Biological Scenarios For Language Evolution
Further information: Evolutionary linguisticsAll 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:
“If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“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)
“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)