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The Origins of Language

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THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE (TASKS)

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The Origin of the English Language

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Where Did Language Come From? (Theories)

Theories on the Origin and Evolution of Language

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

The expression language origins refers to theories pertaining to the emergence and development of language in human societies.

Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward—and almost all of them have been challenged, discounted, and ridiculed. (See Where Does Language Come From? ) In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any discussion of the topic: "The Society will accept no communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language ." Contemporary linguist Robbins Burling says that "anyone who has read widely in the literature on language origins cannot escape a sneaking sympathy with the Paris linguists. Reams of nonsense have been written about the subject" ( The Talking Ape , 2005).

In recent decades, however, scholars from such diverse fields as genetics, anthropology, and cognitive science have been engaged, as Christine Kenneally says, in "a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt" to find out how language began. It is, she says, "the hardest problem in science today" ( The First Word , 2007).

Observations on the Origins of Language

" Divine origin [is the] conjecture that human language originated as a gift from God. No scholar takes this idea seriously today."

(R.L. Trask, A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics , 1997; rpt. Routledge, 2014)

"Numerous and varied explanations have been put forth to explain how humans acquired language—many of which date back to the time of the Paris ban. Some of the more fanciful explanations have been given nicknames , mainly to the effect of dismissal by ridicule. The scenario by which language evolved in humans to assist the coordination of working together (as on the pre-historic equivalent of a loading dock) has been nicknamed the 'yo-heave-ho' model. There's the 'bow-wow' model in which language originated as imitations of animal cries. In the 'poo-poo' model, language started from emotional interjections .

"During the twentieth century, and particularly its last few decades, discussion of language origins has become respectable and even fashionable. One major problem remains, however; most models about language origins do not readily lend themselves to the formation of testable hypotheses, or rigorous testing of any sort. What data will allow us to conclude that one model or another best explains how language arose?"

(Norman A. Johnson, Darwinian Detectives: Revealing the Natural History of Genes and Genomes . Oxford University Press, 2007)

Physical Adaptations

- "Instead of looking at types of sounds as the source of human speech, we can look at the types of physical features humans possess, especially those that are distinct from other creatures, which may have been able to support speech production. . . .

"Human teeth are upright, not slanting outwards like those of apes, and they are roughly even in height. Such characteristics are . . . very helpful in making sounds such as f or v . Human lips have much more intricate muscle lacing than is found in other primates and their resulting flexibility certainly helps in making sounds like p , b , and m . In fact, the b and m sounds are the most widely attested in the vocalizations made by human infants during their first year, no matter which language their parents are using."

(George Yule, The Study of Language , 5th ed. Cambridge University Press, 2014)

-  "In the evolution of the human vocal tract since the split with other apes, the adult larynx descended to its lower position. Phonetician Philip Lieberman has persuasively argued that the ultimate cause of the human lowered larynx is its function in producing different vowels . This is a case of natural selection for more effective communication. . . .

"Babies are born with their larynxes in a high position, like monkeys. This is functional, as there is a reduced risk of choking, and babies are not yet talking. . . . By about the end of the first year, the human larynx descends to its near-adult lowered position. This is a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, the growth of the individual reflecting the evolution of the species."

(James R. Hurford, The Origins of Language . Oxford University Press, 2014)

From Words to Syntax

"Language-ready modern children learn vocabulary voraciously before they begin to make grammatical utterances several words long. So we presume that in the origins of language a one-word stage preceded our remote ancestors' first steps into grammar . The term 'protolanguage' has been widely used to describe this one-word stage, where there is vocabulary but no grammar."

The Gesture Theory of Language Origin

- "Speculation about how languages originate and evolve has had an important place in the history of ideas, and it has been intimately linked to questions about the nature of the signed languages of the deaf and human gestural behavior in general. It can be argued, from a phylogenetic perspective, the origin of human sign languages is coincident with the origin of human languages; sign languages, that is, are likely to have been the first true languages. This is not a new perspective--it is perhaps as old as nonreligious speculation about the way human language may have begun."

