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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 ...
Although biology is understood to shape the brain, which processes language, there is no clear link between biology and specific human language structures or linguistic universals. [5] For lack of a breakthrough in the field, there have been numerous debates about what kind of natural phenomenon language might be.
Cladistic representation of the Mayan linguistic family, going back 4000 years.(The numbers represent proposed historical dates in the Common Era).. In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species.
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 ...
Computational phylogenetics can be used to investigate a language as an evolutionary system. The evolution of human language closely corresponds with human's biological evolution which allows phylogenetic methods to be applied. The concept of a "tree" serves as an efficient way to represent relationships between languages and language splits.
At around the same time, geneticists discovered a link between the language deficit manifest by the KE family members and the gene FOXP2. Although FOXP2 is not the gene responsible for language, [ 11 ] this discovery brought many linguists and scientists together to interpret this data, renewing the interest of biolinguistics.
Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. [3]
The earliest language was strictly vocal; reading and writing came later. [3] New research suggests that the combination of gestures and vocalizations may have led to the development of more complicated language in protohumans. Chimpanzees that produce attention-getting sounds show activation in areas of the brain that are highly similar to ...