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    How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
    How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
    How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
    Audiobook13 hours

    How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

    Written by Daniel L. Everett

    Narrated by Jonathan Yen

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today.

    Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett's discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed-one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 20, 2018
    ISBN9781977376848
    How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

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    • 5/5
      Great overview of an important area in the current language-culture-cognition debate. David Everett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett) is both an accomplished scientist and knows how to tell a story.
      Spoiler alert: there are so many conflicting theories in this field, that one should not expect to come away with the definitive answer to man, evolution and the universe :-)
    • 2/5
      Rambling and opinionated. Was hoping for some science and experiment.
    • 5/5
      Daniel Everett's main thesis is that language was invented by humankind, and is not the result of its being hardwired into mankind's brain. In fact, Homo erectus began language (not proven) and, additionally culture, which all Homo Sapiens have today. Language is a nexus of society, conversational analysis, semantics, lexicon phonetics, and history; and not that language is a recursive grammar. Grammar is just an attribute shown by the fact of its complexity and that almost n grammar is universal. Language also did not come about through catastrophic change. Language evolved by the process called uniformitarianismand results from the environment humans encountered. The merge concept which has a binary focus cannot be shown to be true, because of the extraordinary variety of languages. Individual grammars evolved both horizontally and vertically with symbols and paradigms appropriate for that language. I remember David Bellos stating that languages change from each other just to be different and nothing particularly grandiose.