I
came across an essay by Ray Jackendoff from the
Linguistic Society of America. Here are some interesting excerpts from
it:
“Every
human language has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, built up from
several dozen speech sounds.
“What
happened to humans in the 6 million years or so since the hominid and
chimpanzee lines diverged, and when and how did hominid communication begin to
have the properties of modern language?
“The
basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence
is so sparse. Spoken languages don’t
leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of
hominid brains, not what the brains could do.
About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal
tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about
100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn’t permit the modern
range of speech sounds. But that doesn’t
mean that language necessarily began then.
Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more
restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract
may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive. Some researchers even propose that language
began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal
modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.
“We
do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and
50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art
and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization. What changed
in the species at that point? Did they
just get smarter (Even if their brains didn’t suddenly get larger)? Did they become smarter because of the intellectual advantages that language affords (such
as the ability to maintain an oral history over generations)?”
About The Linguistic
Society of America
The
Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1924 for the advancement of the
scientific study of language. The
Society serves its nearly 6,000 personal and institutional members through
scholarly meetings, publications, and special activities designed to advance
the discipline.
The
Society holds its Annual Meeting in early January each year and publishes a
quarterly journal, LANGUAGE, and the LSA Bulletin. Among its special education
activities are the Linguistic Institutes held every other summer in
odd-numbered years and co-sponsored by a host university.
The
website for the Society (http://www.lsadc.org)
includes The Field of Linguistics (brief, nontechnical essays describing the
discipline and its subfields) and statements and resolutions issued by the
Society on matters such as language rights, the English-only/English-plus
debate, bilingual education and Ebonics. To learn more about them, please
contact them at:
Linguistic
Society of America
1325
18th St, NW, Suite 211
Washington,
DC 20036-6501
(202)
835-1714
lsa@lsadc.org
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