning of the names referring to them. In this intellectual climate, the biblical story of the origins of language was no longer taken literally. Alongside, there was a growth in the popularity of theological discussions concerning “the veil of language” — the belief that language conceals the true nature of reality. Among Christian thinkers, the most influential discussion of this problem comes from Augustine (354-430), who expresses the view that after the fall of Adam, cognition based on linguistic description is deceptive (De Doctrina Christian, cf. Fyler, 2010). Augustine, referring to philosophical solutions originating primarily from the Stoics, proposes a version of linguistic scepticism, the source of which is the belief that after Adam’s fall, there was a permanent break between the word (signum) and the thing that it relates to (res) in language. Furthermore, in language itself, there is a gap between a word as a mental entity (verbum) and its external articulation (vox, locutio), and consequently linguistic communication is indirect (it only guides language users to mental content), and unreliable (because the mental content differs from user to user) (De Trinitate, cf. Ferretter, 1998: 261-264).

Augustine’s tendency to treat the biblical story in philosophical rather than historical terms was representative of both Christian and Jewish theology of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, a tendency which Muslim thinkers joined later (Reeves, 2014). In this intellectual tradition, whose origins can be traced to Philo of Alexandria (10 BC-40 AD), Adam’s fall and the confusion of languages symbolise cognitive and communicative degeneration: man separated from God lives in a world of his own imagination and, owing to the imperfections of language, is never able to express himself in a full and unambiguous way (Reeves, 2014).

Such reflections have created an environment in which medieval scholars abandoned issues relating to the origin and the original form of the Adamic language in favour of discussions about how language relates to the world or the mind. As already mentioned, Augustine's concept of the veil of language gave rise to scepticism (see e.g. the work of John Duns 1266-1308), which later found expression in nominalism, questioning the intuition that language is a mapping of reality (e.g., Jean Buridan circa 1295-1361) (Beuchot, 1996). On the other hand, speculative grammar

Box 1.1 The Tower of Babel Myth

An occidental myth that explains linguistic and ethnic diversity is the story of the Tower of Babel. According to the biblical message, after the Deluge there was only one language and one community, whose members built the Tower:

11.1 The whole earth was of one language and of one speech

11.2 It happened, as they travelled east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there They said one to another, *Come, lets make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”

Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.

Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do.

Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city.

Therefore the name of it was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth. (Genesis 11.1—9)

The story of the Tower of Babel in the Torah plays on the meaning of the word Babel (balal), which means “confusion, disruption, chaos” (Cesare, 2011: 56-57). According to some Jewish sources, the language of Abraham did not get confused because he left Babel and went to Caanan before the fall of the Tower (Sherwin, 2014; 83-84). However, according to a majority of Torah commentators, the original language has been lost forever (Cesare, 2011).

Fig. 1.1: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_—_The_Tower_of_Babel (Vienna) — Google_Art_Project.jpg. DOA 12 June 2019.

(Latin speculum, that is mirror) also gained adherents. It postulated that the structure of language, understood as part of the speech system, reflects reality through the ability of words to represent reality in three different ways (Latin modi significandi, hence “modism”): what a given thing is (modus essendi), how it is understood (modus intelligendi) and how the word referring to this thing fulfils the representational function (modus significandi) (Rogalski, 2008). Modists, and Roger Bacon in particular (1214-1294), were the precursors of the idea of “universal grammar” which assumes that the structure of all languages is fundamentally the same.

An important element for the development of reflection on language was the problem of arbitrariness. The best-known classical text discussing the arbitrariness of language is the Platonic dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue contrasts two views on the relation of words (Greek onomata) to reality: the first position, expressed in the text by Hermogenes, assumes that the meaning of words is the result of a contract or convention (Greek sunthéké) and refers to the philosophy of the sophists. Cratylus is the adversary of Hermogenes who claims that there is a natural relationship between names and their references, and thus proposes an onomatopoeic scenario for the genesis of words. Although the dispute is not settled by the end of the dialogue, it had a great influence on the philosophy of the Middle Ages. One of the commentators of that time was a Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus (412-485 AD), who stated that Plato himself had been a proponent of naturalism, understood as a motivated bond between the signifier and the signified (see Pickstock 2011: 259, note 21).

