A History of Language

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Structuralism, as first introduced to sociology by Émile Durkheim, is nonetheless a type of humanistic evolutionary theory which explains diversification as necessitated by growing complexity. Schlenker, Philippe; Chemla, Emmanuel; Arnold, Kate; Lemasson, Alban; Ouattara, Karim; Keenan, Sumir; Stephan, Claudia; Ryder, Robin; Zuberbühler, Klaus (December 2014). A very specific social structure—one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust—must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on "cheap signals" (words) an evolutionarily stable strategy. In 2011, Quentin Atkinson published a survey of phonemes from 500 different languages as well as language families and compared their phonemic diversity by region, number of speakers and distance from Africa. Moreover, such vocal imitation can occur without comprehension such as in speech shadowing [109] and echolalia.

How Did Language Begin? | Linguistic Society of America

As Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva acknowledge: "Grammaticalisation requires a linguistic system that is used regularly and frequently within a community of speakers and is passed on from one group of speakers to another". Another approach, this time archaeological, involves invoking symbolic behavior (such as repeated ritual activity) that may leave an archaeological trace—such as mining and modifying ochre pigments for body-painting—while developing theoretical arguments to justify inferences from symbolism in general to language in particular. The "origin of language" as a subject in its own right emerged from studies in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and human evolution. Since the emergence of language lies so far back in human prehistory, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces; neither can comparable processes be observed today.Synchronic linguistics, in contrast, aims to widen scientists' understanding of language through a study of a given contemporary or historical language stage as a system in its own right. Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates—it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. Steven Mithen proposed the term Hmmmmm for the pre-linguistic system of communication posited to have been used by archaic Homo, beginning with Homo ergaster and reaching the highest sophistication in the Middle Pleistocene with Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis. For modern language to have occurred, PFC delay had to have an immense survival benefit in later life, such as PFS ability.

History of British Sign Language - UCL History of British Sign Language - UCL

Aryon Rodrigues hypothesizes the emergence of a Proto-Tupian language between the Guaporé and Aripuanã rivers, in the Madeira River basin (corresponding to the modern Brazilian state of Rondônia) around 5000 years ago.ramidus would have not been limited in terms of the mechanical components of speech production as chimpanzees and bonobos are.

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Who asked the first question: the origins of human choral singing, intelligence, language and speech. We propose that as a result of paedomorphic morphogenesis of the cranial base and craniofacial morphology Ar. Most mythologies do not credit humans with the invention of language but speak of a divine language predating human language. 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. The question of language origin seemed inaccessible to methodical approaches, and in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned all discussion of the origin of language, deeming it to be an unanswerable problem.These mechanisms may have played an evolutionary role in enabling the development of intentional vocal communication as a supplement to gestural communication.