Singing was often considered in late-eighteenth-century discussions about the origins of language. Several scholars hypothesized that original languages had musical properties and linked the early languages to singing. That is, from an evolutionary perspective, there were a singing languages prior to the development of a spoken language. For example, the German philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) published an essay that considered singing in his writing about the origins of language in 1772 (Herder, 1772). An interest in the singing origins of language continues in contemporary literature (e.g., Brown, 2000)