This book proposes a step-by-step process through which the early evolution of human language originated. Starting from an ape-like communication system, prehuman ancestors were "pumped" out of the rainforest by cyclic climate changes between 10 to 6 million years ago 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, finally, to words. Bancel details each of these steps in which the origin of language and the origin of humans are shown to be concordant.
Pierre Bancel was drawn early on to languages and focused on learning a dozen of them, including German, Russian, Hindi, and Kabyle, as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned an 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 Le Robert, 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 dozen research articles in linguistics journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has been coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research into language and into how articulated words may have emerged in an originally speechless ape species, turning it into humans in the process.
Table of Contents:
List of Maps
List of Tables
List of Boxes
List of Diagram
List of Annexes
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
PART ONE The Origin of the Human Voice and the Discovery of Consonants
Chapter 2 The Climatic Species Pump
Chapter 3 Hums
Chapter 4 The Proto-Sapiens Negative/Prohibitive Particle *ma and the Invention of the CV Syllable
PART TWO The Evolution of Narration
Chapter 5 From Proto-Sapiens Back to Proto-Human: An Evolutionary History
Chapter 6 Stages in the Evolution of Phonetic Articulation
Chapter 7 Celeste and the Cuckoo
PART THREE Proto-Sapiens Kinship Terms
Chapter 8 Universal Papa/Mama Words
Chapter 9 Merritt Ruhlen’s Discovery
Chapter 10 Innovations Galore
Chapter 11 Transmission and Preservation of papa/mama Words
Chapter 12 The Age of Mama and Papa
PART FOUR The Evolution of Personal Pronouns
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
PART FIVE Sorting Out
Chapter 20 Move Along, Nothing to See Here
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
References
Index of Languages
Index of Authors
Index of Notions
