BRIEFE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE ACROSS CURRICULUM

BY

Xxxxxxxx SORENG

ROLL NO. 104

SUBJECT: LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

SUBJECT CODE –LC41032P

REGISTRATION NO-A01-1132-0039-19

SESSION 2019-2021

SEMESTER I

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

ST. XAVIER’ COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS)

30, MOTHER TERESA SARANI,

KOLKATA – 700016.

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I have taken efforts in this language across curriculum. However, it would not have been possible
without the kind support and help of many individuals. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all
of them.
I would like to thank Rev. Dr. Fr. Dominic Savio S., J., and Father Principal of St. Xavier’s College.
I would like to express my gratitude towards Professor Charlotte Simpson Veigas Vice Principal,
Department of Education, and St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous) Kolkata for her words of
encouragement which assisted me in completion of this language across the curriculum.
I am highly indebted to the Supervisor, Professor sushmita paul, for her guidance, valuable criticism,
constant and timely supervision which made it possible to produce this practicum in time.

Date xxxxxx soreng

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 CONTENTS PAGE NO

 ABSTRACT------------------------------------------------1
 INTRODUCTION-----------------------------------------2
 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE--------------------------------3
 EVALUTION OF LANGUAGE--------------------------3
 THEORIES OF LANGUAGE----------------------------4-5
 THE BOW-WOW THEORY
 THE DING –DONG THEORY
 THE LA-LA THEORY
 THE YE –HE-HO THEORY
 THE POOH –POOH THEORY
 ORIGIN OF SPEECH------------------------------------------5
 ORIGIN OF WRITING----------------------------------------6
 BRIEF HISTORY VEIW OF ENGLISH IN INDIA----------6
 CONCLUSION-------------------------------------------------7
 REFERENCES--------------------------------------------------8

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 ABSTRACT

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communication ideas, emotions and desires
by means of a system of voluntary produce symbols.

The history of language explains about various origin of language, development of language,
languages in different period and its evolutions. History of language includes a variety of changes in
the language and affecting the credibility of human beings. Language plays dynamic roles in all
languages. Language is effective and dynamic and also has its humorous applicability. It helps us to
communicate ideas, solving problems, understanding different problems and also looks after our social
well being.

History of language thus helps us to maintain the record of past evolution and changes in future and
present. Language is an integral part of human life therefore history of language should be maintained
for future evolution and development of language. In order to study subjects we need to learn language
first to communicate and express our thoughts and understand problems to solve any mathematical
problems. History of Language is essential tool for learning and teaching in schools or colleges.

KEY WORDS: evolution, communication, maintain, solving problems, history, continuity theory,
origin.

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 INTRODUCTION
Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex
systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; a language is any specific example
of such a system.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of
language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias
and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from
emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-
century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language.
Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on
social convention and learning. Its complex structure affords a much wider range of expressions than
any known system of animal communication. Language is thought to have originated when early
hominines started gradually changing their primate communication systems, acquiring the ability to
form a theory of other minds and a shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to
have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as
having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions.
Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's
and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and
children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. The use of language is deeply
entrenched in human culture. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language also
has many social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as
social grooming and entertainment.

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 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
The origin of language and its evolutionary emergence in the human species have been subjects
of speculation for several centuries. The topic is difficult to study because of the lack of direct
evidence. Consequently, scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from
other kinds of evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language
diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of
communication existing among animals . Many argue that the origins of language probably relate
closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the implications
and directionality of this connection.

One can sub-divide approaches to the origin of language according to some underlying
assumptions:
"Continuity theories" built on the idea that language exhibits so much complexity that one cannot
imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form; therefore it must have evolved from earlier
pre-linguistic systems among our primate ancestors.

"Discontinuity theories" take the opposite approach that language, as a unique trait which cannot be
compared to anything found among non-humans, must have appeared fairly suddenly during the course
of human evolution.

Some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty largely genetically encoded.

Other theories regard language as a mainly cultural system learned through social interaction.

THE EVALUTION OF LANGUAGE

Evolutionary linguistics is a subfield of psycholinguistics that studies the psychosocial and

cultural factors involved in the origin of language and the development of linguistic universals. The
main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no
traces. This led to the abandonment of the field for more than a century, despite the common origins of
language hinted at by the relationships among individual languages established by the field of
historical linguistics. Since the late 1980s, the field has been revived in the wake of progress made in
the related fields of biolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary anthropology,
evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and cognitive science.

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 THEORIES OF LANGUAGE
The absence of such evidence certainly hasn't discouraged speculation about the origins of language.
Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward and just about all of them have been
challenged, discounted, and often ridiculed. Each theory accounts for only a small part of what we
know about language.Here, identified by their disparaging nicknames, are five of the oldest and most
common theories of how language began.

The Bow-Wow Theory

According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural
sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic marked by echoic words such as moo, meow,
splash, cuckoo, and bang. 

What's wrong with this theory?

Relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. For
instance, a dog's bark is heard as au au in Brazil, ham ham in Albania, and wang, wang in China. In
addition, many onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural sounds.

The Ding-Dong Theory

This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the
essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in
harmony with the world around them.

What's wrong with this theory?

Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there's no persuasive evidence, in any language,
of an innate connection between sound and meaning.

The La-La Theory

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds
associated with love, play, and song.

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What's wrong with this theory?
As David Crystal notes in How Language Works, this theory still fails to account for "the gap between
the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression."

The Pooh-Pooh Theory

This theory holds that speech began with interjections spontaneous cries of pain, surprise (Oh!),
and other emotions (Yabba dabba do!).
What's wrong with this theory?
No language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out, "the clicks, intakes of breath,
and other noises which are used in this way bear little relationship to the vowels and consonants found
in phonology."

The Yo-He-Ho Theory

According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by
heavy physical labor.
What's wrong with this theory?
Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go very
far in explaining where words come from.
As Peter Farb says in Word Play: What Happens When People Talk:"All these speculations have
serious flaws, and none can withstand the close scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of
language and about the evolution of our species."

But does this mean that all questions about the origin of language are unanswerable?
Not necessarily. Over the past 20 years, scholars from such diverse fields as genetics, anthropology,
and cognitive science have been engaged, as Kenneally says, in "a cross-discipline, multidimensional
treasure hunt" to find out how language began. It is, she says, "the hardest problem in science today."

In a future article, we'll consider more recent theories about the origins and development of language
what William James called "the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for
communicating a thought."

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 ORIGIN OF SPEECH

For speech human need a set of vocal organs produce sounds to form different words, they need a brain
that can handle all these sounds and them into meaning words and sentences. Mans nearest relatives in
the animal kingdom such as the apes, cannot talk. Evidences show that the human-like begins that
living in Europe between 1000000 BC .and 30000 BC.could had have some kind of primitive
speech .they would probably have had some sign language too. their hands hands were now free to do
all exiting things such as making tools ,or drawing pictures inside theirs caves. They soon have learn to
use their hands to make gesture, may be after while this sound will do the job that the gesture did, in
place were gesture could not be seen.
With the help of speech a man can tell other people about danger that they can not see. If there is a
dangerous animal hiding in the jungle ,he can warn about it.

ORIGIN OF WRITING
WE have evidence of writing emerging from around 30000 BC. People started to cut marks in sticks or
on bones to show numbers of things. The next steps was to distinguish types of things, using clay. This
happen around 9000 BC. Small lumps of clay were shaped into a ball, or a core or a rectangle and so
on.
By around 3400BC. A writing system has began to developed in which scribes scratched marks into
clay tablets . a thousand year latter these has become cluster of small straight wedge shaped marked,
made by the end of the reed. The system was called cuneiform. The earliest cuneiform writing has been
found in the ruins of ancient city of uruk.on the banks of river Euphrates in the modern Iraq.
Eventually cuneiform writing came to used for all kinds of purposes, such as making list of
possessions, sending message, and recording events .it was easy to see the value of a writing system of
this kind, and soon other language in the region started to use it . in fact it lasted for over 2000 years
and only died out when more convenience ways of writing were invented.

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 BRIEF HISTORICAL BACK VIEW OF ENGLISH IN INDIA

The East India Company or the Honorable East India Company as it preferred to be known, sailed forth
in search of new trading posts in the 1600s. It sought trade relations with other nations in the European
continent, as well as what they called the East Indies, i.e. the Indian subcontinent. They landed in
Surat, in Gujarat, as early as 1608 or thereabouts and in Goa, about the same time. It would be safe to
assume that India’s first brush with English began here. Indian history famously records the ambitions
of the trading company as they gradually involved themselves in local politics and soon established
themselves as rulers little by little. Over the next centuries, they commandeered all our resources,
introduced railways, expanded industries and then set about to create a band of clerks who would
document and maintain these developments. In the 19th century, this was the vision of Lord Macaulay
(1800-1859), the Whig politician and historian, who advocated the teaching of English in India with
his famous notion of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect”.

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 CONCLUSION
Therefore language has its broad and wide history. There are various modifications and
developments occurred in the past and these modifications and development helps in the modern
generation. Language has different histories and theories which help the people to understand more
about the language development.
Language was made by men because society was controlled by men and it was people with
power in the society who could build their reality their point of view into the language. Whatever may
be the case many linguistic and psychologist now believe that thought and language is interdependent.
Although the two are separate and function alone, language often facilitate thought, and we have to
think to understand and use language.

Development of language is stimulated by the social need that springs from cultural necessity.
Language develops in the society and society also cannot exist without language. So there is a mutual
dependence between language and society. Language thrives in the society as a means communication
as a means for the formation of the thought and accumulation as a medium of transmission of
expression and as a means of creation of thoughts and ideas.

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 REFERENCES

 LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

By Dr.J.E. Vallabi

 LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

By Dr.Malayendu Dinda

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