Usual reader of novels, this time I opted for a scientific essay whose subject directly attracted my curiosity: how did Man begin to speak?
And I am not disappointed, but despite my enthusiasm for this book, who can better explain it than the author himself.
In a few lines, can you introduce yourself and describe your career as a scientist?
I was 11 when my parents immigrated to Canada. When at the end of my classical studies I chose the biology-chemistry option of the baccalaureate, despite a rather poor school career, it was because we were only six students to register, under the responsibility of an open-minded teacher. I had some inclination to become a forest engineer, but I was more gifted in literature and French than in mathematics. My mentor therefore advised me to follow the path of teaching, acknowledging my successes as a scout, summer camp instructor since the age of sixteen and responsible for the student newspaper at my college. At 23, while continuing my university studies and because I wrote well, I was offered a position as a French teacher at the secondary level, then at the normal school, to finally see myself recruited, at the age of 29 years old, on the teaching staff of the new University of Quebec in Montreal, founded in 1969. I discovered linguistics by enrolling in a minor after being admitted to a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Montreal in 1961. My passion for the French language was then revealed. This opened up unexpected disciplinary horizons for me, which flattered my “spirit of geometry” rather than my “spirit of finesse”. Phonetics, lexicology, French grammar and above all a new syntax inaugurated by the young American prodigy Noam Chomsky, have forged in me a real addiction to the sciences of language. Then it is in master’s degree (the European ‘master’) that my interest in the computational syntax of compound words in Romance languages, such as the word corkscrew, for example, was consolidated. This object of study subsequently became the basis of a critical research program that has continued throughout my life. In 1971, with weapons and luggage, in addition to two young children, I moved to France after being admitted as a doctoral student at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes (now Paris 8 Saint-Denis), under the supervision of ‘a young and talented teacher, Richard S. Kayne, straight out of MIT with the reputation of having been one of the most brilliant students of the already famous Chomsky. The best of both worlds, what! I also repeated this French immersion experience of my family from 1980 to 1982 after being selected by the government of Quebec to occupy a position of associate director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris. Upon my return in 1973 and keen on so-called “generativist” syntax, I began an academic career in the linguistics department at UQAM, while distancing myself from stardom. I tend to work alone. I therefore devoted my efforts to the establishment of ‘teacher training’ programs adapted to the needs of Quebec in the 1970s, to the direction of my department and that of the Revue québécoise de linguistics, as well as to the union action, without neglecting my social commitment as a language columnist in a major French-language weekly in Quebec. In the end, the pursuit of my research on different aspects of language, notably the Quebecois language and its history, gradually moved me away from syntactic formalism and its ratiocinating methods. – Your work addresses the thesis according to which language appeared through meaning.
Could you explain to us how your research went to arrive at this finding?
In fact, it was in reaction to certain dominant ideas of my contemporaries, in particular those of the generativist school, that at the beginning of the 2010s I undertook to plow the ground repeatedly cleared of the origin of language. My own experience of the facts of language directly clashed with the presumption of a specifically human genetic origin of language, which would have suddenly manifested itself with Homo sapiens less than 100,000 years ago by virtue of a rewiring of the neural circuits of the brain. . Of this riddle, I had a more cultural and neo-Darwinist view of the ability to speak than the formal and innate view advocated by Chomsky and his followers, or the influential approach of Derek Bickerton and his pidgin-like protolanguage. . However, an episode in my life as a retired professor gave me the opportunity to reflect on the terrestrial dimension of time with regard to the complex evolution of human beings. I’m talking about a cancer with complications which, in the five years leading up to complete remission, gave me the opportunity to reread the classics: Darwin, Lamarck, Maupertuis, the Enlightenment Philosophers, Stephen Jay Gould, Jean -Pierre Changeux, René Thom and many others. Then I plunged into the scientific literature and its multiple points of view, those of paleo-anthropologists, neurologists, geneticists, ethologists, biologists, psychologists and, paradoxically, very few linguists. It took me seven years of continuous work to finally put my ideas within the grasp of my understanding from a bibliography with no less than 336 titles in my book. Besides my caring wife, writing this book was one of my two lifelines against depression. I then came to the conclusion that no proposition relating to the origin of language was truly cognitively explanatory. Why ? Because it is in speech, and not in unconscious language or grammar, that the prehistory of our language faculty resides. This theoretical reframing is the only one which makes it possible to naturalize the intellect, unlike current approaches which strive to intellectualize nature. Ultimately, meaning is what allowed the Homo species to adapt the organ of its animal voice to the human articulation of phonemes required by any linguistic system.