Based on Plato's authority, naturalism contributed to the emergence of the medieval etymological tradition. Its best-known advocate was Isidore of Seville (560-636), the author of the voluminous work Libiri Etimologiarum (also Codex Etimologiarum). The goal that Isidore and his followers set themselves was to reconstruct forms of expression so that it would be possible to determine the original onomatopoeic relationship between the reconstructed word and its meaning. And so, Isidore argues: “[They are called] ... lashes (flagrum) and floggings and scourges (flagellum) because they resound on the body with a whistling (flatus) and a crack” (Barney et al., 2006: 124).

However, in later medieval philosophy, which appreciated the complexity of the relationship between language, the world, and the mind, the conviction regarding the conventional nature of linguistic meaning was articulated. The most influential version of conventionalism was proposed by William of Ockham (1287-1347). The key concept of this idea is signification which, as Ockham states, consists of two basic types: verbal signification and conceptual signification. According to Ockham, verbal signification, which concerns the representation of individual words, is arbitrary (i.e., it is not based on the similarity between the word form and its meaning) and is an expression of a contract between users (e.g., English speakers use the form dog, while French speakers use the analogous form chien). Verbal signification is different from conceptual signification described by Ockham as involving natural signifiers — i.e. those that resemble in a justified way what they relate to, in the way that the concept of a dog captures the features common to many individual dogs. Ockham’s theory of signification separated the representations of word forms from their conceptual content and equated conventionality with arbitrariness. These two threads, clearly visible over the centuries, have not lost their relevance and form the basis for the modern understanding of lingusitc meaning in Ferdinand de Saussures work (1916) on the one hand, and on the other in the works by Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards (1923).

Jewish tradition

A similar change took place in the Jewish intellectual tradition. The view of the natural relationship between the word and the meaning occupied an important place in religious currents such as the Kabbalab or the exegetical tradition of midrash (Hebrew: Midrasbim), where religious experience is often understood as finding a pure language — the “breath of God” (Hebrew: ruach elobim), which is key to understanding the divine and earthly realities (Cesare, 2011: 89). The original version of naturalism was developed by the influential Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1241-1291), one of the leading scholars of the medieval Kabbalah. Abulafia refers to gematria, or numerology based on the Hebrew alphabet, and aims to show that Hebrew is the model for all languages, illustrating his considerations with examples from such languages as Arabic, Basque, Greek and Latin (Idel, 1989: 1-26). On the other hand, Philo of Alexandria espoused naturalism, referring to the Greek philosophy of language. Although the Kabbalistic fascination with Hebrew has never disappeared, there was a significant, intellectual change in the mainstream Jewish thought. This stems in particular from the thought of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, who inspired Thomas Aquinas and contributed to the creation of scholastic philosophy. Maimonides consistently fought against Jewish mysticism, including the view of the special status of Hebrew, which he believed had the same power of expression as other languages (Kellner, 2006: 166). His views on meaning, influenced by both Plato and Aristotle, could be described as conceptualism, similar to Ockham’s proposal, whose characteristic feature is treating the linguistic sign (Greek semeion, Hebrew, simman) as a symptom indicating the existence of a concept or an idea in the mind of the language user. Maimonides used this theory of meaning as an argument for his negative theology, according to which the category of divinity is completely beyond human comprehension: if language, in Maimonides’ approach, refers primarily to concepts and ideas in the human mind, it does not grant any possibility of describing the attributes of God, even with the use of metaphors or other non-literal devices (Benor, 1995).

1.1.3 Reflections on language in Indian philosophy

Interestingly, the dispute between linguistic naturalism and conventionalism did not take place only in Western circles. The best-known nonoccidental version is found in classical Indian philosophy, where the cult of the Vedic scriptures and the role of Sanskrit were conducive to the development of naturalistic views. They became the foundation of the philosophy of mimamsa, whose adherents, through the deification of Sanskrit, sought to defend the authority of the Vedic scriptures. They argued that words as ideal objects (Sanskrit: pada) have different physical, or phonic, realisations (Sanskrit: dbvani). Sometimes words are spoken quietly, sometimes loudly, sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely. In spite of this instability, words invariably refer to appropriate meanings. This is because, due to their internal potency (Sanskrit: sakti), words refer to substantially existent general properties (Sanskrit: samdnya) with which they are naturally associated (Sanskrit: suabbdvikaka). The natural and direct relationship between words and general properties is particularly marked in the case of terms from Vedic Sanskrit, which is regarded as a language par excellence (see Dreyfus, 1997: 214-213; Żywiczyński, 2004).

