Origin of Language - Biological Scenarios For Language Evolution

Biological Scenarios For Language Evolution

Further information: Evolutionary linguistics

All human populations possess language. This includes populations, such as the Tasmanians and the Andamanese, who may have been isolated from the Old World continents for as long as 40,000 years.

Linguistic monogenesis is the hypothesis that there was a single proto-language, sometimes called Proto-Human, from which all other vocal languages spoken by humans descend. (This does not apply to sign languages, which are known to arise independently rather frequently.)

The multiregional hypothesis would entail that modern language evolved independently on all the continents, a proposition considered implausible by proponents of monogenesis.

Read more about this topic:  Origin Of Language

Famous quotes containing the words biological, scenarios, language and/or evolution:

    Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.
    Betty Rollin (b. 1936)

    The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.
    Paul Tillich (1886–1965)

    The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)