(David F. Armstrong and Sherman E. Wilcox, The Gestural Origin of Language . Oxford University Press, 2007)

- "[A]n analysis of the physical structure of visible gesture provides insights into the origins of syntax , perhaps the most difficult question facing students of the origin and evolution of language . . .. It is the origin of syntax that transforms naming into language, by enabling human beings to comment on and think about the relationships between things and events, that is, by enabling them to articulate complex thoughts and, most important, share them with others. . . .

"We are not the first to suggest a gestural origin of language. [Gordon] Hewes (1973; 1974; 1976) was one of the first modern proponents of a gestural origins theory. [Adam] Kendon (1991: 215) also suggests that 'the first kind of behaviour that could be said to be functioning in anything like a linguistic fashion would have had to have been gestural.' For Kendon, as for most others who consider gestural origins of language, gestures are placed in opposition to speech and vocalization. . . .

"While we would agree with Kendon's strategy of examining the relationships among spoken and signed languages, pantomime, graphic depiction, and other modes of human representation, we are not convinced that placing gesture in opposition to speech leads to a productive framework for understanding the emergence of cognition and language. For us, the answer to the question, 'If language began as gesture, why did it not stay that way?' is that it did. . . .

"All language, in the words of Ulrich Neisser (1976), is 'articulatory gesturing.'

"We are not proposing that language began as gesture and became vocal. Language has been and always will be gestural (at least until we evolve a reliable and universal capacity for mental telepathy)."

(David F. Armstrong, William C. Stokoe, and Sherman E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language . Cambridge University Press, 1995)

- "If, with [Dwight] Whitney, we think of 'language' as a complex of instrumentalities which serve in the expression of 'thought' (as he would say--one might not wish to put it quite like this today), then gesture is part of 'language.' For those of us with an interest in language conceived of in this way, our task must include working out all the intricate ways in which gesture is used in relation to speech and of showing the circumstances in which the organization of each is differentiated from the other as well as the ways in which they overlap. This can only enrich our understanding of how these instrumentalities function. If, on the other hand, we define 'language' in structural terms, thus excluding from consideration most, if not all, of the kinds of gestural usages I have illustrated today, we may be in danger of missing important features of how language, so defined, actually succeeds as an instrument of communication. Such a structural definition is valuable as a matter of convenience, as a way of delimiting a field of concern. On the other hand, from the point of view of a comprehensive theory of how humans do all the things they do by means of utterances, it cannot be sufficient."

(Adam Kendon, "Language and Gesture: Unity or Duality?" Language and Gesture , ed. by David McNeill. Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Language as a Device for Bonding

"[T]he size of human social groups gives rise to a serious problem: grooming is the mechanism that is used to bond social groups among primates, but human groups are so large that it would be impossible to invest enough time in grooming to bond groups of this size effectively. The alternative suggestion, then, is that language evolved as a device for bonding large social groups--in other words, as a form of grooming-at-a-distance. The kind of information that language was designed to carry was not about the physical world, but rather about the social world. Note that the issue here is not the evolution of grammar as such, but the evolution of language. Grammar would have been equally useful whether language evolved to subserve a social or a technological function."

(Robin I.A. Dunbar, "The Origin and Subsequent Evolution of Language." Language Evolution , ed. by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby. Oxford University Press, 2003)

Otto Jespersen on Language as Play (1922)

- "[P]rimitive speakers were not reticent and reserved beings, but youthful men and women babbling merrily on, without being so particular about the meaning of each word. . . . They chattered away for the mere pleasure of chattering . . ..  [P]rimitive speech . . . resembles the speech of little baby himself, before he begins to frame his own language after the pattern of the grownups; the language of our remote forefathers was like that ceaseless humming and crooning with which no thoughts are as yet connected, which merely amuses and delights the little one. Language originated as play, and the organs of speech were first trained in this singing sport of idle hours."

(Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin , 1922)

- "It is quite interesting to note that these modern views [on the commonality of language and music and of language and dance] were anticipated in great detail by Jespersen (1922: 392-442). In his speculations about the origin of language, he arrived at the view that referential language must have been preceded by singing, which in its turn was functional in fulfilling the need for sex (or love), on the one hand, and the need for coordinating collective work, on the other. These speculations have, in turn, their origins in [Charles] Darwin's 1871 book The Descent of Man :

we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes, serving to express various emotions. . . . The imitation by articulate sounds of musical cries might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.

