972. How did humans evolve from grunting ancestors to masters of language and poetry? This week, we explore fascinating theories on the origins of human language, including the laugh-inducing Bow-Wow and Pooh-Pooh theories. We also delve into Irish-English calques for St. Patrick's Day (and in response to a question from a Grammarpaloozian) and celebrate Leslie F. Miller's winning limerick from the National Grammar Day contest.
972. How did humans evolve from grunting ancestors to masters of language and poetry? This week, we explore fascinating theories on the origins of human language, including the laugh-inducing Bow-Wow and Pooh-Pooh theories. We also delve into Irish-English calques for St. Patrick's Day (and in response to a question from a Grammarpaloozian) and celebrate Leslie F. Miller's winning limerick from the National Grammar Day contest.
Miller works as a health care writer in Baltimore. She is the author of the nonfiction book "Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and Pinch of Salt," which is not about BAKING cake, but about EATING cake; a chapbook of "arty and electric" poems called "BoyGirlBoyGirl"; and a forthcoming full-length poetry book called "Words with Friends."
The "language theories" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/bow-wow-theory/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, I have a great follow on to last week's piece about the origin of Proto-Indo-European. We're going to talk about how humans actually started using language. Then with St. Patrick's Day coming up, I have another follow-up about Irish calques, and finally, I have the delightful winning poem from the ACES National Grammar Day poetry contest.
by Valerie Fridland
Bow-wow, pooh pooh, ding dong. These are not the ramblings of a toddler having a little fun with newly learned words, but instead the humorous names given to 19th century theories on how human language got its start in our earliest ancestors.
Most of us have probably wondered at some point how human speech became so much more complex than the way our pets or even our closest relatives, the apes, communicate. Turns out, we are hardly the first to ponder this same question.
In the 19th century, discussion among scientists about the origins of language had grown so prolific and far-fetched that several European linguistic societies banned any writings or debate on the topic by the middle of the century. They didn't ban it because the question wasn't interesting, but because they felt it was outside the realm of linguistics, which they viewed as a field of science based on facts, not hypothetical guesses. Instead, they punted the ball to philosophers who they felt more rightly dabbled in that sort of thing, but not before a number of well-known scientific thinkers had already provided their takes on our linguistic origin story.
Not surprisingly, Darwin, with his interest in evolution more generally, had entered the fray early. In his well known book, "The Descent of Man," Darwin laid out his theory of origins, which was that human language had evolved over time as our ancestors imitated sounds in the natural world. For instance, the song of a bird or the howl of a wolf would have formed a sort of an onomatopoeic proto-language, where early ape-like humans would tweet when referencing birds or howl when warning others of a fanged predator in the area.
In Darwin’s view, aimed at supporting his thesis of natural selection, this proto-language stimulated the evolution of our more expansive thinking. In other words, it spurred brain development, which was then naturally selected over time because people with better communication abilities and more developed minds would be more likely to survive. Darwin felt that, during man’s evolution from apes, early iconic imitative noises (meaning ones that signaled to others about something in the environment) triggered mental abilities that in turn increased our linguistic abilities until both human brains and language fully developed.
Though there were many thinkers at the time who had similar views, the German linguist Max Muller was a staunch anti-Darwinian, meaning he thought Darwin’s ideas were poppy cock. It was Muller who came up with the amusing and derisive titles like the Bow Wow and Pooh Pooh theories to mock both Darwin and others who put forth what he viewed as unreasonable ideas about how language emerged.
Muller was particularly dubious of the idea that man’s speech could have evolved from apes, believing instead language was a significant dividing line between man and beast. He presented Darwin’s view as the “Bow Wow theory” of language, a riff on the idea of early ape-like man saying “bow wow” to represent a dog. Likewise, a closely related theory (and one also considered by Darwin) — that language grew from early groans, grunts and sighs — was labeled the “Pooh Pooh” theory. In this view, the emotional noises an ape-like ancestor would make, say an admiring groan when seeing an attractive ape of the opposite sex to use Darwin’s own example, began to be used as a meaningful way to reference that hot ape, rather than just as a response to it. Perhaps it is hard to imagine how grunts and groans would actually end up developing into language, but the Pooh Pooh theory certainly might explain our propensity for swear words as an emotional response to banging our head on a low tree branch.
Another theory mocked with a silly name — this time the “Yo-He-Ho” theory — suggested that language first emerged in proto-form as part of our social nature — for example, from the sounds of hard physical effort (ah, oof) being made in unison during collective work to help coordinate motions.
Besides criticizing others, Muller espoused his own view on how language began. He believed that sounds themselves carried inherent meaning, an idea that also had its fair share of critics. In this view, sounds are somehow imbued with some quality of the thing they represent. For example, vowel sounds such as “ee” might give a sense of something being small or weak (think “teeny”). People gave this idea the amusing title of the “Ding Dong” theory, and Muller later tried to distance himself from it, claiming he had merely been referencing another scholar’s ideas with the intention of being dismissive.
Ironically, although this theory was not embraced during Mullers lifetime, over the last few decades, a large number of studies have found that there does seem to be a limited tendency for such a relationship between sounds and the things they represent, like nasal sounds such as ‘n’ or ‘m’ appearing at high rates across unrelated languages in words for “nose.” However, considering that “Ding Dong” doesn’t exactly have a very scientific ring to it, today it's called “sound symbolism.”
