Task 1: The Divine Source
In most religions, it is believed that language is a God-given gift to human species. In Christianity, God gave Adam the kingdom of all animals in the Garden of Eden and the first thing Adam did was to name these animals. That is how language started according to religious sources. Today people speak many different languages rather than only one language because ancient humans became too proud and they tried to build the Tower of Babel in order to reach God. So, God punished them by separating their languages.
People tried to discover the original divine language which was spoken by our most ancient ancestors. They assumed that if a child was brought up without hearing any language, the first word the child would utter would be in this divine language.
Task 2: The Natural Sound Source
'The "Bow-bow" Theory'
All languages have sounds that mimic the natural sounds. These are called onomatopoeic words. Some examples from Turkish are şırıl şırıl, hav hav, miyav, lıkır lıkır, etc. One belief is that human languages originated from these onomatopoeic words that mimic the sounds of entities or actions to which they refer. Thus, for example, miyav originally would be a word to refer to cats.
' The "Pooh-pooh" Theory'
According to this assumption language originated with the use of sounds that reflect emotions such as pain, fear, hunger, surprise, and the sounds of laughter and crying, etc. Some examples of these sounds are üf, ayyy, yaa, vay, etc. However, these sounds of emotion do not necessarily exist in the vocabulary of human language. Therefore, it is not plausible to assume that sounds of emotion are the basis for human language.
'The "Yo-heave-ho" Theory'
According to this proposal, early human beings used some sounds when they were doing some collaborative work. For example, when they were lifting a huge animal that they hunted, they used sounds to do their task for physical coordination and to reach their message to their friends that they share the burden of their job. It is claimed that these sounds eventually turned out into a language.
Task 3: The Oral-Gesture Source
People use some nonverbal communication when they speak. For example, we wave hands to say good-bye; we nod our heads to show our approval or to mean 'yes', we produce a sound by our tongue when we mean 'no'. The oral-gesture source suggests that language started with the gestures that we use by our mouth and other speech organs.
Task 4: Glossogenetics
Our ancestors became bipedal (standing and walking on their two legs) about 3.5 million years ago. When these humans could stand on their two legs, their larynx (a speech organ behind Adam's apple in the human throat) changed in a way to allow humans to produce vowel and consonant sounds in human languages. Human language developed as a result of this evolutionary change.
Task 5: Physiological Adaptation
Unlike human beings, no other species can use language because other animals have a very different physiology than human beings. Modern human beings have vocal tract for speaking. Human mouth is small, which makes it easier to open and close for fast speech production. Human teeth are in upright position and are regular in size, which allows us to produce sounds such as, f and v. Human mouth has a complicated muscle system, which allows us to produce various vowels. Our tongue can move backwards, forwards, up and down. This allows us to produce various speech sounds. In fact without these speech organs, human beings could not have spoken.
In addition, to these changes, human brain has gone through a number of changes, it became much bigger and specialized for language.
Researchers have claimed that human beings adapted all these physiological changes throughout their history and these changes caused the emergence of human language.
Task 6: Interactions and Transactions
Human language has two functions: Interactional and transactional. The interactional function pertains to our contact with other people socially and expressing our emotions. For example, we greet people, we ask them how they are, we chat about weather, we show our friendliness and hostility either by using gestures or by means of language. We also use language to transmit knowledge, skills, and information. For example, we give lectures, we give recipes about how to cook spinach, we talk about how to build houses, we talk about news, etc. This is known as the transactional function of language.
The transactional function of language can only be transferred by means of language. In other words, we can not educate our children by using our gestures, we can not transmit knowledge about our past by only using body movements,
According to some scholars, the reason why we, human beings, have developed human language is to be able to record our knowledge and pass it to other generations and to share knowledge and information with other people. In other words, the transactional function of language is a motivation for its origin. It is also considered to be the motivation for the eventual development of the writing systems.
