Book Announcement

Mother Tongue's editorial board is pleased to announce that our editor Pierre Bancel recently published his book Pris aux mots – De l'origine du langage à l'origine des langues (in French, in case you did not notice from its title), appeared in April 2024 at Editions Exils, Paris.

It adopts a definitely evolutionary perspective to explain how a speechless ape species, in a series of steps, conquered first the human voice, then a host of hum interjections, then the first syllables, then a lot of them, and finally assembled them into narrations before syntax evolved.

He has unearthed several striking facts, some already known to a few long-rangers, like the Proto-Sapiens negative/prohibitive particle *ma, some others which had gone unnoticed, like the universality of hum interjections in modern humans, and made some stunning observations, such as his granddaughter Celeste, aged 22 months, telling the complete story of their encounter with a singing cuckoo.

Dear readers sadly unfamiliar with la langue de Molière (as well as Paul Broca, Louis Pasteur, Ferdinand de Saussure and a few others), wipe your tears and keep an eye out for the English translation of this indispensable book, which is well underway.