We simply do not
know how language originated : it remains a speculation. We can just guess that
spoken language started earlier than the written. But we have no direct
evidence to prove the exact source and time of the origin of language.
Therefore many attempts have been advanced by different thinkers regarding
the origins of language. The Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) grouped
commonly held theories into four types and added a fifth of his own. They are
often refered to by nick names.
The ‘bow- wow’ theory:
According to this
theory, ‘‘Speech arouse through people imitating
the sounds of the environment, especially animal calls. The main evidence would be the use of onometopoeic words’’. When an object flew by, making a cawcaw or cuckoo sound, that
natural sound was adopted by the early men and women to refer to that object.
This is also known as the ‘natural sound source’. But as few of these onomatopoeic words exist in a language,
the theory has little support.
The ‘pooh-pooh’ theory:
This theory says
that ‘‘speech arouse through people making
instinctive sounds, caused by pain, anger or other emotions’’. The main evidence would be the universal use of sounds as interjections. For example, ‘oh’ is used to express wonder, ‘fie’ to express shame. But no language
contains many of these. Moreover, ‘‘in any case the
clicks, intakes of breath and other noise which are used in this way bear
little relationship to the vowels and consonants found in phonology’’. Actually, the spelling is never a satisfactory
guide.
The ‘ding-dong’ theory:
This theory shows
that ‘‘speech arouse because people reacted to the stimuli in the world
around them, and spontaleously produced sounds which in some way reflected or
were in harmony with the environment’’. This theory is
also known as the ‘oral-gesture’ theory which proposes an extremely specific connection between
physical and oral gesture. For example, the morement of the tongue (oral
gesture) in a ‘goodbye’ message
is representative of the waving of the head or arm (physical gesture) for a
similar message. But apart from a few cases of apparent sound symbolism, there
is an extremely large number of linguistic messages which would appear to defy
transmission via this types of gesturing.
The ‘ye-he-ho’ theory:
The theory indicates that ‘‘speech arouse because, as people worked together, their physical
efforts produced communal, rhythmical grunts, which in due course developed
into chants, and thus language’’. It’s main evidence is the use of prosodic
features, especially of rhythm. But the gap between this kind of expression and
what we find in language as a whole is so immense that explanation for the
latter would still have to be found.
The ‘la-la’ theory :
‘‘Jespersen
himself felt that, if any single factor was going to immitate human language,
it would arise from the romantic side of life-sounds associated with love,
play, poetic feeling, perhapes even song. But again,
the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression
would still have to be accounted for’’.
However, there are some other sources
regarded as the origins of language:
From the religious point of view,
in every religion, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans with
language. According to one view, god created Adam and ‘‘whatever
Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’’(Genesis 2:19)
However the basic hypothesis of this
view seems to have been that, if infants were allowed to grow up without
hearing any language, then they would spontaneously begin using the original God given language.
According to the theory of ‘glossogenetics’, some of the
physical aspects of humans (past and present) are not shared with any other
creature. ‘‘It starts with the observation that at
some early stage, our human ancestry made the transition to an upright
posture, with bipedal (two-legged) locomotion, and a revised role for the front
limbs.’’ Actually we see that this theory shows the
capacity for speech of human beings, not the speech production.
Physiological adaptation is a
precondition for language production. Humans have some organs of speech to
produce speech, different from other animals. Again lateralization of the brain
controls the language production of a human beings.
Moreover there is a critical period, puberty in human
life significant in the development of language.