Development of language

Summary

Human language is unique all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other
speices.including our clo-se genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, so called sign
language in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution. Language is a unique
hallmark of the human species. Although many species can communicate in limited ways about
things that are physically present, only humans can construct a full narrative characterization of
events occurring outside of here and now. There are three evolutionary adaptations in human, 1st
bipedalism and delicate muscle movements (result in the lack of need hyperfoucs) 2nd A relatively
safe and rich environment, replace hyperfoucs with cohesion.3rd A bur-geoning social interaction
ushered in natural selection whereby child helplessness or early parturition supported exceptional
self- consciousness(intelligence).language was not a sudden revelation; instead it was a gradual
process and built –in part of the evolutionary sequence.(Hauser and Chomsky ,Fitch,2002) saw
that language as very recent evolutionary event. They note that the divergence of our hominid
ancestors from the great Apes occurred over 6 million years ago .Mithen (1996) suggested that the
crucial evolutionary development that led to the burst in creativity in the Neolithic was the
emergence of human language. Language relies on far more physiological, social, and neural
pathways for information integration, and mechanisms for the formation of social hierarchies. The
Neanderthals had large brains and were able to inhabit much of Eurasia from around 350,000 years
ago. When modern humans and Neanderthals shares a derived version of a transcription factor
gene known as FOXP2.FOXP2 influences the fine motor control of facial muscles required for the
production of speech. There was no structured in the language. But rapidly changed the language
with these features like grammar, vocabulary to be able to link all of the world’s languages to a
common original mother tongue. On the other hand all human languages rely on combining sounds
or phones to make words, many of those sounds are common across languages, different languages
seem to structure the world semantically in similar ways. All the human recognize the past present
or future. Linguistics have known from at least the 18th century about 100 year before Darwin that
languages predominantly evolve by process of decent with modification from earlier ancestral
forms. Phylogenetic trees of a small subset of the approximately 400 or so Indo-European
languages. French and Spanish share cognate forms for ‘hand’ derived from earlier Latin form
‘Manus’. Combing different cognate’s sets from many different vocabulary item allow to draw
phylogenetic trees o entire languages families. These considerations suggest that the anatomical,
neurological and physiological understandings of language are shared among all of humanity. If
the capacity for language did evolve more than once, all traces of it seem to have been lost. This
conclusion is buttressed by the FOXP2 evidence (all human share the same derived gene) and by
the fact that genetic data point to all modern humans descending from a common ancestor.
Assignment name

Development of language

Subject Name General Linguistics

Submitted to Sir Adnan

Submitted by Ume Laila

Riphah international University

Faisalabad campus near satayana road