Evolution Of Spoken Language

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Through the evolution of man, human beings have had the need to communicate in different ways. Even though it is unknown how language originated , it is supposed that some type of spoken language must had developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago) (Yule, 2010). Based on this conception, there are different theories about how language began. The first one is the divine source, It was supposed that a divine source provided humans the language based on people's beliefs. According to Yule: “there was a story of an Egyptian pharaoh named Psammetichus (or Psamtik) who tried the experiment with two newborn babies more than 2,500 years ago. After two years of isolation, the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word, but something that was identified as the Phrygian (an older language spoken in part of what is modern Turkey) word bekos, meaning bread (2010)”.…show more content…
However, there was another theory based on the concept of natural sounds, known as “The natural sound source”. This theory proposes that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women heard around them (Yule, 2010). For instance, noises produced by objects, animals, or emotions (such as pain) have the almost the same sounds in spoken language, supporting the idea of this theory. On the other hand, the“social interaction source” proposes something different. It claims that people learn the language from their interaction with others and that the physical effort can be the source of the language (Yule,

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