This book is an amazing achievement. Not only does it review essentially every significant bit of rowk on the evolution of language, it does so in a brilliant analytic fashion. Fitch patiently analyzes every idea, theory, and hypothesis he can find—beginning with a clear statement of the theme, then carefulliy marshalling all supporting and opposing arguments. He rarely misses a logical possibility or contradiction. He is competent in every field related to language, from animal communication to neurology to modern linguistic diversity. As a scholar of this field, I can’t imagine how one person can command this wide a literature.
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Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

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1. ISBN-10

052167736X

2. ISBN-13

978-0521677363

3. Edition

1st

4. Publisher

Cambridge University Press

5. Publication date

May 17, 2010

6. Language

English

7. Dimensions

6.69 x 1.41 x 9.61 inches

8. Print length

624 pages

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## Editorial Reviews

### Review

“Reconstructing the evolution of language is a daunting task but Tecumseh Fitch brings it off with style. An impressive synthesis.” --Robert Seyfarth, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

“The evolution of language has been described as the hardest problem in science, fraught with conflict, entrenched views, and misunderstandings between the multifarious disciplines involved. Fitch guides us through this tangled and often treacherous domain with clarity, equanimity, and encyclopedic reach. No other book so completely, fairly, and eloquently presents contemporary notions as to how language evolved.” --Michael Corballis, University of Auckland

### Book Description

This book brings together the most important insights from the vast amount of literature on the origin of language.

### About the Author

W. Tecumseh Fitch is a Reader in Psychology at the University of St Andrews. He studies the evolution of cognition and communication in animals and man, focusing on the evolution of speech, music and language. He is interested in all aspects of vocal communication in terrestrial vertebrates, particularly vertebrate vocal production in relation to the evolution of speech and music in our own species.

## Product details

- Publisher
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (May 17, 2010)

- Language
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  English

- Paperback
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  624 pages

- ISBN-10
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  052167736X

- ISBN-13
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  978-0521677363

- Item Weight
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  2.65 pounds

- Dimensions
  ‏
  :
  ‎
  6.69 x 1.41 x 9.61 inches

- Best Sellers Rank:  #1,194,992 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books)

- #522 in Linguistics (Books)

- #2,652 in Linguistics Reference

- #8,936 in Core

- Customer Reviews:
  4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars)25 ratings

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## Customer reviews

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Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2014

This book is an amazing achievement. Not only does it review essentially every significant bit of rowk on the evolution of language, it does so in a brilliant analytic fashion. Fitch patiently analyzes every idea, theory, and hypothesis he can find—beginning with a clear statement of the theme, then carefulliy marshalling all supporting and opposing arguments. He rarely misses a logical possibility or contradiction. He is competent in every field related to language, from animal communication to neurology to modern linguistic diversity. As a scholar of this field, I can’t imagine how one person can command this wide a literature.

Language evolution is complex. One must consider the evolution of the mechanics—brain wiring, throat and mouth anatomy, and so on. One must consider how our language sounds developed, and why we talk at all as opposed to gesturing. One must consider how people evolved learned languages that can all generate literally infinite numbers of sentences from ape calls that are few and instinctive. One must consider how grammar got so complicated; apes give single calls, humans generate sentences that can then be negated, turned into commands, made conditional, and so on. One must consider what use such a complex system was to early hominins. Early humans may have said little beyond “hunt mammoth” and “take care of the baby,” so why have a system that can produce War and Peace and Kant’s philosophy?

Fitch is particularly sympathetic to music as a part of language evolution. He is not clear on whether song arose first or whether language and song differentiated from a common chanting or warbling (as G. Vico thought in the 18th century—oddly uncited here). Fitch also sees language as having evolved in small groups of people with a high degree of relatedness. Otherwise, he thinks, people would have had too many reasons to lie and conceal their intentions, and would not have developed a complex mode of conveying useful, reliable information. Of course people lie so much that a few humorists have held that language was invented for that purpose…but Fitch is probably right here.

Fitch uses bird song as a comparative case, rightly noting that we can learn a lot from analogy. One thing we can’t learn is why language evolved. Bird song is intimately connected with holding territory. The most highly intelligent and sociable birds—crows and ravens—have lost the ability. Several other highly social birds that descend from songbirds have also lost it, or reduced it to a low level. The exact opposite is true of people, of course; we are hypersocial and use language in highly social situations. It is grossly overengineered for small-family communication. Bird song, as Fitch notes, is also very much about mating, whereas language is about everything (and then some). He points out that language developed in large part for the purpose of teaching children; evidence is the striking speed with which children learn their languages.