Your book brings a new vision on the origin of language compared to existing literature. Can we speak of discovery?
I leave it to those who read me to decide. For my part, I like to think that my intellectual approach can be modestly qualified as innovative, even ingenious, if only by virtue of the evolutionary notion of exaptation by the meaning that I apply to it. vocal organ. Evidence so banal that when we speak, it is to produce meaning, as the late psychologist JeanFrançois Le Ny understood so well, has always been taken for granted by researchers and intellectuals. But very few have wondered how the exceptional inscription of this aptitude of our mind in the gray matter of a species of bipedal primate was accomplished. The challenge then is to show how meaning slowly developed in the psyche of Homo habilis and his successors, when his phonation enabled him to materialize his perceptions. I would consider myself fulfilled if my book managed to better enlighten readers on such a scholarly questioning!
What do you think of other studies on the subject?
There are so many ! It would be presumptuous of me to do them justice in a few minutes. However, almost all of them are biased because of their anthropomorphic perspective. I mean that modern man is the accomplished being who takes the place of starting point, the question being: How did man learn to speak? However, this approach is contrary to Darwinism, since evolution takes place from the past to the present. For my part, I proceed in reverse, starting from the ancestral monkey to the Cro-magnon man. The question then becomes: How and why did a species of primate depart from its animal communication? Hence the title of my first chapter: Man is an animal which has lost its language. The other conceptual gap present in many “explanations” of the origin of human language consists in systematically ignoring everything that must have preceded the invention of the first word. The appearance of the first word spoken by one of our prehistoric ancestors somewhere in East Africa is neither miraculous, nor spontaneous, nor even individual. Because it is in fact the invention of the first symbol that the mind-brain has succeeded in conceiving. This is the key that goes into the lock of meaning. All that ensued is a matter of cerebral and anatomical development, of perfecting phonation and of cooperation between individuals forming perennial communities capable of transmitting to their descendants this new aptitude of their intelligence to symbolize reality. Finally, many studies pursue the false trail of a single language at the origin of our language faculty by methodically reconstituting several dozen lexical taxa from words existing in living and archaic languages, such as Sanskrit for example. But although comparative (or comparative) linguistics has obtained very edifying results by highlighting the links which justify grouping thousands of languages into a few large linguistic families, this approach can hardly claim to go back in time beyond, let’s say. , 12,000 BC, which is ridiculous in terms of human evolution. In addition, the word is not a relevant standard to take the place of keystone of the origin of the faculty of language since it is itself a result, constructed thanks to the convergence of prior aptitudes of a psychic nature. , anatomical, neuromotor, genetic and socio-cultural.
Can you answer the question everyone is asking: why did the man start talking? And not the other species, are we so different?
Speaking is originally an altruistic behavior that has gradually replaced animal communication by becoming the language faculty of modern humans. The why of language is therefore rooted in the irrepressible need of presapiens to communicate meaning, because meaning has constituted an enormous selective advantage that has allowed the survival and domination of our species. After many millennia, meaning has become thought, which only a language endowed with a grammar can materialize. The convincing difference then lies in the fact that all the other animal species have remained dependent on their “tune”, made up of ancestral vocal signals, and not of articulated signs (or symbols). Cows have always mooed, pigeons always cooed or crows always croaked, etc., while humans, besides not “speaking” like the monkeys they once were, have also always been able to grumbling, if I may …
Given the importance of the work, can we say that this study is the culmination of your life as a linguist?
You are not wrong to presuppose it. It takes a tremendous amount of time to indulge in reading scientists in your field of research. Many years are needed to forge a credible personality, autonomous but also critical vis-à-vis the leaders of the discipline, so many ideas abound that make the “buzz” in terms of language. My book is in a way the high point of my “life as a linguist”, as you say, insofar as my life expectancy could contradict the statistics.
Publisher: www.desauteurs-deslivres.fr
Official website of the book: www.linstinctdusens.com
Author’s official website: https://www.philippe-barbaud.com
Scientific book
346 pages
39 euros
ISBN 978-29570999-9-3
