But trying to work out exactly how and why that is the case has been weirdly taboo.
That language is uniquely human has been assumed for a long time. But trying to work out exactly how and why that is the case has been weirdly taboo. In the 1860s the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned discussion about the evolution of language, and the Philological Society of London banned it in the 1870s. They may have wanted to clamp down on unscientific speculation, or perhaps it was a political move—either way, more than a century's worth of nervousness about the subject followed. Noam Chomsky, the extraordinarily influential linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was, for decades, rather famously disinterested in language evolution, and his attitude had a chilling effect on the field. Attending an undergraduate linguistics class in Melbourne, Australia, in the early 1990s, I asked my lecturer how language evolved. I was told that linguists did not ask the question, because it was not really possible to answer it.