Edinilson Luís Salé

Paida Cumbane

Baffir Baptista

Daniel Chico

Ginildo Augusto

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Licenciatura em Ensino de Inglês

Universidade Unirovuma

Niassa

2020

i
 Edinilson Luís Saé

Paida Cumbane

Baffir Baptista

Daniel Chico

Ginildo Augusto

The origin of language

Work elaborated in the chair

of General Linguistic for the
department of the language
science with the Teacher: Dr.
Janete Azizi

Universidade Unirovuma

Niassa

2020

ii
INDEX

Introduction………………………………………………….………….03

The origin of language………………………………………………...04

The divine sources. …………………………………….…………….05

The scientific approach……………………………….……….………06

The natural sounds………………………………….…………………07

The nature sounds sources………..…………………….….………..08

The oral-gesture sources……………………………….…..…………09

Conclusion……………………………………………….……………..10

Bibliography…………………………………………….….…………...11

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INTRODUCTION

In present work, we’ll talk about the origin of language on different

sources, theories such as, and according with George Yule is a quite different
view of the begging of language, is based on concept of natural sounds. The
human auditory system is already functioning before birth (at round seven
months). That early processing capacity develops into an ability to identify
sounds in the environment, allowing humans to make a connection between a
sound and the thing producing that sound.

This leads to the idea that primitive word derive from imitation of the natural
sounds that early men and women heard around them.

This work has so much information about the origin of language, so, there are
also “the divine sources “, the natural sounds and so on.

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THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

We don’t usually think of speaking as similar to chewing, licking and

sucking, but, like speaking, all of these action involve movements of the mouth,
tongue and lips in some kind of controlled way. So, perhaps this connection is
not as improbable as it first sounds. It is an example of the type of observation
that can lead to interesting speculations about the origins of spoken language.
They remain, however, speculations, not facts. We simply don’t know how
language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed
between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about
5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier periods of life on earth, we
never find any direct evidence or artifacts relating to the speech of our distant
ancestors that might tell us how language was back in the early stages.
Perhaps because of this absence of direct physical evidence, there has been no
shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech. In this chapter, we
will consider the merits of some of those speculations.

THE DIVINE SOURCES

In the biblical tradition, God created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called
every living creature, that was the name thereof”. Alternatively, following a
Hindu tradition, language came from Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the
universe. In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides
humans with language. In an attempt to rediscover this original divine language,
a few experiments have been carried out, with rather conflicting results. The
basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if human infants were allowed to
grow up without hearing any language around them, then they would
spontaneously begin using the original God-given language.

An Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus tried the experiment with two

newborn babies more than 2,500 years ago. After two years in the company of
goats and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to have spontaneously
uttered, not an Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the Phrygian
word bekos, meaning ‘bread’.

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 The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian, an older language spoken in a part
of what is modern Turkey, must be the original language. That seems very
unlikely. The children may not have picked up this ‘word’ from any human
source, but as several commentators have pointed out, they must have heard
what the goats were saying. (First remove the -kos ending, which was added in
the Greek version of the story, then pronounce be- as you would the English
word bed without -d at the end. Can you hear a goat?) King James the Fourth of
Scotland carried out a similar experiment around the year 1500 and the children
were reported to have started speaking Hebrew. It is unfortunate that all other
cases of children who have been discovered living in isolation, without coming
into contact with human speech, tend not to confirm the results of these types of
‘divine-source’ experiments.

Very young children living without access to human language in their early
years grow up with no language at all. (We will consider the case of one such
child later in chapter 13.) If human language did emanate from a divine source,
we have no way of reconstructing that original language, especially given the
events in a city called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the
language of all the earth”, as described in the book of Genesis (11: 9).

In short: In most religions, it is believed that language is a God- given gift to

human species. In Christianity, God gave Adam the kingdom of all animals in
the Garden of Eden and the first thing Adam did was to name these animals.
That is how language started according to religious sources. Today people
speak many different languages rather than only one language because ancient
humans became too proud and they tried to build the Tower of Babel in order to
reach God. So, God punished them by separating their languages. People tried
to discover the original divine language which was spoken by our most ancient
ancestors. They assumed that if a child was brought up without hearing any
language, the first word the child would utter would be in this divine language.

THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

During the many centuries when scientists have studied human language, a
large number of definitions have emerged. To indicate how widely these

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definitions differ, it will suffice to quote just two examples: According to Bertrand
Russell (1940) "language consists of noises made by persons with a view to
causing desired actions by other persons", whereas John P. Hughes (1967)
stated that "language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by which thought is
conveyed from one human being to another." Not only do these definitions
widely diverge', they also use terms such as symbol, thought etc. on the
definition of which there is no agreement either. At the root of this predicament
is the fact that all those definitions are ex- pressed in words which in turn are
part of the language to be defined. Hence those definitions are circular and
inadequate. The lack of an appropriate definition of human language poses a
problem when one tries to trace the origin of this language.

