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Spoken Language Could Tap Into "Universal Code"
sciencehabit writes: While we know a lot about language but we know relatively little about how speech developed. Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started, but how we decided which sounds to use for different words remains a mystery. Now, an experimental game has shown that speakers of English might use qualities like the pitch and volume of sounds to describe concepts like size and distance when they invent new words. If true, some of our modern words may have originated from so-called iconic, rather than arbitrary, expression—a finding that would overturn a key theory of language evolution.
... from the ability and need to communicate fundamentals about where food is, where threats are and where mates are. AKA it's very positional/structural. I'm sure all language traces back to even the simplest organisms, things that we wouldn't call 'language' as we know it but are in fact communication (aka remembering and knowing where food is, mating opportunities are, etc). It makes sense because uniting and forming groups against others is a necessary strategy if one is to survive on the planet and that requires communication at some level, even if some of us arrogant humans who are being dropped off and in a sense 'born yesterday' in evolutionary history wouldn't see it like that.
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.
This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.
So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.