Language

[mad cunt]

I'm trying to find the actual theory behind it, because I remember seeing it somewhere. But I was thinking about language in its earliest form, and I was finding it hard to believe that humans alone could have developed their languages all on their own.

Sure, you can point at an object and name it, and then everyone else around you knows what it is. But how do you put words to things that exist beyond a physical representation? Words like "what, when, where, how, why and the".

Then, how do we unanimously establish these words and what they mean, when we don't have a language to convey it in the first place?

Humans learn to speak at a young age through mimicry, observation and application. We figure out which words go where and probably their actual meaning later on, until we have a base knowledge of how to talk, then the roles would reverse as we expand upon our vocabulary.

I find it more likely that another sentient being taught us how to speak, but maybe I'm underestimating the capabilities of mankind, seeing how far we've come in everything else.

What do you think?


EDIT: And then there were those like Plato, who believed the knowledge existed within us to begin with.

[Chevalier Sombre]

Eh. We've done a lot of shit, I don't think developing languages on our own was an improbability.

[Aucune Raison]

Most kinds of animals have a sort of language, our species just has a more developed one because our survival depends so highly on socialized groups and such.


To be honest, Mitsu, I think you just believe humans are incapable of anything. xD

[Takuya]

Eh. Developed from sounds derived from our physiology, at first just grunts meaning whatever the grunter perceived it to be. The listener then repeated that sound and tried to understand. With gestures, the listener was then guided to the meaning. As we evolved, and our mouth and vocal chords, etc. changed shape, the sounds became more and more distinct. Eventually, through repeated use, the sounds have been understood to have similar meaning throughout a region. Through difference of opinion and limited memory, the sounds have been altered from the original subconsciously and defined to sounds most similar to its analogy object, idea, or person.

The difference in language throughout different regions derived from natural selection, e.g. the necessary transformation in physiology to survive and flourish in that region, its environment with its animals and in its natural cycles. Different physical evolution. A more ethnical reason tied with natural selection would also be through the changes in thoughts (ideology) and popularity (of a sound or syllabary) either through the general population or the elite.

Experiences can play a role in affecting the transformation of language. Food can. Influences. Dreams. Technology(Tools). Housing. The way one lives their life.

That's an educated theory. It's deriving from the fact or possibility that humans once were able to pronounce only sounds and grunts.

EDIT: Also, inspired from Ragione's post, the social nature of humans extends our use of language, so that we have to use them daily, further advancing and putting more practice into developing more defined languages.

[mad cunt]

Originally Posted by Ragione

To be honest, Mitsu, I think you just believe humans are incapable of anything. xD

Yeah probably... =)

[Bangkok Superpussy]

Originally Posted by JUSTICE

Then, how do we unanimously establish these words and what they mean, when we don't have a language to convey it in the first place?

It's simple. Spoken language is not the only form of language, or the only way to communicate at all for that matter. It is arguably the most recent, but certainly not the first, and not the one we used to establish the meanings of extremely vague words.

[Darkwatch]

Well the very likely story is that we used some other means of communication (i.e. sign language, using physical representation), before slowly moving forward into something that explains the non-physical.

I don't see this too far off from a possibility, because we've been around for a long time. We had plenty of time to brush up on our languages and communication.

[Brandonazz]

<holds up a rock>

Ug.

<holds up another rock, beside the first>

Pon ug.

<puts one rock down and throws the other>

Ik tok ug.

<points to someone else, who is throwing two rocks>

Lig tok pon ug.

<holds up a stick>

Bok.



Now tell me. How do you say "He is throwing two sticks?"

If you can figure it out, the human mind should be given a little more credit.

[violent_anger]

According to the Histories by Herodotus, this one egyptian pharaoh wanted to find out what the oldest language in the world was, since egyption was a serious competitor and all. He locked some babies in a shed and everyone was forbidden to talk to them. The first word they said was "beccos" or something close to that, don't remember. That's the Phoenician word for bread. or something, don't remember.

