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Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual

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Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance.

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Animal-Friendly Idioms That Your Students Will Love | PETA

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Replace outdated phrases that are harmful to animals with these fun alternatives. Plus, get exclusive idiom posters for your lesson!

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If you don't speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:

1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?
2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?
3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?
4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?
5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?
6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?
7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?
8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?
9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?
10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?

The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).

If you think this exercise is futile, you're in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign - a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture - is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise - eg, 'cuckoo', 'achoo' or 'cock-a-doodle-doo' - there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn't feel more 'slimy' any more than it feels 'dry'.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel 'slimy'; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)

How and why do ideophones do this? Despite their prevalence in many languages, ideophones were once considered linguistic oddities of marginal interest. As a consequence, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have only recently started to unlock their secrets.

Their results pose a profound challenge to the foundations of Saussurean linguistics. According to this research, language is embodied: a process that involves subtle feedback, for both listener and speaker, between the sound of a word, the vocal apparatus and our own experience of human physicality. Taken together, this dynamic helps to create a connection between certain sounds and their attendant meanings. These associations appear to be universal across all human societies.

This understanding of language as an embodied process can illuminate the marvel of language acquisition during infancy. It might even cast light on the evolutionary origins of language itself - potentially representing a kind of 'proto-world', a vestige of our ancestors' first utterances.

How should we define an ideophone? All languages contain powerfully emotive or sensual words, after all. But ideophones share a couple of characteristics that make them unique. For one, they constitute their own unique class, marked with their own linguistic rules - in the same way that, say, nouns or verbs also follow their own rules in how they are formed and used. In Japanese, for instance, ideophones are easy to recognise because they most often take the form of a two-syllable root that is then repeated - such as gochagocha (messy), nurunuru (slimy) or tsurutsuru (smooth).

Native speakers also have to agree that words in this class, as a whole, depict sensual scenes with an intensity that cannot be expressed by vocabulary outside the class. 'So you could just describe it in dry, arbitrary words, but what [ideophones] do is enable you to experience it yourself,' Mark Dingemanse at Radboud University in the Netherlands told me.

Ideophones are more prevalent in some languages than others. English has relatively few; by comparison, more than 4,000 Japanese words are classed as ideophones, meaning that they're a hugely important part of anyone's vocabulary. They can also be found across Asia, Africa, South America and Australasia. (My personal favourite ideophone is ribuy-tibuy, which means 'the sound, sight, or motion of a person's buttocks rubbing together as they walk' in Mundari, spoken in Eastern India and Bangladesh.)

Some of the earliest formal studies of ideophones come from anthropologists who travelled in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th century. Analysing Bobangi, a language spoken in Congo, the linguist John Whitehead in 1899 described 'colouring' words that were 'among the most graphic in the language', adding that 'often they have such force that sentence after sentence can be constructed by means of them, without the use of a single verb.'

The Ewe word for 'duck' evokes an uneven walk, and is accompanied by an exaggerated waddling motion

Even more influential was the German missionary Diedrich Westermann, who described the Lautbilder or 'picture words' of Ewe, spoken in present-day Ghana and Togo. Like Whitehead, Westermann emphasised the fact that these words could depict vivid and complex scenes. For example, zɔ hlóyihloyi captured the manner of someone 'walking with many dangling objects'; another, zɔ ʋɛ̃ʋɛ̃, the 'gait of a fat and stiff person'.

Part of their power comes from how the words themselves are produced: ideophones are often spoken in a dramatic tone of voice and accompanied by visual gestures to help you visualise the scene. The Ewe word ɖaboɖabo, for instance, translates as 'duck'; in addition, the repetition of its basic syllables evokes an uneven walk, and the sounds are accompanied by an exaggerated waddling motion. 'It's a really good example of an ideophone as a word that imitates not just sound but a whole sensory scene,' Dingemanse, who speaks Ewe, told me.

That observation is significant in itself. In the West, we have tended to think of language as primarily one modality - words, as either speech or writing - but there is now a growing appreciation that bodily gestures and hand signs are also incredibly important for meaning-making.

Yet Westermann's later research found that there was also something special in ideophones' phonological features. Comparing the ideophones of half a dozen West African languages, he noted that certain 'front' or 'closed' vowels - such as the [i] sound in the English word 'cheese' - tended to be used to represent concepts that were light, fine or bright, for instance; while 'back' or 'open' vowels - such as the [ɔ] sound in 'talk' or the [ɑ] in past - tended to be associated with a sense of slowness, heaviness and darkness. Meanwhile, voiced consonants such as 'b' or 'g' - so-called because they require the vocal cords to resonate - were associated with greater weight and softness, while voiceless consonants, such as 'p' or 'k', tended to be used to represent lighter weights and harsher surfaces. So, for example, in Ewe, someone kputukpluu is thinner than someone who is gbudugbluu.

He found similar relationships with linguistic tones. In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word's meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones. Many also include the repetition of syllables, which can be used to signify number and a continuous action or state. So, for instance, in Ewe, kpata is used to denote one drop falling, but kpata kpata depicts many drops falling.

Such 'sound symbolism' - as it is known in the literature - should not be seen as a one-to-one, rigid 'coding'; a particular phoneme can be associated with a whole range of sensations to do with weight, shape, brightness or darkness and motion. But Westermann's research offered some of the first concrete evidence that certain linguistic sounds might be somehow better-suited to evoking certain concepts for listeners than others.

These patterns have now been observed in the ideophones of many other languages. To take a couple of examples from Basque - a language isolate that also has more than 4,000 ideophones - tiki taka, with its closed, frontal [i] sound, means taking quick, light steps, while taka taka, with a more open [a] sound, denotes taking heavier steps; tilin tilin means 'small toll', and tulun tulun 'big toll'.

Meanwhile, in Japanese you have gorogoro, which, with its voiced 'g' sounds, represents a heavy object rolling continuously, while korokoro, with a voiceless 'k', represents a lighter rolling object. Similarly, bota means a 'thick/much liquid hitting a solid surface', while pota means a 'thin/little liquid hitting a solid surface'. If you are a Pokémon fan, you might even notice these sound-meaning relationships in your favourite characters. Pikachu, for instance, is named after the Japanese ideophone pikapika, which means sparkle. As Westermann had noted, the voiceless consonants and front [i] vowels are often associated with brightness in a number of languages.

Importantly, psychological studies suggest that these general sound-symbolic connections are universally understood throughout the world. Consider the following experiment. Given two words, kiki and bouba - which term is most appropriate to describe the following shapes?

An early version of this experiment can be found in the writing of the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the late 1920s, who tested participants in Tenerife. But the result has now been repeated many times, in many different cultures. In almost all cases, bouba is chosen to represent the shape on the right by the vast majority of participants, while kiki naturally seems to fit a spiky, pointed object.

The evocative power of ideophones might therefore reflect on an inherent sound symbolism understood by all humans. Although we don't know the exact origin of these universal connections between sounds and meanings, one attractively parsimonious answer comes from human biology and the bodily experience of speech. According to this theory, subtle feedback from our mouth and throat primes us to associate certain phonemes with certain concepts. The mouth tends to form a rounder shape when we form an [o] sound, compared with an [i] sound - which might help to explain the kiki/ bouba phenomenon. Voiced consonants such as 'b' also last for a marginally longer time than voiceless consonants such as 't' - which might explain why they are associated with slower speed.

