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:

    “In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who “come out” together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.”
    —Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    “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)

    “Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
    —James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)

    “Like Freud, Jung believes that the human mind contains archaic remnants, residues of the long history and evolution of mankind. In the unconscious, primordial “universally human images” lie dormant. Those primordial images are the most ancient, universal and “deep” thoughts of mankind. Since they embody feelings as much as thought, they are properly “thought feelings.” Where Freud postulates a mass psyche, Jung postulates a collective psyche.”
    —Patrick Mullahy (b. 1912)