Oh, and I saw this video in history class. Apparently, written languages almost never just form out of nothing, and almost every form of writing in Eurasia and Africa is based on Sumerian. There's another written language in the Americas, but it didn't take off, with large portions of the Americas never developing any writing system.

[Poker Face]

I don't know what the exact time frame is but it would seem that they had decades to figure alot of that out.

[dual_wielder]

Well grunts and noises could be perceived as the first formation of language. Just like animals have different sets of sounds, a cat meows and mews, A dog woofs and whimpers, a cow does various moos. To the animals they can understand each other probably as long as it's noises they recognise. Language is just a set of sounds and noises which the person interpreting can decide on what they mean, the only reason why language is such a huge established thing is that as civilisation grew, more people interacted with each other, so they needed one set of sounds or language everyone could communicate with, today that would be English.

Decades ago, each set of people had their own sets of sounds, so lets say the Ancient French (I dunno their names) has different sounds to what the Ancient Greeks did. But as people interact with each other more, such as the Anglo-Saxons invaded England, they influenced the language vastly, same with the French (where we get the word table, art and centre from). Language is only a basis to name things so two people can communicate on, so if one person says table, the other person will know what they're referring to.

According to the Histories by Herodotus, this one egyptian pharaoh wanted to find out what the oldest language in the world was, since egyption was a serious competitor and all. He locked some babies in a shed and everyone was forbidden to talk to them. The first word they said was "beccos" or something close to that, don't remember. That's the Phoenician word for bread. or something, don't remember.

It depends on when the babies were taken and put in a shed, many factors could have lead to them saying this, like hearing another person saying the word outside of the shed, if they were taken later stages of baby years, they would've picked up some words already.

Also if a human today grunted at things, i'm sure another human could pick up what he means.
The way I see it is that language is a set of sounds which everyone can do just to communicate with each other, so we're not lonely.

On the other hand, language could just be a coincidence all together.

[Obliviongirl13]

Personally I find it difficult to understand the idea that we as humans made things up as we went along. And the thing that irritates me is that, who decided swears were bad? Is it just how they sound, and what justifies it or the 'Definition' of it? Sorry that bugs me.

I think that there might be something in our brains that connects all of our senses to create what something is. An apple for instance, we know its rounded, red and grows from a tree. But how did we as children learn what an apple was, or a car? We learn from seeing and trying to comprehend the world around us. Through the world and how its evolved has shaped words, verbal communication and even gestural communication. Its just going back as far as we can, in history and digging even deeper to learn about our past to figure out how it started.

yay archeology.

[Angel]

As cavemen, we developed cave drawings, which were a way to communicate with each other, however primitive.

Somehow, I guess that later on, we developed a way of making sounds to match the drawings; a primitive linguistic system.

And as people moved across the planet, certain dialects and accents became native to each area, eventually evolving into the languages we know and use today.

[Kegluneq]

In my opinion language first developed from something that used sound based communication and later we developed on it in greater and greater volumes as a way of distinguishing us from eachother.
I always thought that the reason why we don't use 1 language is because either 1 its do difficult to speak one language or 2 we don't want to conform to other languages.

My brother says, " when people found it necessary to create certain words and they created them."

[Lifes.Lover]

Language is nothing more than just a series of letters put together and giving meaning by humans.

In the beginning, we had no such true way of identifying what things were, so we made a way. Over the years, it's involved into a highly complicated and evolved language. Many of them, in fact.

The reason why we have so many languages is because of all the different areas that were so isolated from each other. In the end, the words aren't what matter, but rather what meaning we give them. When we are first born, we can see the letters all around us (billboards, signs, TV), but they hold no meaning to us, and thus we are unable to 'read' them. We don't recognize them as letters, and we don't recognize that, put in a certain order, they come to form a word that we associate with a certain thing.

Also, there have been many experiments in the past to see what language babies would learn if given no influence. In the end, the experiments failed because the babies weren't given necessary human contact. They all eventually died. The grunts and groans we hear from babies is just their own way of trying to communicate- much like what the caveman used to have, before we decided to become highly evolved (and yet, at the same time, incredibly stupid) creatures.