How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention [Hardcover]

An ambitious text.... Everetts amiable tone, and especially his captivating anecdotes from his field studies in the Amazonian rain forests, will help the neophyte get along. Its worth it in the end to get a glimpse of conversation through his eyes, as humanitys most impressive collective invention.Very few books on the biological and cultural origin of humanity can be ranked as classics. I believe that Daniel L. EverettsWhen I first became interested in cultural evolution, cognitive revolutionaries would say that Noam Chomsky had proved that an innate language acquisition device was the key to linguistics. Daniel Everett is a leader of the counterrevolution that is putting culture and cultural evolution back at the center of linguistics, and cognition more generally, where I think it belongs.Moving far outside historical linguistics, Everett credits Homo erectus with having invented language nearly two million years ago. This communicative invention came notin Everetts viewin one revolutionary breakthrough but, instead, at the slow pace typical of evolution, as early hominids gradually organized themselves in ever-more-complex social groupings, eventually learning to fashion culturally weighted symbols and then to manipulate such symbols in communicative strings, so setting the evolutionary stage for the planets only loquacious species: Homo sapiens. . . . Certain to spark that liveliest form of languagedebate![Everett]?mixes esoteric scholarly inquiry with approachable anecdotal interludes to surmise how humans developed written and spoken language and why it became vital for survival and dominance. As in his previous books, Everett energetically attacks the long-accepted theory of Noam Chomsky that humans are born with the language instinct, including innate rules of structure....That Everett is skilled at leavening an intellectually challenging treatise with humor is evident on the first page of the introduction.Provocative and ambitious. . . . l3)