Vontarius Falls 's Key Ideas from Origins of Language
by James R. Hurford

While emotional vocalizations still predominated, the ability to point at and reference objects through gestures likely emerged first. Pointing allowed early humans to jointly attend to and communicate about objects in their environment. This led to the next breakthrough - making voluntary vocal sounds to label and name objects. Naming objects through learned vocal associations began the transition from emotion-driven to symbol-driven communication.

Once individuals sounds became associated with specific meanings and functions as words, the ability to combine words into larger utterances emerged. Word combinations exponentially increased the expressive power of language by allowing the description of actions, qualities and relationships. However, early word combinations were likely holistic and lacked systematic syntactic rules.

The crucial step - developing recursive syntactical rules that allow words to be combined in an open-ended number of ways - enabled the true generativity of human language. Recursive rules allow an infinite number of grammatical and meaningful sentences to be generated from a finite set of words. This property sets human language apart and likely emerged gradually through cultural and genetic evolution.

Various theories attempt to explain how and why human language evolved. The social intelligence hypothesis posits that language co-evolved with our social cognitive abilities. The ecological dominance hypothesis argues that language helped humans adapt and spread across diverse environments. The genetic change hypothesis proposes that mutations affecting language areas of the brain occurred. Likely a combination of social, ecological and genetic factors drove language evolution.

The book concludes by considering the ongoing evolution of language. Languages are constantly changing and new dialects and languages emerge. Advances in artificial intelligence may one day allow machines to develop vocabulary and combine words in a rule-based way, but true generativity and conceptual understanding remain challenges. The outlook for radically different future languages, either biological or artificial, remains an open question.