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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 ...
A review of Schleicher's book Darwinism as Tested by the Science of Language appeared in the first issue of Nature journal in 1870. [17] Darwin reiterated Schleicher's proposition in his 1871 book The Descent of Man , claiming that languages are comparable to species, and that language change occurs through natural selection as words 'struggle ...
The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is a historical-comparative linguistics research project hosted by the Santa Fe Institute. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It aims to provide a detailed genealogical classification of the world's languages.
In historical or evolutionary linguistics, monogenesis and polygenesis are two different hypotheses about the phylogenetic origin of human languages. According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue.
Dating back to 1821, German linguist August Schleicher was the representative pioneer of biolinguistics, discussing the evolution of language based on Darwin's theory of evolution. Since linguistics had been believed to be a form of historical science under the influence of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , speculations of the origin of ...
The Symbolic Species is a 1997 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon on the evolution of language. [1] [2] Combining perspectives from neurobiology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, and semiotics, Deacon proposes that language, along with the unique human capacity for symbolic thought, co-evolved with the brain.
Approaches to language as part of cultural evolution can be roughly divided into two main groups: genetic determinism which argues that languages stem from the human genome; and social Darwinism, as envisioned by August Schleicher and Max Müller, which applies principles and methods of evolutionary biology to linguistics.
The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how.This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy.