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Mar 1, 2013 · Does possessing Language, the non-individuated construct associated exclusively with humans, presuppose monogenesis or does it allow for polygenesis? How consistent is either position with paleontological evidence about the evolution of the Homo genus? How did linguistic diversity start?
- The Bow-Wow Theory
- The Ding-Dong Theory
- The La-La Theory
- The Pooh-Pooh Theory
- The Yo-He-Ho Theory
- Will We Ever Discover The Origin of Language?
- The Evolution of Human Language
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. So what's wrong with this theory? Well, relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. For inst...
This theory, favored by ancient philosophers Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them. Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there is no persuasive evidence, in any languag...
Danish linguistOtto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song. As David Crystal notes in "How Language Works," this theory still fails to account for "... the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression... ."
This theory holds that speech originated with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!"). However, no language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out that the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises used in this way "bear little relationship to the vowels and co...
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor. Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.
As American linguist Peter Farb wrote in "Word Play: What Happens When People Talk," virtually all these theories "have serious flaws, and none can withstand the scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our species." But does this mean that allquestions about the origin of language are unanswerable? N...
Still curious about language? There are several other theoriesabout the origin and evolution of human language. Among other things considered, physical adaptations in humans, such as changes in teeth, lips, and the larynx, as well as theories on the role of gestures and social bonding, contribute to the ongoing debate on the evolution of language.
Nov 15, 2016 · The origin of spoken languages is intricately and inseparably interwoven and intertwined with the origin of human species as well, and in this paper, we propose a 'Wholly-independent Multi ...
This article presents the principles of linguistic geography and palaeodemography, which indicate that language originated gradually over a diverse population of pre-languages and pre-language families.
Sep 1, 2017 · Language was built piece by piece, but not like Esperanto, which was the work of a person with linguistic models and a linguistically wired brain. Language was built by a population with a prelinguistic brain and on the basis of prelinguistic mapping principles.
- Bernard H. Bichakjian
- 2017
Apr 26, 2018 · 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.
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Mar 28, 2023 · The precise nature of language is shaped by the needs of the species (arguably, uniquely H. sapiens) utilizing it, and the emergence of new situational adaptations, as well as new forms and types of human language, demonstrates that language includes an act driven by a communicative goal.
