Actually you're imposing a *lot* of restrictions on the term "language" that really have nothing to do with language
per se.
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
... I am interested in how or when humans made the intellectual leap in being able to associate and express objects and, more importantly ideas, in abstract sounds and syllables.
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Here you run into trouble because as experiments like those with Koko the gorilla have shown, many if not most primates actually have a pretty good handle on abstractions of objects and ideas *without* a language like ours.
Now obviously what we do is a little bit more sophisticated, but the crux of the problem in answering your question is that many of the distinctions here are of *degree* and not *kind*: that makes it virtually impossible to pick a "day the universe changed."
Things like an "oral tradition" really are a confluence of intellectual, linguistic and social components each of which evolved over a long period of time.
As a result, picking a date like 10,000 years ago is really getting into something akin to arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, because everyone is going to have a different opinion about which combination of things are important and what point that that combination was surpassed in degree when there is absolutely no evidence that we can even conceive of proving this.
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
Well, I'm not sure about that. They were certainly present in early homo sapians, but earlier species of the genus "homo" and the Neanderthals did not have the proper anatomical structures (especially within the larynx) to make a wide range of sounds and syllables. As well, early "homo" species had much smaller brains...
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I'm unfortunately too lazy to look this up, but there was indeed some stuff published in the last year that showed that Neandertals and other homo species physical characteristics necessary for language, but more importantly that the DNA recovered included elements that are related directly to the development of speech centers in the brain.
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
Those are not really languages though. Sounds, grunts, hormones, and motions (what we would collectively call "body language") have been used as a means of communication for tens of millions of years, especially among social animals and super organisms. But they rely mostly on instinct, and are rarely used as abstractions. And most of the time they convey very simple information, such as emotional states or basic desires/needs.
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You need to be careful about being overly anthropocentric about this sort of thing. It's the very thing that has held back all sorts of areas of science from anthropology to sociology: many behaviors and traits in "lower" species are in fact very closely tied with our own behaviors, but we like to think that we do these things only because we're "smart", something that unfortunately we all to often prove isn't the case!
In order to justify the stance that "our" language is the only "real" kind of language, many do as you did here:
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
Language, by definition, incorporates a well defined syntax, a set of rules on how to manipulate various sounds and grammar and relate them to the outside world.
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If I were creating a computer language, I'd agree with you, but actually probably the vast "history" of "human language" probably had no syntax or grammar at all, just nouns and verbs with no necessary structure, and if any, probably localized to tribes. This is one of the reasons why its so easy to trace the lineage of languages and explains the huge differences between Indo-European languages from Oriental and Native American languages which truly bear no resemblance to one another.
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
...The way we do this is quite arbitrary; it is not necessary for the sounds to have any relation to the objects in question; We can assign any sound or grammar to a given object or idea. It is our ability to do this that have allowed us humans to communicate not just simple emotions needs, but abstract ideas and observations.
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Again: "abstract ideas" is not a linguistic issue, and many lower species have them, so if this is your way to distinguish "true language" it really falls apart.
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Originally Posted by LogicTech
Also, all language has to be learned, rather than known by instinct.
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There's mounting evidence that this is not the case, as was part of the recent research I mentioned earlier: we've actually identified language processing parts of the brain, and they've been around quite a while....
I believe that justice is instinct and innate, the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as the threat of feeling, seeing and hearing,
Buffy