Nasal sounds are found in words associated with the nose, such as 'snout', 'sniff' or 'sneeze'

Although nuanced, these 'vocal gestures' - in which our articulatory system subtly mimics the concept we wish to convey - might just be enough to prime us to intuitively feel that a word is more or less suited to a particular concept.

Sound symbolism might also emerge from the sensations associated with how we make noises. The marked resonance in the front of our face might explain why nasal sounds are more often found in many words associated with the nose, such as 'snout', 'sniff' or 'sneeze' in English.

However, that doesn't really explain how sounds could convey a concept such as the brightness of glitter. Another theory chalks this up to more general cross-talk between brain regions, where our neural wiring means that activation in one sensory region triggers a response in another. We know this happens in people with synaesthesia - such that a particular musical note can evoke a colour, say - which is thought to be caused by an overabundance of neural links, as if the brain were a too-dense forest whose tree roots have become entangled. Some scientists believe that a similar, though less pronounced, phenomenon could lie behind sound-symbolic connections. Interestingly, synaesthetes tend to be more sensitive to sound symbolism than average members of the population, offering some circumstantial evidence for the idea.

Whatever its origins, analyses of thousands of languages reveal that most cultures use sound symbolism to some degree. Unsurprisingly, languages with many ideophones make more systematic use of sound symbolism to evoke meaning. In one experiment, for instance, Dingemanse and his colleague Gwilym Lockwood gave a group of Dutch participants a list of Japanese ideophones, their translations and their antonyms. (Lockwood also provided the quiz at the start of this article.) He found that they could guess the right answer with around 72 per cent accuracy. He then tried the same experiment with regular Japanese adjectives. The participants still scored above chance - they were right about 63 per cent of the time - but finding the meanings of the adjectives from the sounds alone was harder, compared with the ideophones.

As part of the same study, Dingemanse also asked Dutch participants to memorise various lists of word pairs. In one, the ideophones were paired with the correct translation that matched their sound symbolism ( kibikibi was paired with its true meaning, 'energetic', for instance). In another, the Japanese ideophones were paired with words of the opposite meaning ( kibikibi was paired with the Dutch word for 'tired').

Over all the experiments, the participants found it far easier to learn the ideophones paired with their correct meaning, remembering about 86 per cent of the 'congruent' word pairs, compared with 71 per cent of the word pairs in which they had been given the wrong translation of the ideophone. Once again, this was not true in another experiment that measured how well they learnt Japanese adjectives - supporting the idea that there is something special about ideophones, and the way they are formed, that makes them particularly vivid.

Perhaps because of historic 'Eurocentrism' in linguistics, and its concentration on more formal, written sources, such research has not always received the attention it deserved. (One linguist in the 1990s even went as far as to describe ideophones as the 'lunatic fringe' of language.) Dingemanse points out that even Westermann's detailed writings had been largely ignored - a 'forgotten treasure' - until he recently unearthed them. But in the past decade, more and more linguists and cognitive scientists are coming to recognise them. 'The topic has seen rapid adoption, and many people are now working on it, and those that aren't at least feel they should acknowledge it,' Dingemanse told me in an email.

This burgeoning understanding is of great philosophical importance, suggesting that we should embrace some long-abandoned theories of language. Millennia before Saussure had proposed the 'arbitrariness of the linguistic sign', philosophers had debated whether some words are inherently better at expressing an idea. Plato, for instance, records the philosopher Cratylus arguing that there should be a natural connection between a word's form and its meaning. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as iconicity, the opposite of arbitrariness.

The sheer number of documented ideophones suggests that these ideas are worth revisiting. 'Languages are on a spectrum; each language is on a balancing point between the forces of arbitrariness and iconicity,' says Marcus Perlman, a linguist and cognitive scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Dingemanse agrees, noting that while 'there are still lots of degrees of freedom in language', the general principle of absolute arbitrariness needs to be modified to acknowledge that both arbitrary and iconic features play a role in transmitting meaning.

Japanese parents use ideophones far more frequently during the first few years of a child's life

Recognising the importance of iconicity could solve some lingering scientific mysteries, including the process of language acquisition during childhood. To understand why this is a conundrum, put yourself in the mind of a baby or toddler, hearing the swell of conversation around her. Imagine, for instance, that she is watching a rabbit hop across the lawn - while her mother or father says: 'Look at the rabbit! Look at it hop!' How is the baby meant to know which word refers to its own actions, which word refers to the rabbit itself, and which refers to its movement? More importantly, how does she know to generalise what she has learnt - so that the same word applies to all rabbits of different colours and sizes? Or that the word 'hop' can apply to any creature - even a human - moving in a stop-start, jumpy fashion?

Gestures such as pointing, and the parent's gaze, could obviously assist in distinguishing some elements of the scene. But Mutsumi Imai at Keio University in Japan and Sotaro Kita at the University of Warwick in the UK argue that sound symbolism can also give subtle cues that help a child to identify what a word is referring to - an idea they call the 'sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis'.

As evidence, Imai and Kita have shown that one- and two-year-olds, when given a sound-symbolic word, were more likely to direct their attention at the appropriate object or movement. The children also found it easier to remember and generalise the sound-symbolic words afterwards - such that, if they learn a new verb, they know it can be applied to other scenarios, suggesting the sound symbolism helps them grasp that the word refers to motion.

It's telling that Japanese mothers and fathers consistently use ideophones far more frequently during the first few years of a child's life. This raises another big question: how do children learn languages such as English, without such a widespread, systematic use of sound symbolism? There is now some evidence that parents in these cultures invent their own, or select existing words with slightly more sound-symbolic forms (such as 'teeny-weeny' to mean small). To achieve the same ends, they might also use prosodic cues, such as intonation, stress and rhythm, as well as more dramatic pronunciation - another feature of ideophones.

Even more profoundly, ideophones might offer us a glimpse of the early origins of language at least 40,000 years ago. The emergence of speech is a longstanding mystery for evolutionary theorists. In general, the evolution of a complex trait such as language should happen gradually. But if the arbitrariness principle holds, and speech is meaningful only by convention, our amazingly open-ended communicative abilities would have required a huge evolutionary leap. Without a recognised form of language already in place, how could humans' first vocalisations convey anything useful to their peers?

For this reason, many theorists have preferred a 'gesture first' theory - the idea that language arose first with pantomimed hand gestures that slowly evolved into more conventional signs. But this hypothesis only shifts the problem, because it doesn't fully explain how or why most humans now communicate primarily through speech rather than with signed languages.

According to some scholars, including Imai and Kita, the research on sound symbolism - and ideophones in particular - can help us to solve that puzzle: the iconic associations between sound and meaning could have offered a starting point for the group to develop a shared lexicon.

The first words must have conveyed whole scenes rather than discrete objects

Some preliminary evidence in favour of this hypothesis comes from Perlman. In one of his studies, a group of participants played charades, but instead of using gestures, they were allowed to use only completely novel vocalisations for concepts such as 'man', 'rock', 'knife', 'hunt', 'cook' and 'sharp' - while others guessed what they meant. Contrary to expectations, their accuracy - around 50 per cent - was far higher than chance would have allowed (in this experiment, around 10 per cent). 'For the majority of these concepts, people had really consistent intuitions about what sounds map onto what kinds of meanings,' Perlman told me.

