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Proto-Indo-European
- Linguists believe that all modern languages can trace their roots back to a single common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This proto-language is thought to have originated in Central Europe around 7500 BC and spread throughout Europe, Asia Minor, and India as people migrated or traded with each other.
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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.
Some theories propose that language is mostly innate, determined primarily by genes, while others hypothesize that human language has cultural origins, resulting from learning in social interaction, with limited and only general contributions from genetics.
The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively traced back to the Paleolithic. However, archaeological and written records extend the history of language into ancient times and the Neolithic. The distribution of languages has changed substantially over time.
- Interdisciplinarity
- From Models to Paradigms
- Uniqueness
- Compatibilism
Several disciplines contribute to the discussion on the origin of language: computer simulation, cognitive psychology, genetics, paleoanthropology, and comparative studies, as some examples (see Tallerman and Gibson 2012). Some disciplines employ sophisticated analysis techniques resulting in empirical evidence inconceivable until a few years ago. ...
Many scholars interested in language origin research (e.g., Bickerton 2012; Tattersall this volume) have explicitly assumed Chomsky’s model of language, that of Universal Grammar (UG), which is still relevant in the current debate (e.g., Hauser et al. 2014) despite some criticism (e.g., Tomasello 2009; Pennisi and Falzone 2016; Corballis 2017). Bio...
Biolinguistics presents several aspects that need to be analyzed. In our opinion, when it comes to the origins of language, the reference to a refined and well-established model of language represents both the strength and weakness of such paradigm. More specifically, the problematic issue is represented by uniqueness—an issue in the Chomskyan pers...
In our view, the first attempt made by Pinker and Bloom (1990) to integrate Chomsky’s model of language in an evolutionary context is an example of the limitations of the biolinguistic paradigm. Assuming UG as the indisputable starting point of the argument, Pinker and Bloom disputed Chomsky in proving UG to be compatible with the theory of evoluti...
- Francesco Ferretti, Ines Adornetti, Alessandra Chiera, Erica Cosentino, Serena Nicchiarelli
- 2018
Origin of Language. Language represents a fundamental character of modern humans, Homo sapiens. All animals engage in some form of communication. For example, single-cell organisms may relate to individuals around them via chemicals, whereas birds prefer more vocal communication.
It is assumed that the subfamilies, and from them the individual languages of the Indo-European family, are ultimately derived from a unitary language spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia (its exact location is still under debate), perhaps 5,000 years ago.
May 10, 2024 · Aristotle defined language as an activity that links sound and meaning, and requires therefore the coordination of two distinct systems: a phonetic system that receives and produces sounds (the sensory-motor component of language) and a cognitive system that gives meaning to sounds (the semantic component of language).
