The Study of Language:

Language: is primarily a means of communicating thoughts

from one person to another.

The Origins of Language

While it is sure is that - unsurprisingly - spoken language
developed long before written language, no-one knows for
certain how language originated.
There are, however, lots of
speculations about the origin of human
language.
The Divine Source
The Natural Sounds Source
The Oral-Gesture Source
Physiological Adaptation
Speech and Writing
 The Divine Source

According to one view, God created Adam and "

whatsoever Adam called every living creature .In most
religions there appears to be a divine source that provides
humans with language. In attempts to rediscover this
origin, However it seems that children with no access to
human speech simply grow up with no language at all
,NO SPEECH = NO LANGUAGE.
The Natural Sounds Source

Another speculation on the origin of language is that the

first words were imitations of natural sounds. It is true that
there are onomatopoeic words in every language, i.e. words
that echo natural sounds, for example: CUCKOO, SPLASH,
BANG ‫قرع‬, RATTLE ‫خشخشة‬, BUZZ ‫أزيز‬, etc. Another
idea is that the original sounds of language came from cries
of emotion, i.e. pain, anger and joy, for example: OUCH!
One more idea is that the "yo-heave-ho theory" places the
development of human language in a social context and
states that language originated in the need to coordinate
physical effort.
 The Oral-Gesture Source

Many of our physical gestures, using body

hands and face, are means of nonverbal
communication and are used by humans
nowadays, even with their developed
linguistic skills. The "oral-gesture theory"
proposes an extremely specific connection
between physical and oral gesture involving a
"specialized pantomime of the tongue and
lips" (Sir Richard Page, 1930).
 Physiological Adaptation
Some of the physical aspects of humans that make the production of
speech possible or easier are not shared with other creatures:

Human teeth are upright and roughly even in height. Human lips have an
intricate muscle interlacing. The human mouth is relatively small, can be
opened and closed rapidly and contains a very flexible tongue.

The human larynx ‫( حنجرة‬or 'voice box') is special as well as the pharynx
above the vocal cords can act as a resonator for any sounds produced.
The human brain is lateralized and has specialized functions in each of the
two hemispheres. The functions that are analytic, such as tool-using and
language, are largely confined to the left hemisphere of the brain for most
humans. All languages require the organizing and combining of sounds or
signs in specific constructions.
 Speech and Writing
Many of the speculations on the origin of language deal with the
question of how humans started to interact with each other.
However there are two major functions of language use:
The interaction function has to do with how humans use
language to interact with each other socially or emotionally.
The transactional function has to do with communicating
knowledge, skills and information.
This transactional function will have developed, in part, for the
transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. And
while there are cultures that rely mainly on their oral tradition, in
many cases, as speech by its nature is transient ‫عابر‬, ‫زائل‬, the
desire for a more permanent record must have developed:
The Development of Writing
The Development of Writing
In comparison to spoken language, writing is relatively new - it
was invented for the first time by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia
in about 3200 BCE. Indians of Mexico invented it
independently around 600 BCE, and the rise of Egyptian
and Chinese systems may have been independent s
well. Writing was certainly a great boon ‫هبة‬to memetic
spread, greatly increasing the fidelity‫ الدقة‬and the
fecundity‫ مبدع‬of the memes that took advantage of it.
These issues have already been analyzed in Memetics
and Society. In this section we will examine writing
systems and how they might have developed
Memetics and Society
The term "memeim[ :API( "ːm], not "mem"), coined in
1976 by Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural
information that can be transmitted from one mind to
another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-
phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches .
A meme propagates ‫ينشر‬itself as a unit of cultural
evolution analogous in many ways to the gene (the unit
of genetic information) .

Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated

cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes
Writing and Memetic Selection
It is certain that writing is a purely memetic adaptation - there
are no genes "for" writing proficiency (though there are some
that impair ‫يتلف‬this ability). Writing, of course, is a vast
improvement upon speech in terms of memetic fecundity and
fidelity. Writing a meme down greatly increases its likelihood of
being read by potential adherents‫التحام‬, and the very fact of
being written may encourage people to adopt certain memes, as
in the cases in which people insist that something is true because
they read it in the paper. Writing also improves on memetic
fidelity by liberating memes from fallible‫ عرضة للخطأ‬human
memory; memes that are written down are much less vulnerable
to confusions or elaborations in retelling, and therefore have a
much lower mutation‫ تغير أساسى‬rate.
Writing probably actually developed through memetic
competition, in which slightly different systems
competed and those that were most successful were
adopted. Writing probably began as an accounting
system of marks on clay‫ طين‬tablets or other media. As
such, it was probably not very standardized; each
merchant or accountant could in theory have his own
slightly different system of marking his tablets. Major
conventions such as direction and orientation of
markings may have been established in most languages
due primarily to historical contingency‫احتمال‬, but the
specifics of structuring the marks probably came about
via memetic selection.
Each person who used the marks
used them in a slightly different way;
some ways were easier to remember,
easier to write, or easier to read than
others, and so these memes got
copied, Eventually, this process
produced better and better writing
systems.
Types of Writing
There are three basic forms of writing systems:
logographic systems, which use symbols to represent
whole words; syllabary systems, which use symbols to
represent syllables; and alphabetic systems, which use
symbols to represent units of sound. Logographic
systems are the most intuitive from the perspective of a
society on the cusp ‫نقطة التقاء‬of developing writing,
and thus they tended to be the first to arise. They also
are most logical next step from the marking system used
by merchants and accountants. (Incidentally, the fact that
Chinese is a logographic system is one piece of evidence
for its independent invention .
Logographic systems, while being highly intuitive at
first, quickly become extremely cumbersome ‫ متعب‬.
They are difficult to learn and give relatively few
pronunciation cues‫ صببع ة‬-‫شببائ ة‬. Moreover, they
require the invention of a new syllable every time a
new word is needed, and they make compound words
and complicated syntax much more difficult to write.
Finally, the complicated pictorial symbols must be
rendered almost perfectly in order to be legible, which
makes writing a time- and energy-consuming process.
The second system, the syllabary, is much rarer,
since it is an intuitive system only for a few
languages.
It is used in one variant of Japanese and was
developed by an extremely intelligent Cherokee,
Sequoyah, for use in writing and recording his
native language. His system, based very loosely on
English (at most he borrowed a few forms),
became so successful that the formerly illiterate
Cherokee tribe began publishing newspapers and
books in their own language.
The third system of writing, the alphabetic system, is the most
difficult to invent and the easiest to use. Many linguists believe it
was invented only once, by the Phoenicians, and then spread or
adapted to other languages. The system seems counterintuitive at
first, since its most basic units do not correspond to anything
meaningful in speech, but rather to an isolated sound. However,
the system uses the power of infinite combination to achieve its
success; whereas Chinese characters might take years to learn,
the standard Roman alphabet often takes only a few months for
children to memorize.
Moreover, when each letter represents a certain sound,
pronunciation is more easily inferred from the structure of a
word (though English pronunciation sometimes leaves speakers
confused). Finally, markers such as umlauts serve to increase the
power of a system by more carefully delineating the
In general, when logographic, syllabary , and
alphabetic systems compete, the alphabetic
system will tend to dominate because it can
express the most thoughts most efficiently.
Languages such as Japanese and Chinese will
probably eventually be outcompeted because
English - or another language based on an
alphabet, most likely the Roman one - is so much
easier to use. (This is not to say that English is
easy, only that the alphabetic system is most
efficient.)
 Spelling and Writing
One of the pitfalls of an alphabetic system is
the proper spelling of each word. Regional
variations in pronunciation affect how
different speakers try to render their spoken
words into writing. Consequently, speakers
of the same language may find it impossible
to communicate via writing because of
differences in spelling.
The solution to this problem, of course, is to standardize
spelling whenever possible. This is another example of the
influences of memes: those spellings that are easiest to
remember are most likely to become standard.

Of course, plenty of modern English spelling is due primarily

to now-obsolete historical facts, but these spellings were most
likely quite logical to the English-speakers that originally
standardized spelling.

Moreover, sometimes illogical or difficult-to-remember spellings

(and grammatical rules) are retained for other memetic reasons:
they may confer prestige on those who observe them, serve as a
mark of education, or indicate a formal tone (compare through
and thru).
Early "creative spelling" in English has given way
to standardized spellings for the vast majority of
words, recorded in dictionaries and, more recently,
in computerized spell-checkers. Though some
variation in spelling remains, this primarily reflects
distinct dialects, rather than multiple accepted
spellings in a single dialect. For example,
American and British English vary systematically
in the spellings of certain words (American color
and British colour) and suffixes (American -ize and
British -ise).