As long as there is no agreement on the characteristics of human

language, how can one expect to determine the point in its evolution at which
the methods, by which animals communicate, turned into the human way of
speaking to each other? Obviously, the two subjects, definition and origin of
human language, are closely entwined. This fact will become even more evident
during the discussions of this paper which deals with a new approach to
defining human language. The new definition is non-circular and based on well-
defined concepts instead of words. It will delimit human language from other so-
called languages, such as the language of the bees or computer languages,
The new definition will enable the author to trace the factors which were
predominant in the rise of human language. Since language is one of man's
most important attributes, a new insight into man's emergence from the animal
state will also be obtained.

THE NATURE SOUND

Natural sounds are any sounds produced by non-human organisms as

well as those generated by natural, non-biological sources within their normal
soundscapes. It is a category whose definition is open for discussion. Natural
sounds create an acoustic space. The historical background of natural sounds
as they have come to be defined, begins with the recording of a single bird, by
Ludwig Koch, as early as 1889. Koch's efforts in the late 19th and early 20th

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centuries set the stage for the universal audio capture model of single- species-
primarily birds at the outset-that subsumed all others during the first half of the
20th century and well into the latter half and into the early 21st, as well. In late
1968, influenced by acoustic efforts in the fields of music and film, this model
began to evolve into a much more holistic effort with attention paid to the
acoustic experience of entire habitats, inclusive of all the wild animal voices.
Expressed as wild soundscapes, these phenomena included sounds primarily
from two main sources, non-human and non- domestic wild ones, and non-
biological sources in relatively undisturbed habitats. In the early years of the
21st century, the definition of the soundscape was broken down into three
components: the geophony, non-biological natural sounds that include the
effects of water by a stream or waves at the ocean, the effects of wind in the
trees or grasses, and sound generated by the earth, itself, for example, glaciers,
avalanches and earthquakes; the biophony, all the non-human, non-domestic
sounds that emanate from a relatively undisturbed habitat; and anthrophony, all
sound generated by human endeavor, whether music, theatre, or
electromechanical.

NATURAL SOUNDS SOURCES

'The "Bow-bow" Theory'

All languages have sounds that mimic the natural sounds. These are called
onomatopoeic words. Some examples from Turkish are şırıl şırıl, hav hav,
miyav, lıkır likır, etc. One belief is that human languages originated from these
onomatopoeic words that mimic the sounds of entities or actions to which they
refer. Thus, for example, miyav originally would be a word to refer to cats.

'The "Pooh-pooh" Theory'

According to this assumption language originated with the use of sounds that
reflect emotions such as pain, fear, hunger, surprise, and the sounds of laughter
and crying, etc. Some examples of these sounds are üf, ayyy, yaa, vay, etc.
However, these sounds of emotion do not necessarily exist in the vocabulary of

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human language. Therefore, it is not plausible to assume that sounds of
emotion are the basis for human language.

The "Yo-heave-ho" Theory'

According to this proposal, early human beings used some sounds when they
were doing some collaborative work. For example, when they were lifting a
huge animal that they hunted, they used sounds to do their task for physical
coordination and to reach their message to their friends that they share the
burden of their job. It is claimed that these sounds eventually turned out into a
language.

THE ORAL-GESTURE SOURCE

People use some nonverbal communication when they speak. For example, we
wave hands to say good-bye; we nod our heads to show our approval or to
mean 'yes', we produce a sound by our tongue when we mean 'no'. The oral-
gesture source suggests that language started with the gestures that we use by
our mouth and other speech organs.

GLOSSOGENETICS

Our ancestors became bipedal (standing and walking on their two legs) about
3.5 million years ago. When these humans could stand on their two legs, their
larynx (a speech organ behind Adam's apple in the human throat) changed in a
way to allow humans to produce vowel and consonant sounds in human
languages. Human language developed as a result of this evolutionary.

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CONCLUSION

For this point, how we know the work was talking about origin of
language, and we understood that, to know about the origin of language isn’t
easier there are a large number of definitions have emerged, all of them talking
about the origin of language but each one has his opinion and we have ours.

The origin of language began with the vowel sounds, because all of us
were born knowing some of them for example the vowel “a”, when a baby is
born she cries “huhaah”, the vowel “u” is not understandable but they emit the
vowel a.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

YULE, George. The Study of Language. 3rd edition, Cambridge. C. U. P.

2006, Pp 01-03

YULE, George. The study of language. 4th edition, Cambridge: 2010, PP 01-
04

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