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.Ljiljana Progovac, a linguist in Wayne State University in the U.S., is one of the latter. In a recent study, she argued that humans’ ability to be witty with their words could have been sexually selected for, in a similar way peahens select peacocks with a brighter plumage. She said she believes the idea of “survival of the wittiest” needs to be added to the complex picture of human evolution.Using syntactic theory, which says sentences have an inherent hierarchical structure to them, she reconstructed what she believes is the earliest stage of grammar: a combination of two words at a time, a verb and a noun (such as “eat food” or “seek truth”). Syntax, the rules that dictate how words and phrases should be used together to form meaningful sentences, grammar, and language — everything must have evolved gradually from these simple verb-noun compounds, she said.“By deconstructing language evolution and coming up with the first stage, you can actually see why the next stage would evolve, because [the first stage] already provides a foundation.”‘Living fossils of language’She then realised many modern languages also have such verb-noun compounds, like “pickpocket”, “killjoy”, “crybaby”, and “scatterbrain” in English.“So then, because they resemble the stage that I reconstructed, I called them fossils, living fossils of language,” Dr. Progovac said. “Because they show properties that I predicted the earliest stages had to have.”Some believe language does not leave behind fossils as evidence, but Dr. Progovac’s findings challenge that notion.“And sure, we are not going to find language in the stones,” she said. “But these are even better fossils, because in a way, language never died. It just kept building and living in different generations.”According to her, she realised these verb noun compounds mostly seemed to describe humans in a funny, typically negative way — like witty banter.