One of the best things about this book is that Fitch abstains from the dreadful musings about “consciousness,” “mind,” and so forth that ruin so much of this literature. Fitch sticks to what can be defined and studied.

A few errrors exist; the ones I can find are largely cases in which facts that emerged since the book was published have disproved his contentions. Dogs and some birds communicate more complexly than he thought. Neanderthals did interbreed with modern humans—quite a lot. (As of publication of this book, that fact was unknown.) A few other points are too minor to note. One annoyance is the number of misspellings and typos, quite high for a Cambridge University Press book.

One person found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2010

This book kept surprising me by being more than I expected. It is not another book on the evolution of language. The author states a clear purpose to avoid offering a particular theory but to instead show how the field is a very broad endeavor that needs to respect what many researchers are doing and that needs to value a wealth of testable hypotheses. That made sense but sounded vaguely tedious. But then I kept getting hooked on each chapter. Each one is a gem that could be a small book on its own that quickly, clearly, and thoroughly covers some element of the puzzle. Chapter 2 on evolution could seem like unnecessary backtracking, but the coverage makes evolutionary theory in all its latest theoretical twists seem alive again while showing how these issues about general evolution relate to language evo. Chapter 6 on everything that is known about the last common ancestor to chimps and humans really brought all the evidence together to get a sense of the issues and the researchers so that this all important starting point for language evo could be approached. It was so well done that I was shocked to realize that the whole chapter was only 15 pages. The whole book is like that even at 500 pages. It feels succinct and absorbing throughout. The wide coverage and the, no doubt, years in the making all contribute to this sense that it might be "encyclopedic" as one of the back cover reviews has it, but it is all very well crafted from the to-the-point style to the page layouts.

The author admits to being both a biologist and a linguist professionally, and this too shows. He makes a continual effort to include vocal and communicative evidence from a wide range of species to show how convergence issues and novel possibilities to test for particular facets offer important leads in the study of human language origins. He also respects and finds lessons from seemingly all linguistic traditions which felt refreshing. In the end of this broad excursion he uses the last three chapters to treat three types of theories on the evolution of language in a way where each of these theory types gets full treatment as subjects like the other chapters. Within these the contributors and the issues were examined for strengths, weaknesses, prospects, and testability possibilities. He gave his own evaluations at the level of issues within each theory type without committing to any particular theory of his own. On the one hand instead of ending up with another particular theory after reading the book, the long immersion in so many aspects and facets of language and human evolution left more an impression that the evolution of language too was a similarly multi-faceted and sweeping event. On the other hand the last chapter/book on musical protolanguage really makes this old hypothesis appealing. [This review assumes or suggests that you use Amazon's Look Inside feature to see the 14 chapters that are in themselves worthy of being basic, all-you-need-to-know books on each of these subjects.]

The book is comprehensive, well thought out at every level, easy to read, a reference point for the subject, and a future research direction for the field. Its near perfection is marred by one small, odd blemish at the very end. Even though the glossary and reference sections match well the comprehensive standards of the book itself, the index and the thoughtfully added species index are tiny - the species index laughably so given the species richness throughout.

19 people found this helpful

### Top reviews from other countries



Amazon Customer

_5.0 out of 5 stars_brilliant

Reviewed in Canada on April 16, 2021

brilliant knowledgable readable



Gerald Wirnsberger

_5.0 out of 5 stars_Great book

Reviewed in Germany on November 27, 2018

Excellent book. Title might be a little misleading. It covers a lot of ground and information not only related to language. Beautifully written and well researched.

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anthony

_5.0 out of 5 stars_Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 30, 2015

good, very slight damage to front page.



Amazon Customer

_1.0 out of 5 stars_One Star

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2017

Wrong book



Amazon Kunde

_3.0 out of 5 stars_Mangelhafte Verpackung

Reviewed in Germany on December 6, 2015

Ich habe dieses Buch für meine Staatsexamen bestellt. Dabei habe ich bewusst kein gebrauchtes sondern ein neues Exemplar gekauft. Leider wurde das Buch, welches doch einen stolzen Preis hat, mit anderen Bestellungen versendet. Es war nicht extra eingepackt, weshalb es beschädigt bei mir an kam. Dies ist sehr ärgerlich, da ich dann auch etwas Geld hätte sparen können. Ein gebrauchtes Exemplar sieht bestimmt ähnlich aus wie mein neues.

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