What Is Language?

Ebru Köklü
22 Şub
3 dakikada okunur

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals. Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans. When and how the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that its evolution must have been a long process. Our ancestors were probably speaking a million years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar than we are accustomed to.

Language has always been the most important skill that society had. Without language human beings won’t be able to communicate at all. We are able to exchange knowledge, beliefs, opinions, wishes, threats, commands, thanks, promises, declarations, feelings – only our imagination sets limits. We can laugh to express amusement, happiness, or disrespect, we can smile to express amusement, pleasure, approval, or bitter feelings, we can shriek to express anger, excitement, or fear, we can clench our fists to express determination, anger or a threat, we can raise our eyebrows to express surprise or disapproval, and so on, but our system of communication before anything else is language. Every region has their own language dynamics.

Language dynamics is a rapidly growing field that focuses on all processes related to the evolution, emergence, change, competition and extinction of languages. In Japan you probably would speak Japanese, in India you would speak Indian (well a bit of English thanks to Brits), in Turkey Turkish, in Russia Russian. These languages somehow related to each other. Turkish and Japanese belong to the same Ural-Altay Language family and we have common word in other languages too.

Language started thanks to early people who decided to create a system instead of ‘huga huga’. The language dates back to roughly 150,000 years ago. However, all the linguistic evidence dates back to around 6000 years ago, when writing began. Consequently, the major history of language is discovered through guesses and written evidence that is much newer than the era that the linguists study. The origins of human language will perhaps remain forever obscure. By contrast the origin of individual languages has been the subject of very precise study over the past two centuries.

There are about 5000 languages spoken in the world today (a third of them in Africa), but scholars group them together into relatively few families – probably less than twenty. Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions. The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times – as little as a few thousand years ago.

The Evolution of ‘tik’

Algonquianists reconstructed the words one and finger and concluded that they come from the root tik. The supporting idea is that people count one with the finger. The other supporting idea is that some languages still use similar words. For example, in Dinka – a Sudanese language – the word for one is tok. In Turkish, the word for only, that’s kind of like one, is tek.

In Old English, tahe was the word for toe, which is similar to a finger. In Japanese, te is hand, which is also related to fingering. In an Eskimo language, the word for index finger the word is tik. Examples are numerous, and they all pose one question: do they all come from the same origin?

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