Admittedly, many of the utterances took the form of sound onomatopoeia - a knife's vocalisation involved a 'whooshing' sound of a blade, for instance. But combined with the research on sound symbolism and ideophones, it supports the notion that iconic vocalisations, where the word's form somehow 'resembles' its meaning, might have been a starting point for communication between speakers with no previous language.

Kita hypothesises that, like ideophones, the first words must have conveyed whole scenes rather than discrete objects, evolving only later to be more like conventional words. And like ideophones, these utterances might have been dramatic in nature - using a tone of voice, facial expression and gesture - with the sound symbolism to help other group members connect the utterances to their meaning, such as an object's appearance or movement. The sound-symbolic patterns that we still find today are like linguistic 'fossils', Kita says, that can help us to guess what those early words might have sounded like.

There is a danger, however, that these evolutionary theories entrench the idea that today's ideophones are somehow primitive - a prejudice that has lingered since those first detailed studies of African ideophones. But Dingemanse says that this view could not be further from the truth. Ideophones move us a little closer to understanding how, through sounds alone, two individuals can share sensual experiences across time and space. They should remind us that language is deeply rooted in the body; that each word is, in some small way, a performance-piece that deploys many of our senses. 'Poetry helps you see things in a new light, helps you savour words, is evocative of sensory scenes,' Dingemanse told me. 'That is exactly what ideophones do in many of the world's languages.'

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In the beginning was the word, and the word was embodied - David Robson | Aeon Essays

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If you don't speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options: 1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?4.

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Uncommon tongues are more likely to last when young people are actively speaking them.

Shutterstock

In the desert town of Lajamanu, Australia, at the bend of a narrow dirt road, Carmel O'Shannessy worked at a school as a teacher-linguist in the early 2000s. Lajamanu's indigenous Warlpiri people, who live in the country's Northern Territory, were skilled at drawing sustenance from the landscape's parched red soil, and O'Shannessy soon discovered hidden cultural riches the Warlpiri had stored up.

As she got to know the children in the community, O'Shannessy noticed that they had a different way of expressing themselves than their elders. People in Lajamanu generally spoke English, Warlpiri (an established local Aboriginal tongue), and some Kriol (a blend of English and Aboriginal languages). But O'Shannessy, who speaks both English and Warlpiri, grew convinced that the kids joking in the schoolyard were communicating in an unusual way. "When I listened more closely to how the children were speaking, they seemed to be using two languages in every sentence," remembers O'Shannessy, now a lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra. "I thought, This is really interesting. This is something worth investigating."

As O'Shannessy recorded conversations and took notes, she realized that the children's speech was distinct from anything she'd heard before. She created a storybook in pictures about a dog that escapes from a monster, then asked the kids to describe what was happening in the story. That exercise helped her confirm a few key features of their language. The children were using sentence structures from Warlpiri, but the verbs came from Kriol. The nouns, meanwhile, came from English, Warlpiri, and Kriol.

Speakers mixed in some completely new rules as well, such as using the suffix -m to refer to past and present events but not future ones. That custom was not present in any earlier languages, O'Shannessy says: "That really consolidated that this is a new [language] system all by itself."
Read: The randomness of language evolution
The media hailed O'Shannessy for highlighting a newly "discovered" language, called Light Warlpiri. And that discovery is not an isolated incident. Within the past decade or so, linguists and anthropologists around the world have described a handful of recently recognized tongues for the first time, including Jedek in Malaysia, Koro Aka in northern India, and Zialo in Guinea.

Understanding how languages emerge and survive holds great interest for researchers, since many languages are slipping away in increasing numbers around the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states that more than 40 percent of the world's estimated 6,000 languages are endangered. But each new-language debut represents a bright spot against the global backdrop of widespread language die-offs. Tongues such as Light Warlpiri, Jedek, and Koro Aka fill gaps in our knowledge of how languages arise and endure, revealing some of the factors that can help keep rare languages alive.

Uncommon languages are better equipped to survive, researchers are learning, when young people are actively speaking them, whether in a family setting, in a school system, or in immersion programs. Elders who transmit cultural traditions to young people through a language can help it thrive, as well. But when the number of speakers drops from year to year-sometimes due to outside forces, such as globalization, that are difficult to control-rare languages might vanish, whether they've lingered for centuries or popped up seemingly overnight.

In some ways, the origin story of any language mirrors the broader story of how language evolved in the first place. Within close-knit groups of humans, whether on the savanna or in bustling towns, two factors have been present since ancient times: the need to communicate clearly and specifically, and the cognitive capacity to develop language systems that satisfy that need.

Relatively young languages, however, such as Light Warlpiri, are distinct in that they typically emerge out of the swirl of other, older languages that surround them. Many of these new languages arise in settings where there is some degree of cultural blending or displacement-and Light Warlpiri certainly fits that description. After British settlers arrived in northern Australia in the 1800s, indigenous Australians began to speak English and Kriol.

In this fluid setting, indigenous people became very comfortable switching between languages, a practice that helped drive Light Warlpiri's emergence in the 1970s and '80s. When adults spoke to children, O'Shannessy says, "they would speak in Warlpiri, but insert verbs and pronouns from English and Kriol. So the children internalized that system as if it was a single system."

A similar melding prompted the rise of a language known as Jedek on the Malaysian peninsula, where many languages are spoken in a limited geographic area. Linguists from Sweden's Lund University first stumbled across Jedek in the early 2000s, while studying a variety of other languages spoken on the peninsula. Jedek bears some resemblance to Jahai, a language commonly spoken nearby, and is akin to other Malaysian languages heard somewhat farther away. But it is also its own separate entity, with distinct grammatical structures and r sounds that Jahai does not possess. In late 2017, the Swedish researchers published their first paper confirming that Jedek is a totally distinct language.

The village where Jedek is spoken places a high value on cooperation and exchange. As such, the language includes many words that describe sharing and few that describe individual ownership.

Creating a full-blown new language often cements a kinship felt among its speakers-whether that kinship is rooted in religion, common social practices, or ancestral ties. Usually, O'Shannessy says, speakers of a fledgling language draw on older word forms and start to incorporate patterns they hear, or they might make small changes to a language pattern that already exists. "And then, because they're all speaking to each other, that new pattern stays," she says.

Some newly discovered languages, meanwhile, have very old roots. The linguist David Harrison of Swarthmore College and his research team, supported by the National Geographic Society, happened upon Koro Aka about 10 years ago in a remote region of northern India where dozens of indigenous languages are spoken. Although Harrison is not sure exactly when Koro Aka originated, he thinks it might have existed for centuries.

In the northern Indian region where Koro Aka arose, people share a common identity, living in bamboo homes on stilts, growing rice, and raising livestock. But all of Koro Aka's speakers-about 1,000 people-already speak another language called Hruso Aka. That has researchers wondering why a community went on to develop a new language, especially since Koro Aka speakers identify culturally with people who speak only Hruso Aka.

"The Koro Aka population is subsumed within a larger population of Hruso speakers," Harrison says. "That's the usual scenario where people would switch over to the majority language." What's more, Koro Aka does not resemble the languages spoken in closely surrounding villages; it is as different from them, Harrison says, as English is from Japanese. But Harrison thinks Koro Aka might have linguistic predecessors that have not yet been uncovered, so he and his colleagues are tracing ever-expanding circles around the Koro Aka community to gather clues about the language's true roots.

