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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
In evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary linguistics, the mimetic theory of speech origins [1] is an analysis of the factors leading to the evolution of language in human ancestors, typically during the Homo erectus era. This theory is most commonly associated with Merlin Donald, who developed the idea in his 1991 book Origins of the ...
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; [2] [3] "Why do languages have the properties they do?"; [4] or "What is the origin of language?". In addition to these fundamental questions, the theory of language also seeks to understand ...
The monogenetic theory points to a single origin of all of the world's languages and it is the most accepted theory. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It states that all current languages have formed through language change from a single tongue that gradually differentiated into unintelligible languages.
This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. [1] The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it. [2]
There are many competing theories of how language might have evolved, if indeed it is an evolutionary adaptation. They stem from the belief that language development could result from an adaptation, an exaptation, or a by-product. Genetics also influence the study of the evolution of language.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, [1] involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. [2]Language use was first systematically documented in Mesopotamia, with extant lexical lists of the 3rd to the 2nd Millennia BCE, offering glossaries on Sumerian cuneiform usage and meaning, and phonetical vocabularies of foreign languages.