(quoted from Howard 1982: 70)

The modern scholars mentioned above agree in rejecting the well-known scenario according to which language originated as a system of monosyllabic grunt-like sounds that had the (referential) function of pointing at things. Instead, they propose a scenario according to which referential meaning was slowly grafted upon nearly autonomous melodious sound."

(Esa Itkonen, Analogy as Structure and Process: Approaches in Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology and Philosophy of Science . John Benjamins, 2005)

Divided Views on the Origins of Language (2016)

"Today, opinion on the matter of language origins is still deeply divided. On the one hand, there are those who feel that language is so complex, and so deeply ingrained in the human condition, that it must have evolved slowly over immense periods of time. Indeed, some believe that its roots go all the way back to  Homo habilis , a tiny-brained hominid that lived in Africa not far short of two million years ago. On the other, there are those like [Robert] Berwick and [Noam] Chomsky who believe that humans acquired language quite recently, in an abrupt event. Nobody is in the middle on this one, except to the extent that different extinct hominid species are seen as the inaugurators of language’s slow evolutionary trajectory.

"That this deep dichotomy of viewpoint has been able to persist (not only among linguists, but among paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and others) for as long as anyone can remember is due to one simple fact: at least until the very recent advent of writing systems , language has left no trace in any durable record. Whether any early humans possessed language, or didn’t, has had to be inferred from indirect proxy indicators. And views have diverged greatly on the matter of what is an acceptable proxy."

(Ian Tattersall, "At the Birth of Language."   The New York Review of Books , August 18, 2016)

• Where Does Language Come From?: Five Theories on the Origins of Language
• Cognitive Linguistics  and  Neurolinguistics
• Five Theories on the Origins of Language
• Displacement in Language
• Holophrase in Language Acquisition
• Duality of Patterning in Language
• The Sound 'Schwa' With Definition and Examples in English
• Observations on What Is Language
• An Introduction to Semantics
• What Is Psycholinguistics?
• The Cultural Transmission of Language
• Universal Grammar (UG)
• The Theory of Poverty of the Stimulus in Language Development
• Definition and Examples of Linguists
• Indeterminacy (Language)
• 10 Types of Grammar (and Counting)
• Pragmatics Gives Context to Language
• Defining Philology

Darwin on the Origin of Language

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2021
• pp 1737–1740
• Cite this reference work entry

• Demetra Themistocleous 3 &
• Xenia Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous 3  

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The musical protolanguage model ; Theories of language

Charles Darwin proposed theories of how language emerged. His theories availed for his observations on both animals and humans.

Introduction

In his book, On the Origin of Species , Darwin intentionally did not refer to human evolution in detail (Darwin 1859 ). Although it was perceived that this was a mere oversight, this was not true. Darwin carefully avoided to thoroughly refer to his hypothesis on human evolution because he knew that his theory would not be accepted, but rather it would probably provoke the existing insurmountable opposition. His rivals, however, emphasized the importance of human mind, and language in particular, to compete Darwin’s work. Friedrich Max Müller, one of the reputed scholars of that time, was considered as Darwin’s most intimidating rival on the linguistic front (Stam 1976 ). In 1861, Müller delivered lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. These lectures, entitled as...

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Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species (1st ed.). London: John Murray. Retrieved from http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1861_OriginNY_F382.pdf .

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Farrar, F. W. (1870). Philology & Darwinism. Nature, 1 , 527–529.

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Fitch, W. T. (2005). The evolution of music in comparative perspective. In G. Avanzini, L. Lopez, S. Koelsch, & M. Majno (Eds.), The neurosciences and music II: From perception to performance (Vol. 1060, pp. 29–49). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

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Mithen, S. (2005). The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind, and body . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Müller, F. M. (1861). The theoretical stage, and the origin of language. In Lectures on the science of language . London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32856/32856pdf.pdf?session_id=91e4fa60940e5aa84d77d785be62cef8153f5f5c .

Stam, J. H. (1976). Inquiries into the origin of language: The fate of a question . New York: Harper & Row.

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Themistocleous, D., Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, X. (2021). Darwin on the Origin of Language. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1122

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

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The Origin of Language

Mar 17, 2019

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The Origin of Language. Where did language come from?.

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Where did language come from? • Since the early 1990s, a growing number of professional linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others have attempted to address with new methods what they are beginning to consider "the hardest problem in science."[4] …the origin of language.

How old is human language? • Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old.

What or who created language?

#1 Belief in the Divine Creation of Language • Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans.  The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that the first man, Adam, gave names to all living creatures.  This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language.  •       It can't be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and human society are inseparable.  Wherever humans exist language exists. 

#2 Natural Evolution Hypothesis • At some point in their evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible.    • The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from our primate ancestors soon became a creative system of language. As soon as humans developed the capacity for creative language, cultural development would have been an inevitable next step. 

#3 Invention Hypotheses • If humans acquired the capacity for language either by divine gift or by evolution, then exactly how might humans have devised the first language? • There are several hypotheses as to how language might have been consciously invented by humans.Most linguists agree that the origin of language is still a mystery. 

Regardless of whether language was a special gift from the gods, a natural evolutionary acquisition, or an ingenious, conscious human invention, language came to exist! • Since there are over 5,000 languages spoken on Earth today, a second question arises: Was there one or more than one original language?   We know that there were even more spoken in the past, when most people lived in small bands or tribes rather than in large states.

What did man’s original language sound like?How did so many diverse languages come to exist today? • No one is sure—only theories exist. We will explore some of those theories.

There are three age-old beliefs regarding the origin of the world's present number of languages.

The Hypothesis of Parallel Evolution (or the Candelabra Theory) • As humans evolved at the same time in more than one location; each group developed its own unique language.  This hypothesis is called theCandelabra theory.  Each of the original languages then would have changedinto numerous forms.  The major language families of today would be descended from these separate mother tongues.

The Mother Tongue theory(or the Original Language) • This theory holds that one original language spoken by a single group of Homo sapiens perhaps as early as 150 thousand years ago gave rise to all human languages spoken on the Earth today. • As humans colonized various continents, this original mother tongue diverged through time to form the numerous languages spoken today.  Since many scientists believe that the first fully modern humans appeared in Africa, the mother tongue theory is connected with a more general theory of human origin known as the Out of Africa theory.

Migration of Languages

Religious theories: • The oldest belief is that there was a single, original language.  In Judeo-Christian tradition, the original language was confused by divine intervention, as described in the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. • There is a similar story from the Toltecs of pre-Columbian Mexico, who tell of the building of the great pyramid at Cholula, and the dispersal of the builders by an angry god.  And other similar stories are found in other parts of the world. 

Some humorous theories proposed by scholars: • A German scholar of the last century statedthat German was the first language and that all other languages are inferior corruptions of it. Other European linguists conferred the same exalted status on Greek or Sanskrit! • One Swedish scholar claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish and the serpent spoke French!

The Twelve Super-families of Present-Day Human Language • Linguists like Joseph Greenberg believe that all of man's languages are descended from a common ancient language, and that twelve distinct language families exist. Their evidence is that words like ``akwa'' (water) and ``dik'' (finger/one/ten) are used by distinct languages all over the world. Different linguists will divide the world's languages into `super-families” in different ways.

How do linguists create these theories? First, to try to trace the original mother tongue (or mother tongues), comparative linguists compare modern languages to try to reconstruct ancient languages.

Second, because languages change slowly, they contain all sorts of indications of ancient culture. • Study a language--any language--and you will learn much about the history of the people who speak that language. You will also be taking a crucial step toward understanding the contemporary culture of the speakers.  Linguists who study language from this cultural standpoint are called anthropological linguists.          

So what does this mean for my language: English? • The Comparative Method finds regular similarities between languages that cannot be explained by coincidence or word-borrowing, and estimates ancient language forms from these similarities. The ancestor language of English can be traced by this method.

Where does English come from? • English is one of many modern language derived from Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have determined a “family tree” of languages which descended from Proto-Indo-European. The next slide is an artistic representation of this language family tree of which English is a part.

Videos/Images http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0phq7litTc (Before Babel: In search of the first language) From 0:00 to 7:40 minutes and 41:40-47:30 min.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/world_languages.html http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/ling001/world_languages.html • http://9gag.com/gag/3629214 • http://golden-zephyr.tumblr.com/image/32334248366 • http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_Proto-Indo-European

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