Parallel quests to understand what nurtures new languages and what sustains existing ones have led social scientists to one key answer: Languages often survive when young people are speaking them on a regular basis. This language transfer can be actively encouraged, as in immersion schools in Native American communities, or it can simply occur naturally.

O'Shannessy is optimistic about Light Warlpiri's future for this reason. Even though only a few hundred people know the language, nearly all of the youths in the community are absorbing it and speaking it frequently.

In general, fostering language vitality is one of the anthropologist Gwyneira Isaac's goals as director of the Smithsonian Institution's Recovering Voices program. Though Isaac does not work specifically with emerging languages, she witnessed how cultural practices can help revive language after meeting a Canadian man who spoke the endangered Anishinaabe language. The man found some of his tribe's maple-syrup-making tools in a cabinet at the Smithsonian and was so excited that when he returned home, he produced a series of videos about syrup making using phrases from his native tongue.
Read: A language's popularity could influence its grammar and vocabulary
Young people in his community hear the language when they watch the videos, but they also encounter aspects of their cultural heritage. "This small thing of opening a cabinet turned into this journey," Isaac says, "building the collective knowledge which is really at the base of language."

When young people no longer speak a language, however, its prospects for survival might dwindle. Traditional societies around the world have suffered repeated traumas related to displacement, for example, when the U.S. government pushed Native American people onto reservations and forced their children to attend Western schools from the late-19th to the late-20th centuries. Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia received similar treatment. These policies disrupt generational links and might lead to the death of established languages. Globally dominant languages, such as English, introduced from outside can also threaten the survival of less common languages over time.

And sadly, just because the linguistic community has only recently identified a language does not mean it's invulnerable. Recently identified languages can disappear just as easily as those recognized for decades. Koro Aka, for instance, might already be at risk of slipping away, since there are few Koro Aka speakers under the age of 20. "A process of language shift is under way," Harrison says. "Younger generations are using it only sporadically. It's definitely in decline." Even so, he reports, a small group of young Koro Aka speakers is putting up a valiant fight to save the language. Some even appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., recently to share the Koro Aka language and culture with visitors from around the world.

The youthful Koro Aka speakers on the Mall might have grasped something many of us have not: the rewards of keeping a rare language alive even if a more common tongue would suffice. Languages are often considered to supply the very framework on which our thoughts coalesce-a framework that is completely distinct in each language and gives rise to distinctive modes of thinking and expression.

Over time, the structure of each newly discovered language grows to support a community's history, folklore, and scientific innovations-a world unto itself that might be threatened if the language disappears. "People don't fully appreciate the vast body of knowledge contained within any language," Harrison says. "What does Koro Aka have to say that we never knew? These languages have a contribution to make."
This post appears courtesy of Sapiens.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Elizabeth Svoboda is a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of "What Makes a Hero?"

Sapiens is an online magazine that focuses on anthropology.

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The Reason Some Hyperlocal Languages Survive

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Uncommon tongues are more likely to last when young people are actively speaking them. In the desert town of Lajamanu, Australia, at the bend of a narrow dirt road, Carmel O'Shannessy worked at a school as a teacher-linguist in the early 2000s.

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Alaska has a "linguistic emergency," according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state's 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act.

American policies, particularly in the six decades between the 1870s and 1930s, suppressed Native American languages and culture. It was only after years of activism by indigenous leaders that the Native American Languages Act was passed in 1990, which allowed for the preservation and protection of indigenous languages. Nonetheless, many Native American languages have been on the verge of extinction for the past many years.

Languages carry deep cultural knowledge and insights. So, what does the loss of these languages mean in terms of our understanding of the world.
Environmental knowledge
Embedded in indigenous languages, in particular, is knowledge about ecosystems, conservation methods, plant life, animal behavior and many other aspects of the natural world.

In Hawaiian traditions and belief systems, for example, the tree snails were connected to "the realm of the gods." Hawaiian royalty revered them, which protected them from overharvesting.

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu holds a shell necklace, or lei, of Queen Lili'uokalani, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It is made from tree snail shells, which signifies the high rank of female royalty. Wearing a shell was believed to provide "mana," or spiritual power and a way to understand ancestral knowledge.

Many of these snails are now extinct and those remaining are threatened with extinction. Scientists are working with Hawaiian language experts to learn about the belief systems that once helped protect them and their habitats.
A tool for doctors
Words in indigenous languages can have cultural meanings, that can be lost during translation. Understanding the subtle differences can often shift one's perspective about how indigenous people thought about the natural world.

For example, as an indigenous scholar of the environment, I led a team some years ago of language experts, elders and scholars from Montana and Alberta, Canada, to create a list of Blackfeet words, called a lexicon, of museum objects. The elders I worked with noted that the English word "herb," which was used to describe most plant specimens within museums, did not have the same meaning in Blackfeet.

In English, the word "herb" can have numerous meanings, including a seasoning for food. The closest English word to herb in Blackfeet is "aapíínima'tsis." The elders explained this word means "a tool that doctors use."

The hope is that the lexicon and audio files recorded in the Blackfeet language that our research helped create, might assist future scholars access the embedded meanings in languages.
Saving vanishing languages
Many Native American communities in the United States are now working to save these cultural insights and revitalize their languages.

In Wisconsin, an Ojibwe language school called "Waadookodaading," translated literally as "a place where people help each other," immerses its students in the environmental knowledge embedded in the language.

The Ojibwe believe that theirs is a language of action. And the best way for children to learn is by doing and observing the natural world. Each spring, for example, the students go into the woods to gather maple sap from trees, which is processed into maple syrup and sugar. These students learn about indigenous knowledge of plants, their habitats and uses.

Language loss can be considered as extreme as the extinction of a plant or an animal. Once a language is gone, the traditional knowledge it carries also gets erased from society.

Efforts are now underway worldwide to remind people of this reality. The United Nations has designated 2019 as the " International Year of Indigenous Languages " in order to raise awareness of indigenous languages as holders of "complex systems of knowledge" and encourage nation states to work toward their revitalization.

The loss of indigenous languages is not Alaska's concern alone. It affects all of us.
Rosalyn R. LaPier, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, The University of Montana This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The loss of Native American languages affects our understanding of the natural world

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Alaska has a "linguistic emergency," according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state's 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act.

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Six months have passed since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.

His administration remains deeply understaffed. His legislative agenda is stymied. He has been active in issuing executive orders, but many are toothless, others are only in the early stages of undoing Obama policies and some are tied up in the courts. So far, Trump's leadership has mostly been defined by his rhetoric.

And his rhetoric, the conventional wisdom holds, could not be more different from his predecessor's.

Barack Obama was, as president, eloquent. His language was sophisticated. He spoke in measured tones and advanced informed, reasoned dialogue.

Donald Trump is inarticulate and brusque. His language is simplistic. He dishes out invective. He shows so little regard for the facts that some say he's the exemplar of a " bullshit artist." And he promotes a dialogue of the deaf.

The differences between Trump's and Obama's rhetorical styles seem stark. Yet, when we set aside the presidents' speaking styles and looked more carefully at the specific words Trump employed in his first months in office, we were surprised to discover that, in certain ways, these two presidents are remarkably like each other and unlike their predecessors. Here's what we found - and why Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think.