In another interesting development, later in his life, Muller had a bit of an about face and decided that maybe Darwin’s theory of evolution was not such a long shot after all.
In the end, none of these theories fully account for the origin of language, as they can't explain what triggered the move from making grunts and barks with rudimentary meanings in a present moment to making full sentences discussing vacation plans in the distant future. Modern theories are more concerned with if and how our brain wiring and capacity changed between prehistoric ancestors and modern people and how this coincided with the ability for symbolic thinking, meaning using sounds or words to talk about things not immediately in our environment. But, even if these theories don't explain exactly how we came to be talking the way we do today, modern theories still hold that our early utterances involved basic sounds or perhaps gestures that eventually became more sophisticated as our brains became more modern. So, just maybe bow wow and pooh pooh still have some life left in them, after all.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Alter S. G. (2008). Darwin and the linguists: the coevolution of mind and language, part 2. The language-thought relationship. Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, 39(1), 38–50.
Review of Lectures on the Science of Language, by F. M. Müller. (1871). The North American Review, 113(233), 430–441.
“The Origins of Language.” The brain from top to bottom. Accessed March 2, 2024. https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_10/d_10_s/d_10_s_lan/d_10_s_lan.html.
Yule, George. 2014. The Study of Language. 5th ed. Cambridge University Press.
by Mignon Fogarty
Next, you may remember that a few weeks ago we talked about calques, which are literal translations from one language to another like how many languages just literally translate the words for "sky" and "scraper" into their language to describe skyscrapers, and how Spanish speakers sometimes say the "got down from a car" or "made a party" because that's how those expressions are literally translated from Spanish. Well, after that segment came out, Grammarpaloozian Erin Moran asked me about Irish calques, and I didn't know off the top of my head, but I did know who to ask: Stan Carey who is an Irish linguist with a blog about language called "Sentence First: An Irishman's blog about the English Language." And he directed me to a post he has about what he calls the "hot news perfect" or the "after perfect" tense because it uses the word "after," and this very Irish sounding structure actually came from calquing Irish grammar onto English. An example from Stan is something like "I'm after meeting them," which means "I met them a short time ago"; and "We're just after eating," which means "We just finished eating moments ago." I don't understand Irish, but Stan says it came about because Irish doesn't have a direct equivalent to the word "have." So he says "Translating 'I have just done it,' into Irish involves 'be' and one of several phrases meaning 'after,'" which gives you literally "I am after doing it."
So if you're listening to this a little late on St. Patrick's Day, when you're finished, tell the person closest to you that you're just after listening to the Grammar Girl podcast, and you learned a fun thing about Irish English.
Thanks again to linguist Stan Carey. Do check out his fabulous blog about Irish English at stancarey.wordpress.com. That's C-A-R-E-Y.
So yes, Erin, there are calques in Irish English. Thanks for the question, and thanks for being a Grammarpaloozian and supporting the show.
Grammarpaloozians get texts from me a couple of times a week with a fun language tidbit, can send in familect stories via text message, and can also ask me questions. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free two-week trial at joinsubtext.com/grammar.
by Mignon Fogarty
And a final fascinating tidbit that is different but also related to Irish is that I was surprised to learn that the word "brogue," which describes a strong accent heard in some Irish people who speak English, "brogue" comes from the Irish word for a kind of shoe worn in what the Oxford English Dictionary calls "the wilder parts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands."
These stout, rough shoes were made of untanned hide, and although the origin is unknown, one theory is that since apparently these brogue shoes were very specific, the meaning comes from the idea that it's the accent of people "who call their shoes brogues." So that's fun.
And I also learned that people still refer to a type of modern shoe as a brogue, most typically a leather men's dress shoe that looks a lot like an Oxford. In fact, a character in the movie "The Kingsman" asserts "Oxfords, not brogues," but it turns out that what sets brogues apart is that they have decorative perforations called broguing, so according to multiple men's fashion sites Oxfords can actually be brogues if they have decorative perforations. Sorry, Kingsmen.
Finally, National Grammar Day was last week, March fourth, and ACES: The Society for Editing held its 14th annual National Grammar Day poetry contest. The first place winner was Leslie F. Miller who wrote a limerick about a line from "Hamlet."
Here is the poem in her own voice, and because it includes a set of homophones, I'm going to quickly whisper the spelling where it's appropriate.
In a tale by a playwright historic,
A jester from Denmark (not Zurich)
Had always penned "your"
When he'd really meant "you're"
Now we call him, alas, Poor Yorick.
Leslie F. Miller works as a health care writer in Baltimore. She is the author of the nonfiction book "Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and Pinch of Salt," which is not about BAKING cake, but about EATING cake; a chapbook of "arty and electric" poems called "BoyGirlBoyGirl"; and a forthcoming full-length poetry book called "Words with Friends."
I'll add that I was especially happy to hear that Leslie said she found out about the contest from a post I made on LinkedIn. You don't always know how you reach people, but in this case, it's clear; and the world now has this great poem because my post inspired someone, which feels pretty great.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; and audio engineer Nathan Semes, who loves to garden and started an indoor garden this year with tents and lights and hydroponics.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.