ARTICLE
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
 
Chidera Sunday
 
ABSTRACT
In the bid to find out the ancestry of lingo, studies have been executed, portraying distinct outcomes. A linguist, Max Muller, presented his discoveries theoretically. The Bow-wow, pooh-pooh, ding-dong &amp; yo-he-ho theories are all of Muller's results.
 
Stating the bow-wow theory; "initial words is man's replication of the cries from beasts and birds.
 
Likewise, some scholars generated hypotheses that can be divided into the naturalist, conversationalist, revelationist, revelationist-conventionalists, together with the non-commital theory.
 
"Verbal utterance is from God &amp; not humans". Proposed the revalationist theory.
 
In addition, a specific scientist, Noam Chomsky, argues that single chance mutation might have brought about the conception of language, making his theory biological.
 
It's been said that this whole thing started during the middle stone age in a regional component of Africa.
 
After all, language serves as a means of communicating ideas among humans.
 
However, not all of these theories can hold water. How then do we explain the origin of language?
 
 
 
INTRODUCTION
With thriving queries on the how, why, where &amp; when of oral words, a higher level of inquisitiveness is been spurred among humans, leaving scientists with enough enthusiasm and compelling them into conducting required research.
 
Though results gotten were skeptical &amp; in 1866, the linguistic society of Paris banned existing debates on this subject.
 
This restriction lingered throughout the globe until late in the twentieth century.
 
Scientists, regardless, have ventured into exploring this case, in modern ways.
 
Presently, is there an approved proof of the foundation of language?
 
 
 
THE HOW
I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries.
— Charles Darwin
 
Below are some expounded theories:
1. MAX MULLER THEORY
In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language:
<ul>
 <li>Bow-wow. The bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds.</li>
 <li>Pooh-pooh. The pooh-pooh theory saw the first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise, etc.</li>
 <li>Ding-dong. Müller suggested what he called the ding-dong theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words.</li>
 <li>Yo-he-ho. The yo-he-ho theory claims language emerged from collective rhythmic labor, the attempt to synchronize muscular effort resulting in sounds such as heave alternating with sounds such as ho.</li>
</ul>
Max Muller, from affirming that primal words are replicas of the cry of beasts &amp; birds, to believing that initial words are emotional utterances caused by pain, pleasure, surprise, e.t.c.
 
Furthermore, proposing a theory stating that man's voiced expressions were merely resounding the natural vibrations of things around him.
 
Additionally, Muller came up with a different hypothesis asserting the beginning of speech as the effort of man to harmonize the sounds made by his mouth muscles.
 
Muller's observation seems factual. How about them being quite unlikely, can any other theory present experiential information on communicating the birth of lingo?
 
 
 
 
2. NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 years ago, installing the language faculty (a hypothetical component of the mid-brain) in "perfect" or "near-perfect" form.
<h2>CHOMSKY's &nbsp;SINGLE STEP THEORY</h2>
According to Noam Chomsky's single-mutation theory, the emergence of language resembled the formation of a crystal; with digital infinity as the seed crystal in a super-saturated primate brain, on the verge of blossoming into the human mind, by physical law, once evolution added a single small but crucial keystone. Thus, in this theory, language appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. Chomsky, writing with computational linguist and computer scientist Robert C. Berwick, suggests that this scenario is completely compatible with modern biology. They note that "none of the recent accounts of human language evolution seem to have completely grasped the shift from conventional Darwinism to its fully stochastic modern version—specifically, that there are stochastic effects not only due to sampling like directionless drift, but also due to directed stochastic variation in fitness, migration, and heritability—indeed, all the "forces" that affect individual or gene frequencies ... All this can affect evolutionary outcomes—outcomes that as far as we can make out are not brought out in recent books on the evolution of language, yet would arise immediately in the case of any new genetic or individual innovation, precisely the kind of scenario likely to be in play when talking about language's emergence."
 
The single-mutation theory of language evolution has been directly questioned on different grounds. A formal analysis of the probability of such a mutation taking place and going to fixation in the species has concluded that such a scenario is unlikely, with multiple mutations with more moderate fitness effects being more probable. Another criticism has questioned the logic of the argument for single mutation and puts forward that from the formal simplicity of Merge, the capacity Berwick and Chomsky deem the core property of human language that emerged suddenly, one cannot derive the (number of) evolutionary steps that led to it.
 
