2. What is Language? (1)
• Several European languages have two words
to translate the English word ‘language’
– French: ‘langage’; ‘langue’
– Italian: ‘linguaggio’; ‘lingua’
– Spanish: ‘lenguaje’; ‘lengua’
• According to Sapir (1921: 8): ‘Language is a
purely human and non-instinctive method of
communicating ideas, emotions and desires by
means of voluntarily produced symbols.’
3. What is Language? (2)
• Based on Bloch & Trager in their Outline of
Linguistics Analysis (1942: 5): ‘A language is
a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means
of which group co-operates.’
• According to Hall in Essay on Language
(1968: 158): ‘Language is the institution
whereby humans communicate and interact
with each by means of habitually used oral-
auditory arbitrary symbols.’
4. What is Language? (3)
• Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957: 13) said that
all languages in their spoken or written form, are
languages in the sense of his definition: since (a) each
natural language has a finite number of sounds in it
(and a finite number of letters in its alphabet-on the
assumption that it has an alphabetic writing system);
and (b) although there may be infinitely many distinct
sentences in the language, each sentence can be
represented as a finite sequence of these sounds (or
letters).
5. The divine source (1)
• According this view, language is given by God
since the human is born.
– God, created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called
every living creature, that was the name” (Genesis,
2: 19)
– In Hindu tradition, language came from the
goddess Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the
universe.
– In most religions, there appears to be divine source
who provide humans with language.
6. The divine source (2)
– An Egyptian pharaoh named Psammentichus tried
the experiment with two newborn infants around
600 B.C. After two years in the company of sheep
and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to
have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word,
but the Phrygian word bekos, meaning ‘bread.’
– James IV of Scotland carried out a similar
experiment around A.D. 1500 and the children
were reported to have started speaking Hebrew.
– Children living without access to human speech in
the early years grow up with no language at all.
7. The natural sounds source (1)
• This view suggested that primitive words could have been
imitations of natural sounds which early men and women
around them.
– “Bow-wow” theory: when an object flew by, making “caw-
caw” sound, the early human imitated the sound and used it
to refer to the object associated with the sound. In English,
we have cuckoo, splash, bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss. it
has also been suggested that the original sounds of
language came from natural cries of emotion, such as pain,
anger and joy, in English we have ouch, oops .
8. The natural sounds source (2)
– “Yo-heave-ho” theory proposed the sounds of a
person involved in physical effort could be the
source of our language, especially when that
physical effort involved several people and had to
be coordinated.
9. The oral-gesture source
• The “oral-gesture theory” proposes an extremely
specific connection between physical and oral
gesture. It is claimed that originally a set of
physical gestures was developed as a means of
communication. It is proposed by Sir Richard
Paget (1930)
• Then a set of oral gestures, specifically involving
the mouth, developed, in which the movements of
the tongue, lips and so on were recognized
according to patterns of movement similar to
physical gestures.
10. Physiological adaptation (1)
• Other proposal about the origin of human
speech concentrates on some of the physical
aspects of humans which are not shared with
other creatures, not even with other primates.
• Human teeth are upright, not slanting outwards
like those apes, and they are roughly even in
height. Such characteristics are not needed for
eating, but they are extremely helpful in
making sounds such as f, v and th.
11. Physiological adaptation (2)
• Human lips have much more intricate muscle
interlacing than is found in other primates and
their resulting flexibility certainly helps with
sounds like p, b and w.
• The human larynx, or the vocal cords differs
significantly in position from that of monkeys.
This created a longer cavity, called the pharynx,
above the vocal cords, which can act as a
resonator for any sounds produced via the larynx.
12. Physiological adaptation (3)
• One unfortunate consequence is that the position of
the human to choke on pieces of food. Monkeys may
not be able to use larynx to produce speech sounds,
but they do not suffer from the problem of getting
food stuck in the windpipe.
• The human brain is lateralized, that is, it has
specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres.
Those functions which are analytic, such as tool-
using and language, are largely confined to the left
hemisphere of the brain for most humans.
