Daimond & Graslund
Elizabeth Fly
9/26/07

Jared Daimond's and Bo Graslund's theories on the evolution of human language have a lot in common because their main arguments support each others views.
Daimond and Graslund both agree with Noam Chomsky's theory on generative grammar, which states, "That all languages have a common syntactic and grammatical core, and a common grade of complexity, and that this points to the presence of identical linguistic structures in everyone's brain from birth" (107). Both Daimond and Graslund use the example of the Creole language to support Chomsky's theory (160). For example children who have grown up only listening to pidgeon (an early form of creole) from their parents, and have gone on to speak Creole, which includes syntax (108). Graslund goes on to write, "the realization that there are certain common inherited components behind the basic construction of all languages, fixed in the make-up of the human brain, leads us to the conclusion that even modern speech has a long and unbroken biological and cultural tradition that links us with the most remote past" (109). Both Graslund and Daimond also use the fact that Cro-Magnons left behind tools as evidence that Cro-Magnons communicated with each other through spoken language (115).
Graslund believes that our ability to walk upright is one of the reasons that humans are able to use speech, while Daimond believes that bipedalism's most important function was that it allowed humans to make tools (34). Daimond states, "the upright posture freed our ancestor's forelimbs to do other things, among which tool making proved the most important"(34). Unlike what Graslund wrote, "Bipedalism is the mother of human speech"(117).
The most important contribution to the evolution of human language appears to be the genetic blueprint that is embedded in our brain, since we are born to learn a language.