This book proposes a step-by-step process by which the early evolution of human language originated. Starting from an ape-like communication system, pre-human ancestors were “pumped” out of the rainforest by cyclic climate changes between 10 and 6 Mya and subjected to harsh predatory conditions and the absence of safe havens. A phonetic “modal voice” evolved in response. Inarticulate sounds gradually became articulated syllables. The diversification of these syllables eventually led to symbolic references and then finally to words. Bancel details each of these steps in which the origin of language and the origin of humans were concordant.
The huge gap between human articulate language and all the communication systems of other living beings has prevented a satisfactory answer to this question up until today. Here, the problem is subdivided into a series of necessarily successive steps.
Tables of maps, tables, boxes, diagrams and annexes
Prologue
Chapter 01 Introduction
Chapter 02 The climatic species pump
Chapter 03 Hums
Chapter 04 The Proto-Sapiens negative / prohibitive particle *ma and the
invention of the CV syllable
Chapter 05 Stages in the evolution of phonetic articulation
Chapter 06 From Proto-Sapiens back to Proto-Human: an evolutionary history
Chapter 07 Celeste and the cuckoo
Chapter 08 Universal papa/mama words
Chapter 09 Merritt Ruhlens discovery
Chapter 10 Innovations galore
Chapter 11 Transmission and preservation of papa/mama words
Chapter 12 The age of papa and mama
Chapter 13 From mama to me
Chapter 14 Borrowing personal pronouns?
Chapter 15 Personal pronouns and person markers in Indo-Hittite
Chapter 16 Eurasiatic pronouns long march
Chapter 17 1st person *n and 2nd person *m in Amerind
Chapter 18 Of pronouns and geography
Chapter 19 Global variability of personal pronouns vs. their age-old
persistence
Chapter 20 Move along, nothing to see here
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index of languages
Index of authors
Index of notions
Books and articles consulted
Pierre Bancel was attracted to languages and focused on learning a dozen including German, Russian, Hindi and Kabyle as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned a MA in Language Sciences from the Université Auguste et Louis Lumière, Lyon, with an emphasis on comparative linguistics, instrumental phonetics and fieldwork on Bantu languages. He has worked as a copyeditor for the French dictionary, a journalist for various periodical publications, and as a translator by the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna. Bancel translated into French two books by Stanford linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, and has published several dozens of linguistic research articles in scientific journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has become a coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research and into language and how articulated words may have come about to an originally speechless ape species, turning them into humans in the process.
