A History of Language

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The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. In many situations, they might need to communicate, even without visual contact—for example after nightfall or when foliage obstructs visibility.

history of the English language - Oxford A brief history of the English language - Oxford

Should an especially clever nonhuman ape, or even a group of articulate nonhuman apes, try to use words in the wild, they would carry no conviction. According to the recent African origins hypothesis, from around 60,000 – 50,000 years ago [196] a group of humans left Africa and began migrating to occupy the rest of the world, carrying language and symbolic culture with them.

Others in this intellectual camp—notably Ib Ulbæk [7]—hold that language evolved not from primate communication but from primate cognition, which is significantly more complex. A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming—the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds—to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech. Comment on "Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa" ". As a result, modern linguists have continuously debated whether the language was Nilo-Saharan or Afroasiatic.

The best books on Language - Five Books The best books on Language - Five Books

Ancient history (3000 BCE–500 CE) [ edit ] Africa [ edit ] Expansion of the Phoenician language The Vandals during the Migration period. Lorenzo, Carlos; Jarabo, Pilar; Bermúdez de Castro, José María; Carbonell, Eudald; Arsuaga, Juan Luis (1 March 2021). While all (or nearly all) have been documented in some form in the natural world, very few coexist within the same species. In particular, supporters of Noam Chomsky argue against the possibility that the mirror neuron system can play any role in the hierarchical recursive structures essential to syntax. Petkov, Christopher I; Kayser, Christoph; Steudel, Thomas; Whittingstall, Kevin; Augath, Mark; Logothetis, Nikos K (10 February 2008).B M Velichkovskiĭ; Duane M Rumbaugh; Universität Bielefeld Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung (eds. Studies of creole languages around the world have suggested that they display remarkable similarities in grammar [ citation needed] and are developed uniformly from pidgins in a single generation.

Evolution of languages - Wikipedia

For language to prevail across an entire community, however, the necessary reciprocity would have needed to be enforced universally instead of being left to individual choice. The cortical organization of lexical knowledge: A dual lexicon model of spoken language processing". In response to the objection that the larynx is descended in human females, Fitch suggests that mothers vocalizing to protect their infants would also have benefited from this ability. The pooh-pooh theory saw the first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise, etc. Citing evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo, they concur that a substantial difference must have occurred to differentiate Homo sapiens from Neanderthals to "prompt the relentless spread of our species, who had never crossed open water, up and out of Africa and then on across the entire planet in just a few tens of thousands of years.

Theories of language developing alongside tool use has been theorized by multiple individuals, [67] [68] [69] however until recently there has been little empirical data to support these hypotheses. No symbolic system could have survived from one generation to the next if it could not have been easily acquired by young children under their normal conditions of social life. e. 2 is 1 greater than 1, 3 is 1 greater than 2, 4 is 1 greater than 3; once 4 is reached it seems most children suddenly understand that the value of any integer n is 1 greater than the previous integer).