What are some theories about the origin of language?

Answer 1

There are few theories and there few opinions as to how language began, but based on little foundation. It has often been thought that the theory of language is not for serious study. The only theory may be that language can not appear from nothing and thus appeared by accident. There are no historical traces as to how this may have happened. The theory of language is the hardest problem in science

From The KJV Bible story, and conformation by the science of Linguistics. announced to The Asiatick Society of Calcutta in 1786.

Around 5000 Gregorian years ago Moses wrote in "Genesis", his first book.

And the Lord said. Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imaged to do. Go to, let US go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8. So the Lord scattered them abroad across the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. [GENESIS 11:6-7-8.]

The truth of there being an original phonic language, was anounced in 1786 by Sir William Jones; that Sanscrit had to be related to Greek, and Latin, establishing the science now call Linguistics.

Theories are hypothetical expediencies, specific for each language and in notions, in academic studies in humanities,Social Sciences and sciences .

Language is universally accepted as unique in the higher extant genera species in Homo sapiens as vocalized expression with syntactic & semantic structural content as a social interact.

Theories have been expounded and refuted in the erudite circles .However if the Darwinian hypothesis is to be considered as a gradual evolutionary process for development of the hominids who responded to natural phenomenons in motor impulse to evolve a higher extant genera in the span of 800000 million years or more, the anthropological evidence cannot be ignored with evidence in the development of 600 cu cent to 800 cu cent of cranial matter and complex nervous anatomical connectivity to sensory cortices with release of specific bio chemicals in blood in higher order to assimilate cognitive concepts and associate recall in differentiated vocalization of phonemes as expressions for cognitive concepts in the differentiated distribution of the human hominids from Africa to Asia .The syntactic structure evolved later as social interaction. Language in its origin is differentiated in higher orders. In the lower order the cognitive matrix limits response to vocal motor output with the bio chemical secretion in the blood apart in release of pheromones for detection and response as precepts.

The theological hypothesis :

In The Bible, all humanity made a ladder to get closer to god, but started to argue who was more qualified and better suited to meet god. So, god made them stop arguing by making them speak different languages. That's if you believe that, me personally, think that it was just human nature to be able to communicate, and eventually evolved the grunts into alphabet and went from there, different languages because different people think in different ways. for example: if you get a team of people on one task, they will all come up with different ways to get the job done.

AnswerThe immediate origin of language is unknown. It seems reasonable to believe that speech evolved from the vocalizations of animals, but since there are no primitive languages, and no primitive people either - only primitive economies - it is impossible to describe how that may have come about.

Ultimately the origin of language is the need to communicate, and that is as old as life itself, or at least as old as sexual reproduction. Solitary creatures who reproduce by cellular division or budding may not need to communicate with each other, but all other creatures, plants and animals alike, communicate like crazy in various and gloriously different ways. The scent of fruit and the look of flowers are actual examples of plants communicating with animals.

Human speech, though, is an artefact, not a natural process. It is entirely learned behavior, and must be learned very young. And whether there is any other language than human on Earth is problematic. Certainly there is the organized transmission of abstract information in the dance of the honeybee and the chemical telegrams of the ants; and the flashing squid can say "hello Cutie" and "scram, Buster" at the same time. Somehow all the wolves know what to do. And we have no idea what the whales and porpoises might be saying. For all we know it's poetry.

It has been suggested, only half jokingly, that the real origin of human language was the need for an alibi. It is impossible to lie effectively to anybody with grunts and roars; bluffing is the best you can do.

AnswerThe origin of language is unknown.

With reference to some of the comments above, the distinctive feature of all human language is this: With a limited set of rules and a limited vocabularly it is possible to produce a set of utterances ot sentences that is either infinite or as good as infinite. (This does not apply to communication between other living creatures, which can only send a limited set of fixed signals: they cannot rearrange them).

The statement above that language "is entirely learned behavior" is problematical. Most linguists take the view that the native language is acquired in infancy, not learned. Infants are not taught to speak their native language; they 'pick it up'. The speed with which they acquire the language(s) spoken in their environment suggest that babies are genetically 'programmed' to acquire language.

In reference to this last emendation, language is unquestionably learned, acquired or "picked up" in infancy. There is no useful distinction between those terms. Children who do not encounter language will not invent it on their own, and adults who have never encountered language cannot acquire it. Also, a child born to parents in one culture but raised in another culture will "pick up", or rapidly learn, the language of the new culture, and not the language of the parents' homeland.

Answer

I would like to draw the above distinction more carefully, around the following point.

The idea was originally floated that human beings are a "tabula rasa" - a blank slate. Noam Chomsky (I was told that his was the pivotal point) pointed out that, if the mind started with nothing, none of the perceptual input would mean anything at all to it. Thus, conversely: the mind must be pre-programmed to be able to acquire language through (among other things) hearing speech.

Those who subscribe to the evolutionary explanation for what we are now will thus believe that the mind evolved the ability to learn speech from hearing it, although ostensibly there is a big chicken-vs-egg question here about, on the one hand, how and why this would evolve in the absence of speech and, on the other hand, how speech could be passed on to the next generation without it. Arguably, the solution (assuming there is one) is to postulate that language itself developed gradually, from (say) several grunts that represented important environmental things such as food or danger; these could be learned by association. Slightly more complex utterances could be explicitly taught.

However, although the faculty of being able to acquire elementary verbal communication just by hearing and observing its use (with or without explicit teaching of sound/meaning pairs) requires merely classical conditioning (which is pretty simple, mentally) the ability to implicitly [that is: like a baby does] acquire language in the sense of syntax and grammar, with their infinite possibilities for creating novel utterances that will be meaningful to others (arguably) represents one of those complete mental algorithms that I find so difficult to see as arising instantly and usefully from one random genetic change. (Indeed, that genetic information might specify a mental algorithm at all is something that I would not believe, apart from the brute fact that it does.)

The alternative, of course, is to believe that human beings were created by a god (who did not him-/her-self evolve). This would not only allow for language to develop much faster, but indeed the possibility that we have always had it.

I am not necessarily pushing religion; my point is that the question is a very difficult one, unless one adopts the simple answer that a god did it. (This leaves the amazing complexity of real-world language, but removes the need to explain, additionally, how it might have developed gradually.)

Answer 2

Some theories about the origin of language include the bow-wow theory (imitation of natural sounds), the pooh-pooh theory (emotional outbursts), the ding-dong theory (onomatopoeia), the yo-he-ho theory (effort sounds), and the ta-ta theory (gestures and body language). These theories attempt to explain how early humans may have developed language communication.