How we did our research

Our analysis is based on Trump's more substantial speeches - which we somewhat arbitrarily define as those longer than 500 words - which were directed primarily at domestic audiences. We scraped from the website of the American Presidency Project all of Trump's campaign speeches and presidential addresses through July 1 that met these criteria. We ended up with 74 campaign speeches, representing more than 230,000 words, and 56 presidential addresses, which included more than 122,000 words. We compared these bodies of speech to each other and to a separate database of postwar presidential speech that one of us had collected, using these same criteria, for a recently published book.

We ran these speeches through a specialized computerized content analysis program called Diction. Diction contains 33 separate dictionaries tailored to political speech. It searches texts for the words contained in the designated dictionaries and then calculates the number of words from each dictionary that would be present in a typical 500-word sample.

Obama and Trump vs. everyone else

On two key dimensions, Obama and Trump look similar - and stand in marked contrast to all other presidents.

First, their rhetoric is much more self-referential, meaning it uses more first-person pronouns. Obama's rhetoric is 69 percent more self-referential than the presidential average, and Trump exceeds Obama by another 20 percent.

Trump employs almost 50 percent more first-person pronouns than the second most heavily self-referential president after Obama, Gerald Ford. Trump's rhetoric is twice as self-referential as the postwar presidential average.

Second, both Trump and Obama rank very high on measures of "tenacity." This dictionary includes a series of words such as "must" and "need" that call for action and that " connote confidence and totality." Obama's rhetoric is around 45 percent more tenacious than the presidential average. Trump's rhetoric is a bit more tenacious than even Obama's. They are the only two presidents who substantially exceed the average.

Obama and Trump's rhetoric suggests that the prime mover of government is not separation of powers, political parties or the bureaucracy - but the will of the president. Its self-referentialism projects an image of strong leadership and of the president as the central pivot of action. Its tenacity expresses confidence that the president will triumph over the many obstacles in his way.

For all their differences, both Obama and Trump consistently presented themselves as the solution to the nation's problems. Accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Trump assured Americans, "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it." He regularly cited his own biography as the reason that Americans should "trust" him. The irony is that the predecessor who, on this dimension, most resembles Trump is the very one whom Trump cast as an utter failure and weak leader and as his chief foil. Obama too regularly invoked his unique personal story as the reason that Americans should place their faith in him. Minus Trump's boastfulness, Obama too portrayed himself as the key agent of national transformation: " I'm the one who brings change. It is my vision. It is my agenda," he told The Washington Post in January 2009. He saw other government officials as just "good mechanics."

Yearning for a strong leader

The computerized content analysis of presidential rhetoric sets out a pattern, it does not explain it. However, we believe it likely that Obama and Trump adopted the same rhetorical tack for the same reason: Audiences across the political spectrum have craved a strong leader who will overcome Washington's paralysis and address the nation's challenges.

Especially since 9/11, American politics has grown more partisan and polarized, even as Americans' values have converged. That partisan divide has produced gridlock in the halls of power, and Congress has become a site of minority party obstruction. As a result, Americans have become frustrated with Congress, and their trust in government has plummeted. They have increasingly looked to the president to seize the initiative, conquer Washington's dysfunction and persuade Congress to act.

In 2007, " honesty" mattered most to Americans in selecting the nation's next president, with "leadership/strength" a distant second. In 2012, American voters said that " shares my values " was their top consideration in electing a president. By 2016, having a president who was a "strong leader" had easily taken the top spot, across voters of all parties, and was twice as important to them as it had been four years before.

Obama and Trump's self-referential and tenacious rhetoric - one might even call it authoritarian - seems designed to satisfy that demand for strong leadership centered in the presidency. It is not accidental that their rhetoric, as the linked charts show, also reflects a continued, long-term decline in "cooperative" and "accomplishment" language, as collaboration across party lines has been rare and as there have been few achievements. Ironically, "satisfaction" rhetoric has experienced a corresponding rise - perhaps because there has been less to celebrate and therefore more reason for presidents to proclaim that all is well.

Of course, some of this may be Donald Trump's inimitable rhetorical style. The figures above reveal that Trump the candidate was somewhat less self-referential and less tenacious than Trump the president has been. Perhaps he was simply restraining himself during the campaign. Once ensconced in the White House, he could become more himself. Trump the president may be Trump unleashed.

But the data suggest that Trump is also a manifestation - albeit an extreme manifestation - of our political age. Obama's self-centered, self-confident but soaring speeches gave way to his successor's self-centered, overconfident and vain tweets. Karl Marx knew what he was talking about: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Nevertheless, we'd better get used to authoritarian rhetoric. It appears to be here to stay.

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Trump and Obama have one surprising thing in common - the words they use

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Six months have passed since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office. His administration remains deeply understaffed. His legislative agenda is stymied. He has been active in issuing executive orders, but many are toothless, others are only in the early stages of undoing Obama policies and some are tied up in the courts.

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Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest it began as baby talk, or as imitations of animal calls, or as gasps of surprise. Charles Darwin proposed that language started with snippets of song; Noam Chomsky thought it was just an accident, the result of a freak genetic mutation.

Proposals about the origins of language abound. And it's no wonder: language is a marvel, our most distinctive capacity. A few slight movements of tongue, teeth and lips, and I can give you a new idea, whisk you somewhere else or give you goosebumps. Any thought a human can think, it would seem, can be shared on a puff of air. Explaining how this all started has been called the 'hardest problem in science' and it's one that few can resist. Linguists, neuroscientists, philosophers and primatologists - not to mention novelists and historians - have all taken cracks at it.

Over this long and colourful history, one idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural 'protolanguage'. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. Yet even as the popularity of the 'gesture-first' theory has surged, its major weakness - a flaw some consider fatal - has become all the more glaring.

Early proponents of 'gesture-first' ideas appealed to the intuition that bodily communication is primitive. In his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac imagined a boy and a girl, alone after a deluge, struggling to invent language anew. He described how the boy, wanting to obtain some out-of-reach object, 'moved his head, his arms, and all parts of his body', as if trying to acquire it. And the girl got the message. A scene very much like this can be readily seen today, of course: a baby in highchair wriggling in the direction of a toy just beyond her grasp. Part of the primitive aura of gesture - for Condillac and other early thinkers - stemmed from the observation that gesture precedes speech in infancy. Before children can talk, they point, nod, wave and beg. Perhaps, goes the logic, the development of language in our species followed this same sequence.

Anthropologists of the 19th century widely championed gesture-first theories, citing other intuitive arguments. Garrick Mallery - who saw gesture as a 'vestige of the prehistoric epoch' - noted that it is much easier to create new, interpretable signals with one's hands than with one's voice. Imagine 'troglodyte man', he wrote in 1882. 'With the voice he could imitate distinctively but the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he could exhibit actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, with their derivatives and analogues.' In more modern terms, it is easier to create transparent signals with gesture - signals that have a clear relationship to what they mean. This observation has since been borne out in lab experiments, and it remains one of the most compelling arguments for a gestural protolanguage.

