Survival of the wittiest? Scientists debate if wit helped evolve language
Linguist Ljiljana Progovac proposes that human wit and humor may have been sexually selected traits that drove the gradual evolution of language. By analyzing verb-noun compounds as 'living fossils,' she argues that complex grammar evolved from simple two-word structures.
Why it matters
This theory offers a novel evolutionary perspective on how language complexity emerged, challenging the idea that modern language appeared suddenly.
Language is a key aspect of human life that most likely came up more than a lakh years ago — but linguists still disagree on how exactly it evolved. The influential U.S. linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed that complex modern language emerged suddenly, a theory that many linguists still stick to. But some believe the languages we speak today, with all the complex grammatical rules nestled within them, must have evolved gradually, the way our cognitive abilities evolved.
The article reports on a specific academic theory while acknowledging the existence of competing linguistic viewpoints.
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