Origin Of Language Essay

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Language as it was First Spoken
From what has been studied so far it is clear that man is influenced of usual sociality. His nature to band together with his fellows for lower or for higher purposes is one of his major characteristics. To understand his fellows and to be understood by them, men were driven to the fabrication of language without which they could not converse with each other. The need of communication was the main cause of language production. Nowhere has the old proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention” received a better illustration than in the history of language; it was to satisfy the wants of daily life that the faculty of speech was first exercised.
Language is a basic component of society. It elevated man from a …show more content…

All these researches come with no physical evidence. These are just mere theories about the origin of language. These theories state that language was adapted from various sources, these sources were;
1) The Divine Source
In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans with language (whether it be God in Christianity or Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, in Hinduism). Several experiments have been made to rediscover this original divine language, with rather conflicting results. Thus, if human language did emanate from a divine source, no way/method has been found yet to reconstruct the said original language.
2) The Natural Sound Source
A different view holds the belief that human speech is based on “natural sounds.” In this belief, primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early people heard around them. In fact, all modern languages have some words with pronunciations, which seem to “echo” naturally occurring sounds. In English for example, there are words like splash, bang, boom, rattle, hiss, screech and other such forms of onomatopeia. Keeping this type in view, a theory called “bow-wow theory was formulated which presented the same idea about the origin of language. Though this is true, it is somehow difficult to see how most of the soundless and abstract entities in the world could have been given names if language simply echoed natural