In the 20th century, scholars held on to these intuitive arguments for gestural theories, while also introducing new sources of evidence. One thinker in particular, Gordon Hewes, deserves special credit for this advance. An anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Hewes had an encyclopaedic cast of mind and an unusual zeal for questions about language origins. In 1975, he published an 11,000-item bibliography on the topic. But it was his article 'Primate communication and the gestural origin of language' (1973) that would initiate a new era of 'gesture-first' theorising.

Chief among the article's contributions was the idea that we should look closely at the communicative proclivities of primates. In the preceding decades, several attempts had been made to see if apes might be able to learn human language. In one case, a couple adopted a young chimpanzee named Viki and treated her 'as nearly as possible like a human child'. By the age of three, she had a number of human-like tendencies. She liked building block towers. She loved playing with the phone, holding the receiver up to her ear. But, as the couple noted, 'she seldom says anything into it'. All told, Viki was reported to speak just three words - 'papa', 'cup' and, after some physical assistance in forming her mouth correctly, 'mama'.

Vocal language, it would seem, was out of reach for apes. But gestural language proved to be another matter. Another couple carried out a similar home-rearing experiment with a different chimpanzee, Washoe, but used manual signs borrowed from American Sign Language instead of English words. Washoe's linguistic capacities blew past Viki's. She ultimately mastered some 350 signs - nowhere near the level of a human signer, of course, and with none of the grammatical sophistication, but impressive nonetheless. Subsequent studies teaching signs to other apes - including Koko, a gorilla, and Chantek, an orangutan - enjoyed comparable successes.

Compared with the mouth, the hands seem to be better soil for the seeds of language

Hewes also drew on the emerging understanding of primate communication in the wild. Primate vocalisations, he noted, are largely involuntary, not directed to a particular audience, and only 'meagerly propositional'. Primate gestures, by comparison, seemed richer. Though the data available to Hewes on this point were scant, work in the time since has confirmed his hunch. Chimpanzees use a wider set of gestures than of vocalisations, and seem to use those gestures more intentionally. Bonobos, for instance, will use a 'come here' beckoning gesture and watch their audience closely for a reaction. If they don't get the response they want, they'll make it again. Chimpanzee vocalisations do appear to be under some voluntary control - they're not just reflexive emissions - but not to the same extent. The same asymmetry is seen in the flexibility with which these types of signals are used: ape vocalisations are strongly tied to a stereotypical context, but their gestures are less so.

The takeaway from observations of primate communication is not that ape gestures have all the hallmarks of human language - far from it. It's that, compared with the mouth, the hands seem to be better soil for the seeds of language. Central to contemporary discussions of language evolution is the notion of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees - a now-extinct species perhaps 5 to 10 million years old. Given what we know about primates today, we can confidently say that this ancestor had gestural and vocal abilities much like those of modern chimps. Which means its hands were more language-ready than its mouth - as Hewes put it in 1973, the manual medium was the 'line of least biological resistance'.

Hewes continued advocating gesture-first theories into the 1980s, and he occasionally surfaced new sources of evidence. In one paper, he drew attention to a human peculiarity that few had made sense of: our palms and fingernail beds are lighter than the surrounding skin. (This contrast is more obvious in people with darker skin but is also evident when people with lighter skin are deeply tanned.) No other primate seems to show 'palmar depigmentation' of this type - a fact that Hewes checked for himself by visiting zoos. He speculated that this uniquely human feature had evolved to increase the visibility of our gestures. He seems to have been imagining a scene around an early hearth, the hands of some prehistoric storyteller flashing in the firelight.

In the decades since Hewes, the popularity of gestural theories has swelled. Leading figures in the cognitive sciences have now published their own variants in prominent venues. What might once have been called a single gesture-first theory is now best considered a family of related proposals. One branch maintains that early gestures consisted primarily of 'pantomime' - that is, those transparent gestures that re-enact or depict and thus resemble what they mean. Another branch posits that pointing is the most likely ur-gesture, citing the fact that it is the first to be acquired by children.

Perhaps this rising popularity is not so surprising. When we pull together the best arguments for gesture-first theories and lay them out, the picture is indeed compelling. There's the fact that gesture emerges prior to speech in a child's life. There's the fact that the manual medium seems to be superior at creating transparently meaningful signals. There's the fact that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees likely had the equipment to eventually create a sophisticated system of manual signals, but not vocal ones. And there is also a key existence proof: contemporary sign languages. With all the power and subtlety of spoken languages, sign systems show us that the voice is not the only viable vehicle for our species' most distinctive capacity.

Now we come to the problem: today, speech predominates. People gesture, but their gesture is clearly a secondary supplement. People also sign but, outside of deaf communities, they favour speech. So, if language did get its start in the hands, then at some later stage it decamped to the mouth. The vexing question is: why? Already in the 18th century, Condillac appreciated the difficulty of this problem. 'With the language of action at that stage being so natural, it was a great obstacle to overcome,' he wrote. 'How could it be abandoned for another language whose advantages could not yet be foreseen?' This is now known as the problem of 'modality transition'. To his credit, Hewes fully acknowledged it, and every gesture-first proponent since has had to address it in some way. Can it possibly be explained?

According to some, the short answer is no. The sign language researcher Karen Emmorey at San Diego State University argues that the very existence of sign systems - which are, again, as fully and complexly linguistic as spoken systems - undercuts the idea of a gestural origin for language. She reasons that if language had first built a home in the hands, it would have had no compelling reason to leave. Thus, it must have been spoken from the start. The Dutch psycholinguist Pim Levelt has reached a similar conclusion, calling gestural theories a 'persistent misconception' and 'wasteful'. For humans to go through a gestural stage, he wrote in 2004, would be like 'building a car by first building a ship and then removing the sail, putting it on wheels and adding a combustion engine'.

The burden of proof is clear. To remain viable, gesture-first theories need an account of the move from hand to mouth. And this account would need several pieces. I like to imagine modality transition as a kind of epic journey, one that our protagonist - language - might have been on for hundreds of thousands of years. As with any journey, the protagonist would need a reason to go and a means of getting there, a why and a how. Let's take these two parts in turn.

First, a reason to go. Discussions of why language left the hands often take a scorecard format, a tallying of the putative advantages of speech over gesture. A first supposed advantage, it has often been said, is that speech is abstract. Spoken words for the most part bear an utterly arbitrary relationship to what they mean - the word 'tree' doesn't resemble the physical form of a tree. Visual forms such as gesture, goes the argument, are not arbitrary in this way - and hinder abstract thought as a result. But the argument is specious. Hand movements can be motivated - as we've seen, this is one of their virtues. But they can also be as fully arbitrary as spoken words, as seen in the 'peace' gesture, for example, and in the countless opaque signs in sign languages.

There is one key feature of speech that is harder to dismiss: it takes very little effort

A second supposed advantage is that speech is better in the dark - that, as Levelt put it, gesture is 'functionally dead during, on average, 12 hours a day'. This is probably overstated. As Emmorey points out, modern signers get by without much problem, even in dim lighting, and can use tactile forms of signing - that is, signing in contact with another's skin - in a pinch. Our prehistoric ancestors likely didn't spend many waking hours in pitch-black. Rather, they would have used fires for warmth, cooking, illumination and protection from predators. And, whether or not there's anything to Hewes's palmar depigmentation story, hand movements can certainly be seen by firelight.

