Grammar Girl here, I'm Nion Fog Fog Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

This week I have a great follow-up to last week's piece about the origin of Proto-Indo-European.

We're going to talk about how humans actually started using language.

Then with St. Patrick's Day coming up, I have another follow-up about Irish Calks.

And finally, I have the delightful winning poem from the Aces National Grammar Day Poetry Contest.

Bow Wow, poo poo poo poo poo-poo, ding dong. These are not the ramblings of a toddler having a little fun with newly learned words,

but instead the humorous names given to 19th century theories on how human language got its start in our earliest

ancestors.

Most of us have probably wondered at some point how human speech became so much more complex than the way our pets or even our closest relatives the apes communicate.

Turns out, we are hardly the first to ponder this same question.

In the 19th century, discussions among scientists about the origins of language

had grown so prolific in far-fetched that several European linguistic

societies banned any writings or debate on the topic by the middle of the century. They didn't ban it because the question wasn't interesting,

but because they felt it was outside the realm of linguistics, which they viewed as a field of science

based on facts, not hypothetical guesses.

Instead, they punted the ball to philosophers, who they felt more rightly dabbled in that sort of thing, but not before a number of well-known scientific

thinkers had already provided their takes on our linguistic origin story.

Not surprisingly, Darwin, with his interest in evolution more generally, had entered

the fray early.

In his well-known book, The Descent of Man, Darwin laid out his theory of origins, which was that human language had evolved

over time as our ancestors imitated sounds in the natural world. For instance,

...