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The Origins of Language

Los orígenes del lenguaje

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30 views9 pages

The Origins of Language

Los orígenes del lenguaje

Uploaded by

AAA BBB
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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THE ORIGINS OF

LANGUAGE

Juan Torres Ampuero


M.A. in Linguistics
How language originated!

 There are no artifacts relating to the speech of our


distant ancestors.

 Some type of spoken language must have developed


between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

 Written language was developed about 5,000 years


ago.
The divine source
 Biblical tradition:
God created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called
every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
 Hindu tradition:
Language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma,
creator of the Universe.
 All in all, in most religions a divine source provides
humans with language. Therefore, some experiments
were carried out to rediscover the original devine
language.
 There is no ‘spontaneous’ language!
The natural sound source
 Primitive words derive from imitation of the natural
sounds that early men and women heard around them.
 The “bow-wow” theory:
All modern languages have some words with
pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring
sounds, e.g. coo, splash, boom, hiss, etc. However, we do
have names for soundless things and abstract objects.
 The “pooh-pooh” theory:
Speech developed from the instinctive sounds
people make in emotional circumstances, e.g. cries of
pain, anger or joy, such as: Ouch! Wow! or Phew!
However, these sounds are usually produced with sudden
intakes of breath which is the opposite of ordinary talk.
The social interaction source
 The “yo-he-ho” theory:
A group of early humans might develop a set of
hums, grunts, groans and curses that was used to
coordinate communal physical effort.
 The development of human language is placed in a
social context.
 Groups of early humans were necessarily social
organizations and, to maintain those organizations,
some form of communication was required.
 Nevertheless, apes and other primates live in social
groups and use grunts and social calls, but they do
not seem to have developed the capacity for speech.
The physical adaptation source
 In the study of evolutionary development, there are certain physical
features, best thought of as partial adaptations, which appear to be
relevant for speech.
 Teeth and lips: Human teeth are upright, not slanting outwards like
those of apes, and they are roughly even in height. Human lips have
much more intricate muscle interlacing than is found in other
primates.
 Mouth and tongue: The human mouth is relatively small compared
to other primates and can be opened and closed rapidly. Humans
have a shorter, thicker and more muscular tongue that can be used
to shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral cavity.
 Larynx and pharynx: In the course of human physical
development, the assumption of an upright posture moved the head
more directly above the spinal column and the larynx dropped to a
lower position. This created a longer cavity called the pharynx, above
the vocal folds, which acts as a resonator for increased range and
clarity of the sounds.
The tool-making source
 By about two million years ago, there is evidence that
humans had developed preferential right-handedness
and had become capable of making stone tools.
 Wood tools and composite tools eventually followed.
Tool-making, or the outcome of manipulating objects
and changing them using both hands, is evidence of a
brain at work.
 The human brain: Apparently, there was an
evolutionary connection between the language-using
and tool-using abilities of humans and that both were
involved in the development of the speaking brain.
The genetic source
 Even children who are born deaf (and do not develop
speech) become fluent sign language users, given
appropriate circumstances, very early in life. This
seems to indicate that human offspring are born with a
special capacity for language.
 It is innate, no other creature seems to have it, and it
isn’t tied to a specific variety of language.
 As a solution to the puzzle of the origins of language,
this innateness hypothesis would seem to point to
something in human genetics, possibly a crucial
mutation, as the source.
 The investigation of the origins of language then turns
into a search for the special “language gene” that only
humans possess.
The
End

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