Introduction

In the book of Genesis, just after Adam arrives in the Garden of Eden, he displays a command of vocabulary in naming all the animals. A little later he comments on his partner Eve: “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman, for from man was she taken” (Tanakh, 5). Adam improves substantially after his holophrastic period of animal naming to develop almost immediately a grammar using complete sentences with subordinate clauses, past tense and passive. A literal interpretation of Genesis – whatever literal might mean given the opacity of translations from the original Hebrew and the vagaries of individual exegesis – meets with as much success in describing the development of language as Shelley's account of Frankenstein's reanimation.

How the first humans came to have language is a question that relates both to ontogenetic development (the growth of individual language) and to phylogenetic (growth of the species' language). It is doubtful that we might learn how the first language developed, whether all at once by a mutated gene or in the gradual development of a symbolic system of communication, or by increases in brain size.