Another advantage of speech, it has been argued, is that it frees the hands for other activities. But, here again, this is likely too swift. Signers don't seem to have much of a problem with this, using one-handed signs when necessary. And though most of what we think of as gesture takes place in the hands, critical visual signals can also be produced with the head and face - pointing, affirming, questioning. The list of putative advantages of speech goes still further. But this kind of 'rear-view mirror' reasoning is inherently shaky: we know the outcome and are motivated to explain it. As Tecumseh Fitch - the author of an authoritative survey of language evolution research - has pointed out, we can also readily come up with advantages of gesture. For instance, it is more discreet than speech; it can thus be used during hunting without alerting prey, or around the fire without alerting predators. It's a more directed signal, in contrast to the broadcast nature of speech. It is better suited to noisy environments. It is more available when eating - in fact, speaking while eating poses a choking hazard. The scorecard begins to look like a wash.

But there is at least one key feature of speech that is harder to dismiss: it takes very little effort. Attempts to measure the caloric expenditures involved in speech report that they are essentially negligible. This is both because the movements involved are so tiny, and because spoken words often hitch a ride on our outgoing breath. (Speaking can be thought of as a way of upcycling an abundant waste-product - air - as it leaves the body.) This is not to say that gesturing or signing is an especially athletic or strenuous endeavour by any means, but it is certainly more expensive than talking - by an order of magnitude at least, Fitch estimates.

Could a small differential in calories really matter? Unlikely as it might seem, it could. Laziness is a remarkably powerful shaper of human behaviour - and of human communicative behaviour in particular. The study of language has identified few laws but one is known as the 'principle of least effort'. It explains why the words we use the most are also the shortest; it explains why the signs of sign language become abbreviated over time; it explains why we use acronyms, nicknames and contractions. Even animals show this drive toward more efficient communication, and archaic humans would have been no exception.

It's plausible then that the energetic efficiency of speech could have, over many generations, compelled a transition from gesture to vocalisation. This would supply the why. But what about the how? Via what route could a capacity for meaning-making that developed in one organ be transferred to another, halfway up the body? A possible explanation begins with an anatomical curiosity: in humans, hand and mouth are intimately coupled. There seems to be a hidden yet robust connection between these two body parts - an invisible bridge, if you like - that language could have traversed.

The first evidence for the coupling of hand and mouth begins early in life. In utero, babies often suck their thumbs. Shortly after birth, until around five months old, they exhibit what is called the 'Babkin reflex': press on their palms, and they protrude their tongues. Other evidence comes from the brain. It has long been known that neural areas that control mouth movements are oddly very close to those that control hand movements, leading some to propose a shared command circuitry for the two. Recent evidence suggests that these areas are not merely close but, in fact, integrated. Researchers detected a speech signal from neural activity in the 'hand knob', a region that - as the name suggests - was thought to be specialised for hand movements.

Beyond babies, and brains, the coupling of hand and mouth can also be observed in everyday behaviours. Darwin noted that 'children learning to write often twist about their tongues as their fingers move, in a ridiculous fashion'. Work since has documented tongue protrusions in a wide range of activities, not just during writing and not just in kids. The US basketball star Michael Jordan was known for sticking out his tongue while dribbling or dunking the ball. Watch someone thread a needle or unlock their smartphone, and you might see the same. These 'ridiculous' behaviours are just one type of what are called 'hand-mouth sympathies'. A more subtle type occurs when people use their hands while simultaneously producing a vocalisation. One-year-olds, for instance, vocalise differently when they grasp a small object versus large object.

Is this coupling of hand and mouth a recent addition to the roster of human quirks? Probably not. Chimpanzees show hand-mouth sympathies, too, suggesting that this 'invisible bridge' was very likely already present in our last common ancestor. Thus we have identified a plausible-enough route and a plausible-enough reason to leave. But this, of course, leaves open the question of what a journey along this bridge might have actually looked like.

Any details remain highly speculative, of course. But most scholars agree that a move from hand to mouth would have been very slow. And many now emphasise that the transition was not from a gesture-only system to a speech-only system. That would make little sense, given what language use actually looks like today: speakers gesture with their hands when they talk, and signers gesture with their mouths when they sign. Rather, the transition we seek to explain was from a system in which gestures served as the primary, foregrounded communicative channel, and vocalisation was a secondary channel - much as we see in modern chimpanzees - to the other way around. We want to explain, in other words, how speech gained the upper hand.

We need to explain why we felt an itch to mean anything at all

Proposed explanations have been few and, admittedly, fanciful. Writing in Science magazine in 1944, Richard Paget suggested that language began as manual gesture but was able to switch over to speech because the activities of the mouth unconsciously echoed the activities of the hand. He wrote that when 'the principal actors (the hands) retired from the stage ... their understudies - the tongue, lips, and jaw - were already proficient in the pantomimic art'. The idea was that spoken words first emerged as unconscious, audible echoes of manual gestures. This proposal has been largely forgotten and occasionally derided. In 2010, Fitch described it as 'one of the more precarious edifices in the field'.

But, in the past decade, Paget's ideas have attracted a second look. Partly this is because the evidence for hand-mouth sympathies continues to mount. And partly it is because sign language researchers have recently described a class of signs that show exactly the kind of process that Paget had in mind. The mouth is highly active during signing, as already noted. Sometimes signers are mouthing a spoken language equivalent of a sign; sometimes they are producing adverbs. But still other times their mouths are simply mirroring aspects of a concurrent manual sign - exhibiting what is now known as 'echo phonology'. To take one example, the sign for 'true' in British Sign Language involves bringing one hand, positioned above, down onto the other; at the same time, the open mouth is closed. Thus, a movement of the hands is echoed in a much smaller movement of the mouth. If you were to add in a concurrent vocalisation, you could get a distinctive hand movement along with a distinctive sound.

It might seem wildly unlikely that language could hop from hand to mouth in this way. Much more work would be needed to flesh out the details of this 'echoic' route before we would want to declare it plausible. But this is just a starting point. A goal for the next phase of gestural theories is to develop and refine models of a gradual ' miniaturisation ' process - of a long slog in which humans, by degrees, might have adopted a more compact form of communicative behaviour. At some point in this slog, the prominence of gesturing and of vocalising would have flipped, with speech becoming the foreground channel, and gesture remaining as a background channel. Leaving us, in other words, right where we are today.

Arriving where we are today is, in fact, a major strength of gestural theories. Ever since Hewes, gesture-first theorists have faced a stark burden of proof, of explaining the why and the how of modality transition. But speech-first theorists have their own burden, albeit rarely acknowledged. Any speech-first theory needs to account, not only for how speech could have evolved, but also for why and how speech came to be universally, ubiquitously and automatically intertwined with gesture. Call it the problem of 'modality addition'. It might be tempting to chalk up our use of gesture to its communicative power, but researchers have found only modest support for this idea. Quaint as it seems, the 19th-century notion that speakers' gestures are vestigial, like tailbones or goosebumps, might not be so far off.

None of this is to say that the gesture-first theory has prevailed - far from it. Rather, it is to say, first, that the allegedly 'fatal flaw' of gestural theories might prove, in the end, to be merely a flesh wound and, second, that speech-first theories have their own problems. Ultimately, questions about modality are just one layer of the larger puzzle of language origins. Even if we were able to establish some version of a gesture-first proposal as not merely plausible but likely, there would be many more layers to contend with. We would also want to understand how we came by our abilities to read other minds, to sequence and combine ideas, to conceptualise abstractions such as 'tomorrow' and 'truth'. We would need to explain, not merely whether we first conveyed meaning by hand or by mouth, but why we felt an itch to mean anything at all. It is this multilayered complexity that makes the evolution of language the 'hardest problem in science' - and also one of the most tantalising.

