The origins of language- (original) (raw)
Biosemiotics, 2010
Thomas Sebeok and Noam Chomsky are the acknowledged founding fathers of two research fields which are known respectively as Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics and which have been developed in parallel during the past 50 years. Both fields claim that language has biological roots and must be studied as a natural phenomenon, thus bringing to an end the old divide between nature and culture. In addition to this common goal, there are many other important similarities between them. Their definitions of language, for example, have much in common, despite the use of different terminologies. They both regard language as a faculty, or a modelling system, that appeared rapidly in the history of life and probably evolved as an exaptation from previous animal systems. Both accept that the fundamental characteristic of language is recursion, the ability to generate an unlimited number of structures from a finite set of elements (the property of 'discrete infinity'). Both accept that human beings are born with a predisposition to acquire language in a few years and without apparent efforts (the innate component of language). In addition to similarities, however, there are also substantial differences between the two fields, and it is an historical fact that Sebeok and Chomsky made no attempt at resolving them. Biosemiotics and Biolinguistics have become two separate disciplines, and yet in the case of language they are studying the same phenomenon, so it should be possible to bring them together. Here it is shown that this is indeed the case. A convergence of the two fields does require a few basic readjustments in each of them, but leads to a unified framework that keeps the best of both disciplines and is in agreement with the experimental evidence. What is particularly important is that such a framework suggests immediately a new approach to the origin of language. More precisely, it suggests that the brain wiring processes that take place in all phases of human ontogenesis (embryonic, foetal, infant and child development) are based on organic codes, and it is the step-by-step appearance of these brain-wiring
This paper summarizes the paragraphs about language in the book, in Spanish, entitled "Amor y origen de la Humanidad", near 700 pages, which may be downloaded in Internet (Bubok, Spain, 15$). So, it is here proposed, by the first time in English, that language was the Original Sin transmitted from the woman to the man in the first stable settlements of Mankind (in the biblical Genesis, the Garden of Eden), promoted by the neurobiological effects on children´s brains of new enriched diets and social and cultural complexity. Language is a specifically human mental function, although some neurobiological adaptations associated with communication can be found in other primates, in other mammalian orders, and even in other kinds of animals (evolutionary trend). Exposure to language is necessary for its acquisition (culture), there are specific alleles of some genes for human language (gene), and the brain circuits for language are mainly lateralized towards the left hemisphere (brain lateralization). However, some data suggest that the crucial factor for human verbal language, which originates in childhood in both, ontogeny and phylogeny, must be of motivational nature, and have at least the same importance as other genetic, brain or cultural factors. So, this article proposes that language was promoted by the building of love, and that it was maintained by hominid women as proto-language during some hundreds of thousands years through the maternal-filial interaction, until the first permanent settlements of the current human species, between 40,000 - 10,000 years ago. Also, that it was then when the woman transmitted speech to the man (it is further suggested that this may have been the Original Sin of the biblical Genesis), signalizing this transmission with the beginning of the symbolic thought, thus promoting the first artistic displays, like sculptures, painting or music, which were associated with the expansion of love and speech to the relationship between the sexes, with the consequent diversification of languages, mainly in the last 10,000 to 5,000 years. Love caused and causes human speech in both, phylogeny and ontogeny.
The Origin of Language: Why it never happened
Language Sciences, 1997
Questions about the origin of language hold an important position in the self-images of many, possibly all, of the world's known cultures. It seems, after all, a natural question to ask, from within a culture, about the historical foundations of that culture's practices. Are not some of the first reflective questions that children ask of the kind: Why do we do this? And is it not a natural response to such questions to provide an account of how the practice in question began? Why do questions about the origin of language continue to fascinate us? Perhaps this is because an account of the origin of language provides a narrative way of satisfying a people's feeling that they are special; it is a vivid and comprehensible way of explaining why, from their intra-cultural perspective, they are different, whether in contradistinction to other groups of people or to other animal species. Animal behaviorists have said that, from the perspective of the animal in the wild, the fundamental phenomenological divide is between those who want to eat me and those whom I want to eat. However, from the internal perspective of a human culture, the most important phenomenological division is between those who make sense and those who do not; or to put it in another, slightly more enlightened way, between those who make sense the way we do and those who do not. In the first case, we humans as a species are on one side of the divide and all nonhuman animals are on the other. Whereas in the second case, the divide is between those within our culture and those 'others' who, because what they say makes no sense, the ancient Greeks simply called 'barbarians'. A culture's self-image is formed as a reflexive by-product of the daily tasks of making sense of its environment, of its members' biological being, of its group activities and interactions, and of those very methods it uses, primarily verbal methods, in order to make that sense. Accordingly, those who do not make sense as we, in our culture, do-that is, members of other cultures and other species-will typically not be perceived by us merely as different versions of the same basic kind of thing that we are, but rather as categorically different: as different kinds of things entirely. Our culture's account of the origin of language is a readily grasped way of making sense of why we make sense, and they don't. An origins myth is a compelling way of explaining to ourselves, and thereby justifying to ourselves, our ways of making sense. It might, in this respect, be likened to a reflection in a mirror of that mirror's own reflective properties. Today, however, the origin of language has become the focus of scientific research. Indeed, it has become a pivotal topic in the modern sciences of man, drawing attention from a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary science,
The Making of Language, 2013
The Making of Language presents an alternative to the prevalent view of language as the product of human genetics. It argues instead that language originated in the cooperative activity of early humans. "We made language, as we made pots and pans";. Mike Beaken shows how early forms of communication developed in step with technology, culture and social organisation. This edition considers also the significance of music in relation to other forms of communication. This thoroughly revised edition covers a wide range of disciplines and reflects relevant published research since the first edition appeared in 1996. Written clearly and free from jargon, it will be welcomed by anyone interested in the evolution and origin of language.