Basically what i am asking is how were people suddenly able to understand each other and form words for things? Also how did they then take those words and create letters and writing in a way that other people could understand?
Another question I have is when did languages actually develop and how do we even know?
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Everyone is speaking about the evolution of spoken language.
I’m partial towards the ‘gesture-first hypothesis’, the proposal in linguistics that it was gestures and sign languages that came before speech. It’s got a few things going for it.
Here’s an article that takes a fair and balanced look, with the author concluding that he thinks they arose simultaneously, not preferring speech or gesture first https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325861/
– Fine motor control of the hands was already having to be developed to enable tool usage.
– The ability to teach our primate cousins symbolic gestures in a simplistic single word manner, but nevertheless at a level above their ability to vocalise
– the fact that many hunter-gatherer societies will also have a sign language or complicated gesture system, so as to enable communication while hunting. Gesture would have been needed in this regular urgent moment far more than speech
– the fact that infants are able to point and gesture slightly before they develop speech.
there’s a lot of small clues, non definitive reasons why some linguists take the gesture-first hypothesis seriously.
But ultimately, we don’t know. This is not hard science. This is putting together a plausible story from a number of small clues. It’s all still very much debated. I think gesture first is more likely, but then I got into linguistics through my passion for sign languages.
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