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If language began in the hands, why did it ever leave? - Kensy Cooperrider | Aeon Essays

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Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest it began as baby talk, or as imitations of animal calls, or as gasps of surprise. Charles Darwin proposed that language started with snippets of song; Noam Chomsky thought it was just an accident, the result of a freak genetic mutation.

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That's no more fantastical than the rest of his re-election campaign.

Credit... Ben Wiseman

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It's no longer interesting, or particularly newsworthy, to point out that Donald Trump lies. It stopped being interesting a long time ago. He lied en route to the presidency. He lied about the crowd at his inauguration. His speech itself was one big lie. And the falsehoods only metastasized from there.

Why? We've covered that, too, most recently in all the chatter about "Too Much and Never Enough," by Mary Trump, who is not only his niece but also a clinical psychologist. He lies because he grew up among liars. He lies because hyperbole and hooey buoy his fragile ego. He lies because he is practiced at it, is habituated to it and never seems to pay much of a price for it.

What intrigues me is that last part: the impunity. I want to understand how he has gotten away with all of the lying, because I'm desperate to know whether he'll continue to.

That's the question at the heart of his re-election bid, because his strategy isn't really "law and order" or racism or a demonization of liberals as monument-phobic wackadoodles or a diminution of Joe Biden as a doddering wreck. All of those gambits are there, but they spring from and burble back to a larger, overarching scheme. His strategy is fiction. His strategy is lies.

Can he sell enough Americans on the make-believe that he really cares about the quality of life in cities and is dispatching federal officers as a constructive measure rather than a provocative one, in a flash of empathy versus a fit of vanity? He gave himself away a few days ago when he punctuated a mention of "the wonderful people of Chicago" with the needless notation that it's "a city I know very well." Everything Trump says is self-referential, and everything he does is self-reverential.

Can he feed voters the fantasy that his actions in the infancy of this pandemic saved lives and that our country's world-leading death toll and un-flattened curve are more figment than fact or at least more fluke than indictment? Can he convincingly don the mask of a longtime evangelist for masks?

His recent interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News was a trial run of this and ... wow. Up was down. Black was white. A superficial check of his cognitive coherence was a profound spelunking of his cerebral glory.

He claimed that Joe Biden had pledged to defund - no, abolish - the police, when Biden had done nothing of the kind. He boasted that America's management of this pandemic made us "the envy of the world," when in fact we're so densely diseased that we're barred from entering most of Europe. Oh, and he's cruising toward four more years: All of those pollsters who predict otherwise are incompetent fabulists. (Talk about projection.)

Then there are the Trump campaign's ads, which are "Veep"-grade caricatures of the usual fakery, not to mention paragons of incompetence in their own regard. One that appeared on Facebook in early July said, "WE WILL PROTECT THIS" - just like that, in URGENT CAPITAL LETTERS - beneath a picture of a statue of Jesus. But Trump won't be protecting that statue, because, as eagle-eyed observers noticed, it was the Christ the Redeemer monument that looms over Rio de Janeiro.

Another Facebook ad a few weeks later comprised two side-by-side pictures. Under an image of Trump were the words "Public Safety." Under a separate image, of a police officer crumpled on the ground amid protesters, were "Chaos & Violence."

Scary! But, again, foreign. The scene wasn't Portland or Minneapolis or Washington or Chicago circa 2020, although that was the obvious suggestion. The picture, it turns out, was taken in Ukraine. Six years ago. For a more complete and very funny deconstruction of its infelicity, read Jonathan Last's riff in The Bulwark.

The Trump campaign's television commercials, meanwhile, have painted a dystopia of rampant criminality in Democratic-controlled metropolises where the police no longer function or exist. One shows an elderly woman being attacked by a burglar as she listens to a 911 recording that tells her to "leave a message."

If this is Trump's tenor in July, just imagine October. By the time he's done, Willie Horton will look like Peter Pan.

It's beyond ludicrous. But is it too much? I once would have answered an emphatic yes. Now I just don't know.

Every president's election illuminates the moment in which it occurs, and Trump's told us something important - and terrifying - about our relationship with the truth. He relied like no candidate before him on a new infrastructure of misinformation and disinformation, tweeting toward Bethlehem while his allies made Mark Zuckerberg their stooge. If you're peddling fiction, Twitter and Facebook are the right bazaars.

But they're hardly the only ones. The web (how aptly named) has fostered the proliferation of "news" sites with partisan and micro-partisan agendas. They amount to flourishing ecosystems for alternate realities. Many Americans believe that Trump is an underappreciated martyr because they marinate in selective, manipulated and outright fraudulent factoids. And Trump and his minions have really figured out how to slather on the marinade.

When Robert Mueller released the conclusions of his investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, everyone focused on its second section, about Trump, when the first was at least as important. It documented the extent and ingenuity of Russia's attempts to pervert the election. But even many of the people who paid it heed missed the point, which wasn't Russia's nefariousness. It was the process's corruptibility. It was the power of lies in a world gone digital.

As for the power of a liar, well, that's what Trump is testing. He got away with lies in his business career because he chose professional avenues paved with deception and crowded with con men. Plus he had - and still has - a special talent for treating drivel as gospel, as long as it's tumbling from his lips. That's the great advantage of the truly amoral: They're liberated from any tug of conscience, so there's no suspicious hesitancy in their words, no revelatory panic in their eyes. Damn the verities and full steam ahead.

He got away with lies in 2016 because of social media, because show business and politics had finally fused to the point where one was indistinguishable from the other, and because many Americans had grown so skeptical of traditional candidates that an utterly untraditional one seemed more trustworthy on some level. Trump was the diet that hadn't yet failed them. They were ready to believe.

But to believe now is to ignore the receipts. About 150,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Tens of millions have tumbled into financial ruin or are on the precipice of it. Racial tensions are at a palpable boil. And Trump keeps having to double back to correct his predictions and retrace his missteps. Charlotte, Jacksonville, Charlotte: I've lost track of where the Republicans are convening next month and of who's on board, though I remain primed for Trump's remarks. He alone can fictionalize it.

From now until Nov. 3, Trump will take the grand inventions that attend any presidential candidate's campaign to a newly grandiose level, signaled by his insistence a few days ago that he'd "done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln." I love that "possible." Trump, Lincoln: It's a jump ball, really.

So while this election is indeed a contest between two men with two visions, it's also something else. It's the tallest tale Trump has ever scaled, the greatest story ever told. It's a referendum on the reaches of his persuasion. It's a judgment of the depths of Americans' gullibility.

Have we cut the cord to reality? Then Trump has a chance. And America hasn't a prayer.
I invite you to sign up for my free Listen to "The Argument" podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and me. weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).

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Opinion | Donald Trump Is the Best Ever President in the History of the Cosmos

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That's no more fantastical than the rest of his re-election campaign. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android . It's no longer interesting, or particularly newsworthy, to point out that Donald Trump lies. It stopped being interesting a long time ago.