The talk at the club’s meeting of October 24th proved to be a fascinating exploration of language - and its origins and evolution. Speaker was club member, Emeritus Professor Tony Lodge, drawing with great enthusiasm on one of his own areas of interest – and taking his audience on a journey spanning two and a half million years or so.

We started off with a view of language as the ‘magic ingredient’ – the thing that led from apes to Homo-sapiens. The question posed – can we think without words? The role of language in cooperation, working as groups, collaboration, division of labour and ultimately to changes in the structure of the brain.

We looked at the emergence of Homo-sapiens 200,000 years ago in East Africa and then the spread from Africa perhaps 60,000 years ago.

A vast passage of time and yet the only hard evidence we have of language is from around 6,000 years ago.

Tony went on to discuss the number of languages that exist in the world – about 7,000 today, with a steep decline in number over the last two centuries. However it is also true that new languages are still developing, for example in cities through vernacular usage. We heard of the five big groupings: Afro Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo European, Niger Congo and Sino Tibetan.

Of these it is the Indo European group that has been most intensively studied, with nine sub groups considered to have developed from a ‘mother tongue’ in the area of south Russia of 4,000 years ago. Interestingly it seems Basque, Finnish and Hungarian existed before that time. One view is that migration fuelled the emergence of different languages from that origin; however Tony noted that there is insufficient genetic similarity in speakers to justify that view. His own belief is that it was rather the spread of agriculture displacing hunter-gatherers.

In concluding we heard that new languages can emerge via dialects, when directed by a governing or political force; the emergence of distinct languages from the Latin of Gaul being a case in point. Tony’s final message - language is the basis of our life, and it began with Homo-sapiens.

Following many questions and much discussion, an appreciative vote of thanks was proposed by Bill Henderson.