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E-book The Study of Language
We don’t usually think of speaking as similar to chewing, licking and sucking, but, like speaking, all of these actions 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. A quite different view of the beginnings of language is based on the concept
of natural sounds. The suggestion is that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women heard around them. When an object flew by, making a ???-??? sound, the early human tried to imitate the sound and used it to refer to the thing associated with the sound. And when another flying creature made a sound, that natural sound was adopted to refer to that kind of object. The fact that all modern languages have some words with pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring sounds could be used to support this theory. In English, in addition to cuckoo, we have splash, bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss, screech, and forms such as bow-wow. In fact, this type of view has been called the ‘bow-wow’ theory of language origin. While it is true that a number of words in any language are onomatopoeic (echoing natural sounds), it is hard to see how most of the soundless as well as abstract things in our world could have been referred to in a language that simply echoed natural sounds. We might also be rather skeptical about a view that seems to assume that a language is only a set of words used as ‘names’ for things.
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