Case Study on the Origins of Language Particularly on the Natural Sound Source

One of the most dabatable issues in the world of human comprehension, is about how language
commenced. Did it just sprouted because of evolution? Did we inherited it in the usage of
sounds to imitate things? Or was it given to us by an omnipotent being?

Language probably began when humans started naming objects, actions and
phenomena after a recognizable sound associated with it in real life. This hypothesis holds that
the first human words were a type of verbal icon, a sign whose form is an exact image of its
meaning: crash became the word for thunder, boom for explosion.

The origins of human language will perhaps remain for ever obscure. By contrast the
origin of individual languages has been the subject of very precise study over the past two
centuries.There are about 5000 languages spoken in the world today (a third of them in Africa),
but scholars group them together into relatively few families - probably less than twenty.
Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions.
The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a
common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been
spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago.

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes,
but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged
signals. Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It
comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound
and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans. When and how
the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that
its evolution must have been a long process. Our ancestors were probably speaking a million
years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar
than we are accustomed to.

The other theory says that the beginnings of human speech is based on the concept of
natural sounds that means that early men and women imitated the natural sounds heard around
them, e. g. when they heard a flying object making cuckoo sound, that natural sound was
adopted to refer to that object. In all modern languages there occur some words pronunciation
of which seem to “echo“ natural sounds e. g. bang, hiss, buzz, splash. This theory is called
BOW-WOW theory and the words echoing natural sounds are called onomatopoeic. There are
a lot of abstract words so we are rather sceptical about the view that a language is only a set of
words which are based on natural sounds. One other “natural sound“ proposal is known as YO-
HEAVE-HO THEORY. These are sounds of a person involved in physical effort when that effort
had to be coordinated (to pull a rope, lift a log, push a big stone...).

One suggestion regarding the origins of the sounds of language involves a link between
physical gesture and orally produced sounds. Physical gesture involving the whole body could
have been a means of indicating a wide range of emotional states and intuitions. Many of our
physical gestures, body using hand and face are a means of non-verbal communication. Some
gestures can be very clear but there are a lot of words and messages that cannot be visualized
using only gestures.