How long has language existed

But the basic architecture and expressive power of language stays the same. The question, then, is how the properties of human language got their start. Obviously, it couldn't have been a bunch of cavemen sitting around and deciding to make up a language, since in order to do so, they would have had to have a language to start with!

Intuitively, one might speculate that hominids human ancestors started by grunting or hooting or crying out, and 'gradually' this 'somehow' developed into the sort of language we have today.

Such speculations were so rampant years ago that in the French Academy banned papers on the origins of language! The problem is in the 'gradually' and the 'somehow'. Chimps grunt and hoot and cry out, too. What happened to humans in the 6 million years or so since the hominid and chimpanzee lines diverged, and when and how did hominid communication begin to have the properties of modern language?

Of course, many other properties besides language differentiate humans from chimpanzees: lower extremities suitable for upright walking and running, opposable thumbs, lack of body hair, weaker muscles, smaller teeth - and larger brains.

According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with. So the question of the origin of language rests on the differences between human and chimpanzee brains, when these differences came into being, and under what evolutionary pressures.

The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do. About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract the mouth, tongue, and throat : Until anatomically modern humans, about , years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds.

But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began then. Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive.

Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then gradually or suddenly switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue. These issues and many others are undergoing lively investigation among linguists, psychologists, and biologists.

One important question is the degree to which precursors of human language ability are found in animals. For instance, how similar are apes' systems of thought to ours? Do they include things that hominids would find it useful to express to each other?

There is indeed some consensus that apes' spatial abilities and their ability to negotiate their social world provide foundations on which the human system of concepts could be built.

A related question is what aspects of language are unique to language and what aspects just draw on other human abilities not shared with other primates. This issue is particularly controversial.

Some researchers claim that everything in language is built out of other human abilities: the ability for vocal imitation, the ability to memorize vast amounts of information both needed for learning words , the desire to communicate, the understanding of others' intentions and beliefs, and the ability to cooperate.

Current research seems to show that these human abilities are absent or less highly developed in apes. Other researchers acknowledge the importance of these factors but argue that hominid brains required additional changes that adapted them specifically for language.

How did these changes take place? Some researchers claim that they came in a single leap, creating through one mutation the complete system in the brain by which humans express complex meanings through combinations of sounds. These people also tend to claim that there are few aspects of language that are not already present in animals. Other researchers suspect that the special properties of language evolved in stages, perhaps over some millions of years, through a succession of hominid lines.

In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things. In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.

This would require changes in the way the brain controls the vocal tract and possibly in the way the brain interprets auditory signals although the latter is again subject to considerable dispute. These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language.

There is even no need to discover Proto-Mammal bones and all the other creatures before cats and bats were evolved into completely separate species. Categorizing some species in the mammalian family does not require fossils of every step of evolution, so why does language? If the fist mammal can be reconstructed, why can the first language not be? This looks logical, but the role of the accident is ignored.

Learn more about how language changes. If the Proto-Mammal argument is applicable, then Japanese and English must have the same linguistic origin. This can apply to many pairs of languages.

Another example is Thai: fii in Thai means fire , taii in Thai means tire , and rhim in Thai means rim. Statistically speaking, it is normal to have such accidents among the languages of the world. Does this mean there is no systematic resemblance between distinct languages? There are limits that no language breaks: no language has 16 consonants at a time or seven vowels just running after each other. Another global limit is the use of clicks in languages, even though they can add more variety to the sounds of the language.

This is another argument that supporters of the Proto-World theory use to prove the single origin of all languages. The problem is that the similarities, the tik s, the global linguistic limits, and the arguments are not enough to testify the existence of the same pattern among all languages. Without enough evidence or a universal pattern, proving the origin of languages coming to the same root gets even more difficult. The origin of language is under debate as evidence of languages before writing is almost impossible to find.

One theory argues that the origin of all languages was the same, but they slowly evolved and made thoroughly different entities, just like the animals did.

However, considering the same root for all languages requires more evidence. These also are believed to derive from the language of just one tribal group, possibly nomads in southern Arabia. By about BC Semitic languages are spoken over a large tract of desert territory from southern Arabia to the north of Syria. Several Semitic peoples play a prominent part in the early civilization of the region, from the Babylonians and Assyrians to the Hebrews and Phoenicians.

A shared linguistic family does not imply any racial link, though in modern times this distinction has often been blurred. Within the Indo-European family, for example, there is a smaller Indo-Iranian group of languages, also known as Aryan, which are spoken from Persia to India. In keeping with a totally unfounded racist theory of the late 19th century, the Nazis chose the term Aryan to identify a blond master race.

Blond or not, the Aryans are essentially a linguistic rather than a genetic family. The same is true of the Semitic family, including two groups which have played a major part in human history - the Jews and the Arabs. On a Linguistic map of the world , most of the great language families occupy one distinct and self-contained territory.

The two exceptions are the Indo-European and the Finno-Ugric groups. But the intermingling of Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, forming a patchwork quilt across Europe, has come about for a different and earlier reason. Finland, together with Estonia on the opposite shore of the Baltic, forms one isolated pocket of the Finno-Ugric group the Finno part.

Hungary is another the Ugric element. The cause of this wide separation is the great plateau of Europe which Finno-Ugric and Indo-European tribes have shared and fought over through the centuries.

The ancestral language of the Finns, Estonians and Hungarians was once spoken in a compact region between the Baltic and the Ural mountains, until these people were scattered by Indo-European pressure.

Latin and German: from the 5th century. Over the course of history languages continually infiltrate each other, as words are spread by conquest, empire, trade, religion, technology or - in modern times - global entertainment. A good surviving example of this process is the line in western Europe dividing the Romance languages those deriving from a 'Roman' example from the Germanic tongues.

This linguistic division exactly reflects the influence of the Roman empire. Italy, France and the peninsula of Spain were sufficiently stable regions in the Roman world to retain the influence of Latin after the collapse of the empire.

The Germanic areas east and north of the Rhine were never fully brought under Roman control the exact linguistic dividing line survives in modern Belgium , with its population speaking French in the south and Flemish in the north. England was safely within the empire for three centuries. But the Romanized Celts were not strong enough to resist the invading German tribes, the Angles and the Saxons. Their languages prevailed in the form of Anglo-Saxon.

Modern English occupies a middle position within the western European family of languages, with its vocabulary approximately half Germanic and half Romance in origin. The reason is not Britannia's relatively fragile position within the Roman empire.