We’ll never know who said the first sentence or what they said, but we can have fun speculating. Perhaps it came from the mouth of a Stone Age man hoping to defeat an opponent and win the love of a young woman. He may have approached his love interest and, surreptitiously pointing at his rival, softly whispered in his ear something that translates into English as “shit-head.”
Ridiculous? Not if you’re guided by the research of linguist Ljiljana Progovac. He points out that although Charles Darwin described language as “half art, half instinct”, most who study its evolution have neglected the creative element. His research begins to address this by delving into the puns involved in compound sentences, such as shit-head, bark-flint, and lily-liver, many of which are now written as single words. These, he believes, are linguistic fossils that reveal a crucial stage in the evolution of language: the moment when humans realized that two words could be joined to form very short sentences.
Moreover, after collecting examples of such sentences, Progovac noticed that they have something surprising in common. “They’re usually disparaging,” he says. And there might be a good evolutionary reason for that, too.
Language is central to the human experience, but its ancient roots are difficult to study because it leaves no archaeological remains, at least not until the invention of writing. However, based on the communication systems of other animals, we can assume that our ancestors started making simple noises or…
