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Aug 22, 2019 · 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.
Relevant to language revitalization are clear suggestions and proposals on how to shape a national language policy in a manner that would address the impact of over 100 years of language policy that prohibited and punished the use of Indigenous languages in residential schools.
While we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago, the secret to how language evolved is still unknown, and mainstream theories fall into two distinctly different camps.
- Language came about and evolved over time in order for humans to survive and develop. It was first invented and used by Homo sapiens, but researche...
- Language evolved from the human need to communicate with each other in order to hunt, farm and defend themselves successfully from their harsh envi...
- Darwin called the evolution of language "pre-adaptation," which is now known as exaptation. This concept explains how a species uses an adaptation...
- Researchers don’t agree on what the first language among humans was. Some believe that the proto-language of Homo habilis was the first real langua...
- Overview
- Historical attitudes toward language
As is evident from the discussion above, human life in its present form would be impossible and inconceivable without the use of language. People have long recognized the force and significance of language. Naming—applying a word to pick out and refer to a fellow human being, an animal, an object, or a class of such beings or objects—is only one part of the use of language, but it is an essential and prominent part. In many cultures people have seen in the ability to name a means to control or to possess; this explains the reluctance, in some communities, with which names are revealed to strangers and the taboo restrictions found in several parts of the world on using the names of persons recently dead. Such restrictions echo widespread and perhaps universal taboos on naming directly things considered obscene, blasphemous, or very fearful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, several independent traditions ascribe a divine or at least a supernatural origin to language or to the language of a particular community. The biblical account, representing ancient Jewish beliefs, of Adam’s naming the creatures of the earth under God’s guidance is one such example:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (Genesis 2:19)
Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech. In the debate on the nature and origin of language given in Plato’s Socratic dialogue Cratylus, Socrates is made to speak of the gods as those responsible for first fixing the names of things in the proper way.
A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus, who, coming from Phoenicia, was said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece (see Phoenician language). By a traditional account, the Arabic alphabet, together with the language itself, was given to Adam by God.
The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) exemplifies three aspects of early thought about language: (1) divine interest in and control over its use and development, (2) a recognition of the power it gives to humans in relation to their environment, and (3) an explanation of linguistic diversity, of the fact that people in adjacent communities speak different and mutually unintelligible languages, together with a survey of the various speech communities of the world known at the time to the Hebrew people.
As is evident from the discussion above, human life in its present form would be impossible and inconceivable without the use of language. People have long recognized the force and significance of language. Naming—applying a word to pick out and refer to a fellow human being, an animal, an object, or a class of such beings or objects—is only one part of the use of language, but it is an essential and prominent part. In many cultures people have seen in the ability to name a means to control or to possess; this explains the reluctance, in some communities, with which names are revealed to strangers and the taboo restrictions found in several parts of the world on using the names of persons recently dead. Such restrictions echo widespread and perhaps universal taboos on naming directly things considered obscene, blasphemous, or very fearful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, several independent traditions ascribe a divine or at least a supernatural origin to language or to the language of a particular community. The biblical account, representing ancient Jewish beliefs, of Adam’s naming the creatures of the earth under God’s guidance is one such example:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (Genesis 2:19)
Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech. In the debate on the nature and origin of language given in Plato’s Socratic dialogue Cratylus, Socrates is made to speak of the gods as those responsible for first fixing the names of things in the proper way.
A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus, who, coming from Phoenicia, was said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece (see Phoenician language). By a traditional account, the Arabic alphabet, together with the language itself, was given to Adam by God.
The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) exemplifies three aspects of early thought about language: (1) divine interest in and control over its use and development, (2) a recognition of the power it gives to humans in relation to their environment, and (3) an explanation of linguistic diversity, of the fact that people in adjacent communities speak different and mutually unintelligible languages, together with a survey of the various speech communities of the world known at the time to the Hebrew people.
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
Oct 28, 2024 · The fundamental cause of linguistic change and hence of linguistic diversification is the minute deviations occurring in the transmission of language from one generation to another. But other factors contribute to the historical development of languages and determine the spread of a language family over the world’s surface.
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Oct 28, 2024 · In the structural aspects of spoken language, their pronunciation and grammar, and in vocabulary less closely involved in rapid cultural movement, the processes of linguistic change are best observed by comparing written records of a language over extended periods.
