User:Anika Von

Origin of Language

Language is the systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings.

 Theories on the Origin of Language 

1. The Divine Source - Most faiths believe that language is a gift from God to the human species. In the Garden of Eden, God granted Adam the reign of all creatures, and the first thing Adam did was name these animals. According to religious traditions, this is how language began. People today speak many distinct languages rather than just one because ancient humanity were too arrogant to build the Tower of Babel in order to approach God. As a result, God punished them by dividing their tongues.

2. The Natural Sound Source - The underlying concept is that language is founded on natural sounds, and primitive words might have been imitations of such sounds. There are such terms, but not all of them. We have a cuckoo, a rattle, and a hiss. There's also Ooh, Wow. Yet, because such interjections are produced by abrupt inhalation, which is the reverse of regular speaking, they are not considered candidates for language source sounds.

3. The Social Interaction Source - The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and had to be coordinated. The importance of yo-he-ho theory is that it places the development of human language in some SOCIAL CONTEXT. Early people lived in groups. Groups offered better protection from attack. Groups are social organization. In a group, communication is required. So human sounds were produced.

4. The Physical Adaptation Source - This Theory is based on the physical characteristics of humans. Especially those who stand out from the crowd. Our forefathers made a big adjustment to upright posture, bipedalism, and a new role for the front limbs. The hypothesis is based on the notion that there is a connection between physical gesture and orally generated sounds. First and foremost, a set of bodily gestures was created as a medium of communication. Then a set of oral gestures, particularly those involving the mouth, evolved in which motions of the tongue, lips, and so on were detected using movement patterns comparable to physical gestures.

5. The Tool-Making Source

- The human brain is large in comparison to the human body. It is also lateralized, with different functions in each hemisphere. In the left hemisphere of the brain, the processes that regulate movement of complicated vocalization and tool use are near to one other. The capacity to take two, say, pebbles and combine them to produce anything was required for tool-making. The same capacity may have been used to combine sounds to develop a new tool - language.

6. The Genetic Source

- The innateness hypothesis is a linguistic theory of language acquisition that holds that humans have some knowledge of language at birth. Noam Chomsky first proposed this hypothesis, which supports linguistic nativism. Statistics concerning the complexity of human language systems, the universality of language acquisition, the ease with which infants acquire these systems, and adults' comparative performance in trying the same task are all frequently referenced in support. 