There have been many different concepts and definitions of language, from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, etc. Most of them refer to the internal set of rules and some others to the productive (discursive) part of it, its processing and interpretation. However most if not all of the concepts of language come from or take for granted the paradigmatic view of language as something we possess, we produce and we use as a tool for communication. Are there other views of language different from these? I would like to hear from linguists and non-linguists, from different perspectives, fields, cultures, values and beliefs: What is language, understood as langue and parole?
What is human language? The best approach IMO is trying to reconstruct the different evolutionary steps (elements) of how human language developed.
Fossil & comparative evidence shows that Pleistocene human ancestors (genus Homo) did not run over open savannas as traditionally believed (this is biologically & physiologically extremely unlikely), but simply followed the African & Eurasian coasts & rivers (1.8 Ma e.g. Dmanisi, Mojokerto, Turkana), beach-combing, diving & wading bipedally for littoral, shallow aquatic & waterside foods. Stephen Munro called this early-Pleistocene littoral diaspora the "coastal disparsel model" (2010 "Molluscs as Ecological Indicators in Palaeoanthropological Contexts" PhD thesis Austr.Nat.Univ. Canberra). The combination of early-hominoid gibbon-like song (duets of loud & varied sounds) + seafood collection (Homo's early-Pleistocene diaspora) led the basis for the different elements of human speech, see e.g. our 2011 paper "Seafood, diving, song and speech" (attached): seafood consumption pre-adapted Homo to
- breathing control at free will (breath-hold diving for shallow foods),
- labial-dental-palatal-velar consonants (soft-slippery food swallowing + smacks & clicks),
- brain expansion (brain-specific nutrients in aquatic foods, e.g. DHA).
Upright wading "freed" not only the hands (complex tools), but also the airways (voluntary sounds), which got more & more involved in how spoken language evolved:
- from phoneme to morpheme (word formation), see e.g. Nowak MA & Krakauer DC 1999 "The Evolution of Language" PNAS 96:8028-33,
- and for the evolution of word order & syntax (sentence formation), see e.g. Dik SC & Hengeveld K 1997 "The Theory of Functional Grammar" Mouton de Gruyter NY.
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