The origins of language

LECTURER: NGUYEN LE BAO NGOC

Different beliefs

Ancestors of apes

2 million years ago

Early humans
 Different beliefs

Judeo-Christian tradition:
 God gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden
dominion over all the animals
 Adam’s first task is to name these animals
Tower of Babel: reasons for language diversity
 Language diversity is a punishment for
human arrogance
Different beliefs

1960s – Noam Chomsky

 Innate biological endowment
 Universal Grammar
Baker (1979) – a Chomskyan linguist
“an adult native speaker of a language knows things he could not have
learnt from the samples of speech he has heard; since this knowledge is not
based on his experience of the world, it must come from some property
inside his own mind.”
Universal Grammar sets the limits within which human languages can vary.
Sample: English native speakers
Different
'The train is arriving'beliefs
– grammatical
*'arrives the train' and *'arrives’ not grammatical;
Sample: Spanish native speakers
'el tren llega' (the train arrives) 'ha llegado un tren' (arrives a train) and 'han llegado' (arrives)
- grammatical.
One of the parameters that is open in Universal Grammar is the pro-drop parameter which is
concerned roughly speaking with the relationship of government between Subjects and Verbs
(Chomsky 1981a). English chooses not to have pro-drop; a Subject is required for every
sentence and it cannot be inverted with the verb in declarative sentences. Spanish, however,
is a pro-drop language in which 'empty' Subjects can occur and inversion can take place,
indeed is compulsory in certain circumstances (Green 1976). 
The sources of language

The divine source

The natural sound source

The social interaction source

The physical adaptation source

The tool-making source

The genetic source

1. The divine source

 Without hearing any languages, human infants would begin using

God-given language.
 Experiment from Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus (or
Psamtik)
 Experiment from King James the Fourth of Scotland
2. The natural sound source

the bow-wow theory

the pooh-pooh theory

The bow-wow theory

 Early human tried to imitate the sounds and then used

them to refer to those objects.
 Allmodern languages have some words with
pronunciations that seem to echo naturally occurring
sounds.
 Example: bow-wow, moo, baa, oink, cock-a-doodle-doo
The bow-wow theory

Onomotopoeia: words that sound similar to the noise they describe

The linguistic renditions of animal sounds differ considerably from language to
language, although each species of animal everywhere makes essentially the same
sound.
Example:
Dog: Bow-wow (English), wu-wu (Chinese), wan-wan (Japanese), gaf-gaf (Russian)
Cat: meow (English), mao (Chinese), nya-nya (Japanese)
Pig: oink-oink (English), hryu-hryu (Russian), oh-ee-oh-ee (Chinese)
Animal sounds in Korean

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuEVCmJ0GU
The pooh-pooh theory

 First words came from involuntary exclamations of dislike, hunger,

pain or pleasure, eventually leading to the expression of more
developed ideas and emotions.
 Example: Ouch!, Ah!, Phew!, Wow!, Yuck!
The ding-dong theory
Onomatopoeia
Example: crash, boom

Limitation: how to name silent subjects?

3. The social interaction source

the yo-he-yo hypothesis

3. The social interaction source

 Language developed on the basis of human cooperative efforts

 The earliest language was chanting to simulate collective effort,
from moving great stones to block off cave entrances from
carnivores to repeating warlike phrases to inflame the fighting
spirit.
 First poetry and song came from this aspect of beginning speech
 Example: Volga boatmen, military marching chants, seven dwarfs
working song, to name but a few
Question: Apes and other primates live in groups?
Why don’t they develop languages?
4. The physical adaptation source

Teeth and lips

Mouth and tongue
Larynx and pharynx
Teeth and lips

 Human teeth are upright and roughly even in height => /f, v/
 Human lips have much more intricate muscle interlacing => /b, p,
m/
 Watch the video clips of “Don’t think, feel” in Korean and the
mama and papa in different languages
Mouth and tongue

 The human mouth is fairly small => can open and close quickly
 The tongue is shorter, thicker and more muscular
 Unlike other primates, humans can close off the airway through the nose to create
more air pressure in the mouth

a wider range of shapes and a more rapid and powerful delivery of sounds produced through
these different shapes
 Larynx and pharynx

 Larynx or “voice box”: containing the

vocal folds or vocal cords
 Pharynx: a resonator for increased range
and clarity of the sounds produced via
the larynx and the vocal tract
5. The tool making source

 Tool-making, or the outcome of manipulating objects and changing

them using both hands, is evidence of a brain at work.
 Human brain: left hemisphere and right hemisphere
 Left hemisphere: complex vocalization (speaking) and object
manipulation (making or using tools)
6. The genetic source

 Young baby’s brain: ¼ of adult’s brain

 Larynx: higher
 => A baby can drink and breathe at the same time
 Changes happen: brain gets bigger and larynx descends => up-right
position
 Children are born with the special capacity for language: innateness
hypothesis