Sounds from the Garden of Eden
This blog will bring a new way of thinking of and theorizing the subject of the origin and evolution of language. The blog is based on the content of the new book shown above.
When I started thinking about language evolution, I asked myself what could be said for granted about the subject. And three things came up: the first were the languages spoken today, which are quite well known and described.
The second was the first evidence of written languages of 5 thousands year ago, ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, of which what is most important for us is the fact that they were in many aspects very much similar to modern languages.
The third sure fact that I could point out were...the voices of monkeys and apes.
As those troubling themselves with our subject know, the very famous Noam Chomsky has been desperated in advance of any hope of finding evidence for the evolution of language, and he dedicated much of his late writing to convince us there is no chance to find any evidence, and it all started by an accidental mutation in one person that made him so smart that enabled him and his many off springs to develop language out of their brilliant minds. Surely this is an absolute non understanding of biology and evolution whatsoever, and we can summerize that Chomsky is not relevant for our subject.
The factual evidence supporting the theorizing of the evolution of language is abundant. much more abundant than the evidence supporting the big bang theory. What needed is to collect the relevant data.
For example, what could have been the first sounds of the descends of chimpanzee like ape out of which hominins evolved?
When I faced my first factual result, I realized that the mission I was taking on was to bridge the gap between the guttural sounds of apes and the modern speech which consists mainly on articulating sounds using the tongue, a practice which is practically absolutly absent in apes as well as in all animals.
The theory developed in the title book, and in part in this blog, is new and unprecedented in many aspects, of which one very important is the developing of a phonetic theory that outlines the principle events that took place during the evolution of human beeings and language.
The rest of this post is a paragraph from chapter 2, page 111. It prefaces the discussion about guttural sounds:
4: The Beginning: Guttural Sounds.
The first chapter dealt with the timeframe within which the origin
of Language must be sought, concluding that the evolution
of language has no initial starting point in time. Neither the
emergence of written language, early painting, earliest stone
tools, nor the earliest fossilized hominid skeletons are hard
evidence of the emergence of speech. Therefore, we must begin
our story with the earliest stage of human evolution, namely the
beginning of bipedalism, which turned the primordial ape into
a hominid, or better still, an Australopithecus. In other words,
we must rely on hard, concrete facts, avoiding unsupportable
speculations, when we come to draw the outlines of our theory.
In this section, we shall provide evidence to show that the
earliest human expressive sounds were guttural. We use the
following assumptions:
• Early australopithecines could generate no other sounds.
• These are the sounds produced by a baby during its first
months of life.
• An adult in distress, losing the ability to utter words, resorts to
guttural sounds.
• The history of many languages reveals transformations from
guttural sounds to front-mouth sounds.
The phonetic evolution hypothesis, which is the core of the
present work, is that speech evolved from guttural to tongue
sounds. We must refer to it as a hypothesis, since it deals with
the distant past, yet, as opposed to the claims that followed the
publication of my previous book, this is no mere speculation,
but the inevitable course of the evolution of speech. The
earliest sounds available to earliest speakers were undoubtedly
guttural. .
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