The Evolution of Language: An Interview with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch

We were really excited to get a chance to talk with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch! Dr. Fitch is an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist who received his PhD from Brown University, and is now a professor in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna. He’s published extensively on the evolution of speech, language, and music, and is the author of the 2010 book The Evolution of Language.
In our interview, we discussed the following topics:
- his recent research on whether it's anatomy or neurology holding back monkeys from speech
- his thoughts on Darwin's hypotheses about how language may have evolved
- how to come up with good hypotheses about how language evolved, given that it doesn't leave fossils
- what he believes is different about humans that led to the development of language
... and more! Thanks again to Dr. Fitch for speaking with us.
His book, The Evolution of Language, can be found here: www.indiebound.org/book/978052...
You can find links and PDFs to a lot of his work in the piece here on his website:
homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh...
Fitch's article on monkey vocal tracts:
advances.sciencemag.org/conten...
The Mark Liberman post on this topic:
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/...
Fitch on Darwin's musical proto-language hypothesis:
homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh...
Our previous interviews:
Sali Tagliamonte: • Interview with Sali Ta...
Anne Charity Hudley: • Interview with Anne Ch...
Lisa Pearl: • Interview with Lisa Pearl
Daniel Dennett: • Interview with Daniel ...
Steven Pinker: • Interview with Steven ...
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We also have forums to discuss this interview, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next time!

[@nigeliscool657]

OMG You're finally back! And presenting on the topic that my PhD research is going to be on!

[@moonlight00001]

This was really neat (especially the part on recursion) ! + Honeybees never cease to amaze me ^^

[@robertvaliullin8837]

Hoooray!!! I've been waiting for a new one.

[@dragoncurveenthusiast]

This was really great! I feel like I really learned a lot in the past 20min. Thanks!! As an Austrian who has lived in Vienna and had courses in the UZA II, close to where the department of cognitive biology is located, I'm curious. Did you film the interview there?

[@frankharr9466]

Thanks you. That was good.

[@Valdagast]

Sort of an intuitive set theory.

[@alexolas1246]

i was just wondering when the next upload would be. neat! so, i guess that as ancient monkeys were evolving into humans, they first developed all the mouth bits we use to make noises at each other, and then the actual brain power needed to assign meanings to those sounds came along later? I wonder how exactly the second began to develop... Where did those first meaning-assignments come from? I had been thinking about how small and minimalist of a language might be viable for communication as a hunter-gatherer. Perhaps at some point, an early language might not have had real nouns, only pronouns, perhaps of the set "I", "we", "you", "y'all", "this", "that", "these" and "those".

[@nlotsobabies996]

I'd say mine would be at the start of langauge

[@alexolas1246]

Ok, and what was it like then?

[@dragoncurveenthusiast]

1:57 Phil Lieberman? Any relations Moti? Edit: 4:07 Mark Lieberman? This seems to be a whole family of linguists!

[@marcverhaegen7943]

Very interesting, thanks a lot for this, but biologically (fossils, neurology, comparative anatomy etc.) we can say a lot more on the evolution of human music & speech, google e.g. "Speech originS 2017 Verhaegen".

[@brandgardner211]

maybe more attention to audio, less to decor