Chomsky, explains how this mutation takes place, its procedure is improbable. Perhaps, the entirety of his theory is questionable.
 
 
 
3. MEDIEVAL MUSLIM SCHOLARS
Some students, the medieval Muslim scholars, similarly formulated speculations as regards the basis of oral language. They are in five orders:
<ul>
 <li>Naturalist: There is a natural relation between expressions and the things they signify. Language thus emerged out of a natural human inclination to imitate the sounds of nature.</li>
 <li>Conventionalist: Language is a social convention. The names of things are arbitrary inventions of humans.</li>
 <li>Revolutionist: Language was gifted to humans by God, and it was thus God—and not humans—who named everything.</li>
 <li>Revelationist-Conventionalist: God revealed to humans a core base of language—enabling humans to communicate with each other—and then humans invented the rest of language.</li>
 <li>Non-Commital: The view that conventionalist and revelationist theories are equally plausible.</li>
</ul>
The Medieval Muslim student' theory is distinct from Muller's concept.
 
However, recognizing diverse perspectives on this theme, do we say the linguistic society of Paris as of 1866, was right for prohibiting exiting or future controversies resulting from an absence of explicit experiential evidence?
 
 
WHEN &amp; WHERE
If &amp; only if there is a foundation wherein spoken words owe their existence, certainly, they ought to be a justification for where &amp; when this might have emerged from.
 
 
Q. D Atkinson
Using statistical methods to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity in modern languages, Johanna Nichols—a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley—argued in 1998 that vocal languages must have begun diversifying in the human species at least 100,000 years ago. A further study by Q. D. Atkinson suggests that successive population bottlenecks occurred as human African ancestors migrated to other areas, leading to a decrease in genetic and phenotypic diversity. Atkinson argues that these bottlenecks also affected culture and language, suggesting that the farther away a particular language is from Africa, the fewer phonemes it contains. By way of evidence, Atkinson claims that today's African languages tend to have relatively large numbers of phonemes, whereas languages of Oceania (the last region to be populated by humans) have relatively few. Relying heavily on Atkinson's work, a subsequent study has explored the rate at which phonemes develop naturally, comparing this rate to some of Africa's oldest languages. The results suggest that language first evolved around 50,000–150,000 years ago, which is around the time when modern Homo sapiens evolved. Estimates of this kind are not universally accepted, but jointly considering genetic, archaeological, palaeontological, and much other evidence indicates that language probably emerged somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age, roughly contemporaneous with the speciation of Homo sapiens.
 
 
From Atkinson's perspective, the sub-Saharan part of Africa hosted the inception of lingual language, which was in the era of the middle stone age. Though, this is yet a probability.
 
 
WHY
"The need for public trust freed a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that has been inactive". Asserted by some scholars.
 
Furthermore, a hypothesis, the humanistic theory presented a distinct reason for why language lives.
 
HUMANISTIC THEORY
The humanistic tradition considers language as a human invention. Renaissance philosopher, Antoine Arnauld gave a detailed description of his idea of the origin of language in Port-Royal Grammar. According to Arnauld, people are social and rational by nature, and this urged them to create language as a means to communicate their ideas to others. Language construction would have occurred through a slow and gradual process. In later theory, especially in functional linguistics, the primacy of communication is emphasized over psychological needs.
 
Relating Arnauld's concept to today's world, verbal expressions serve as a means of relaying opinions between humans.
 
 
 
CONCLUSION
Before this moment, lots of examinations have been formulated aiming at discovering validities on the origin of language.
 
Language, after all, has stood existing for over 150,000 years whereas, writing only came alive about some 6,000 years ago. If language is more ancient than writing, how then can writing justify the birth of oral words? Can we say that language has no beginning?
Regardless, research on this subject is maintained &amp; pursued up until this era.
 
 
 
REFERENCE:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language?wprov=sfla1">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language?wprov=sfla1</a>
<a href="https://www.wondriumdaily.com/origin-of-language-when-did-it-start-and-how-did-it-evolve/">https://www.wondriumdaily.com/origin-of-language-when-did-it-start-and-how-did-it-evolve/</a>

THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

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