Supporters of this school believe in the divine nature of language, especially Sanskrit, which has existed since the beginning of the Indian civilisation. An important expression of this view is the cult of Vac — the Hindu goddess of speech. She is mentioned in the Rigveda, the oldest part of the Vedas. According to a later myth, the world was created by the union of Prajapati, the creator of creatures, and the goddess Vac. Similarly to the Greek logos, Vac is viewed as an intelligible principle of the world; however, in contrast to the Greek conception, Vac is not an abstract principle, but it exists as Sanskrit stanzas of the Vedic revelation (Dreyfus, 1997). The Hindu concept of language diversification contains a story similar to the Biblical message, in which the “Tree of the World” (Sanskrit: asvatthahurksha, often identified as Ficus religiosa) decided to grow to such an extent that all people could find shelter beneath it. The god Brahma punished the proud tree, cutting off and scattering its branches across the earth, out of which banyan trees (Ficus benghalensis) sprouted, thus giving rise to various languages and customs (Doane, 1910: 36). Unlike Christians and Jews, Hindus did not argue about the language that had prevailed before the diversification and agreed that the original language — Sanskrit — was preserved in the Vedic scriptures.

The radical naturalism of mimamsa -which resembled some conceptions of the Adamic language — met with opposition coming both from those who acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Vedas, and those who followed heterodox religious currents, mainly Buddhism. The most influential anti-naturalistic position was articulated within Buddhist philosophy (Dreyfus, 1997; Zywiczynski, 2004). According to the traditional Buddhist ontology, only what is momentary, literally what only lasts for a moment (Sanskrit: ksana), has the status of “being” (Sanskrit: bhava). Speaking in the language of Buddhist philosophy, only momentary entities have “causative power” (artbakriydśakti), i.e. the power to create further temporary entities. In the dualistic conception of abhidharma, such a capacity is characteristic of the sets of atoms disintegrating after a while (Sanskrit: paramdnu), whose disappearance brings to life the aggregations of atoms existing in the next moment, as well as discrete moments of consciousness (Sanskrit: vijńdna), which are the cause of the subsequent moments of consciousness. The Buddhist doctrine of temporality (Sanskrit: ksanika) denies that phenomena that make up the world of everyday experience, such as material objects or personality traits, have the status of being. Since, as argued by Buddhist philosophers, language (Sanskrit: śabda) refers to such phenomena (arthasamanya, literally “an object’s generality”), it therefore acts to reinforce the illusion of permanence. Hence, in the philosophies of mimamsa and Buddhism, there are two extremely different concepts of language: on the one hand, language is seen as the key to understanding reality; in the other approach, language is responsible for hiding the nature of reality (cf. the “veil of language”, above).

In this section, we have tried to capture the themes that characterise traditional reflection on language and its origins. The religious phase is defined by a belief in the divine origin of language. Language is sanctified because it comes from a deity, or is itself a deity, as in the case of the Hindu goddess Vac, or its creation is at least inspired by the deity. Deification of language is usually combined with semantic naturalism, according to which words (e.g. of the original Hebrew, as believed in the Kabbalistic tradition, or of Vedic Sanskrit, as believed by Mimamsiks) are not accidental but express the essence of their referents. Thus understood, the language not only reflects reality in an undistorted way, but also becomes an ordering principle: in Abulafia's approach, the biblical Hebrew is the model of all languages, while the supporters of mimamsa go even further and believe that Vedic Sanskrit is the intelligible principle of the world. Traditional religious approaches to the origins of language, apart from the problem of its very origin, suggest mythological explanations of polylingualism (the existence of a multitude of languages). Language diversification is presented as a result of a divine intervention, which is usually negatively evaluated as the loss of a language common to all people. Although our discussion refers only to a selection of issues of the occidental and Indian philosophies, according to the findings of anthropologists and religious scholars, myths about the divine origin of language and its diversification are a common mythological motif (see e.g., Allison, 1971 or Carneiro, 2001).

The second phase of the traditional reflection on language and its origins, referred to as the “scholastic” phase by Cabezón, took place apparently only within the occidental, Indian and probably Chinese thought. The characteristic feature of this new approach was stepping away from a literal interpretation of the sacred texts — in the Christian tradition, this is visible in Augustine, and in the Judaic tradition, in Maimonides. The naive conviction about the natural bond between words and things was replaced by a reflection that emphasises the complexity of the relationship between language, the world and the mind, and that often does not trust the knowledge mediated by language (see “veil of language” by Augustine or the linguistic scepticism in Buddhist philosophy). In early modern Europe, this state of reflection on language clashed with changes caused by the Copernican revolution, which gave rise to research into language origins as a part of a new, scientific approach.