How do languages happen? Not just new words or pronunciations,

>>1327223
I want to know how language even began. Was it a child who started it? Was it an adult?

>>1327240
>be hanging out with WunWun
>point at tree
>make noise
>WunWun looks at me for a second confused
>WunWun makes same noise and points at tree
>we both spazz out and start making the noise and pointing at the tree while dancing around it

and thus, language is born.

In written texts, oxford,dictionary, skahespear for example

extra credits did a decent video on this

or i dunno, it might have been awful i'm not a linguist. seemed alright

>>1327223
>>1327240

Language almost certainly pre-dates modern humans. Many species of ape and monkey have language-like repertoires of calls that could have formed the basis for language, what allows humans to do it so much better than any other animal are the combination of our big brains, our flexible larynxes, and our ability to control our breathing voluntarily. Also, while no ape has developed what we would call a full language, and while they cannot speak human languages because of the way their larynxes work, apes in captivity have shown an ability to learn sign language, and have been observed teaching it to other apes. Like all things where humans exceed other animals we do so in degree, not in kind.

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>>1327240
We don't know for sure. Humans been around approx. 200,000 years "anotomically" but "behaviorally" we've only been around approx. 50,000 years. That is to say, the earliest evidence of shared culture, ceremonial burial, etc. is about 50,000 years old. Various linguistic theories of the origins of language abound, just like with writing.

We know for sure language has been around way longer than writing.

Wikipedia cites this expensive work of academia:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-cradle-of-language-9780199545858?cc=us&lang=en&

as saying, quote, "genetic, archaeological, palaeontological and much other evidence has led to a near-consensus that language probably emerged somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age, roughly contemporaneous with the speciation of Homo sapiens."

There's theories about Mirror neurons, arbitrary cries becoming associated with objects, shapes, forms, and eventually ideas, etc. etc. etc.

We will likely never find out if the first true "word" was uttered by a child or an adult.

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>>1327254
but how do wunwun have name if first word be tree noise???

>>1327254
WunWun sounds cute.

>>1327280
>Middle Stone Age

There is no chance we didn't have language during the old stone age as well. Also, homo sapiens speciated way before the mesolithic, and had spread across the whole world before this quote thinks we invented language. Yeah, no.

There is a pretty based but baseless theory that language oscillates between degrees of analytic (lots of little words, little inflections) and degrees of synthetic (few but massive words, lots of inflection).

>>1327268
I can't stand those faggots

Language is just sounds in order.

>>1327353
By that logic, my farting before taking a dump constitutes a language.

>>1327373
>not communicating with others exclusively via bowel movements

Get on my level

>>1327223
gradual evolution, step by step
>>1327240
it's an instinctual thing. even like deaf orphans in isolated places make up sign languages.

>>1327223
We know that dolphins give each other names, so it probably started like that. Imagine you have three kids and you want to tell one to come over without just pointing at the right one.

>>1327392
>it's a black male thing
What did you mean by this?

>>1327409
Is this /his/ or did this turn into Night Calls all of a sudd...uh...

>>1327223
OP, there is an obscene amount of confusion on this topic, as you can see by some of the absolute nonsense above.
languages change arbitrarily over time. the process most fundamental to language change, and the one that lets us reconstruct ancient ancestor languages, is regular sound change. regular sound change is the phenomenon in which subtle changes in pronunciation and perception of language sounds are actually regular and happen across the entire lexicon in a given language. regular sound change is a fact, and just like tiny mutations in evolution accumulate over time to yield large scale changes in a species, tiny sound changes accumulate to yield large scale changes in a language. the academic discipline that rigorously studies this aspect of language is called historical linguistics.

>>1327240
asking how languages happen is totally different from asking how language began. there are many different approaches, but they basically fall into two categories: nativist and anti-nativist/anti-chomskyan. the nativist point of view is that humans have a biological capacity for language. in other words, language is part of our evolutionary history. the other position, the anti-nativist position, is that there is no language capacity, and that language is the result of a combination of domain general mental capacities. the nativist position is the mainstream in current linguistics. if that's the case, then the language faculty (sometimes called "universal grammar") is part of our evolutionary history. there are two factions among nativists; either the language faculty evolved incrementally over a long period of time, or that it evolved suddenly, as a result of perhaps just one chance mutation. chomsky himself is the leading advocate of the latter position, but the former is the mainstream at this time, being supported by people like steven pinker and ray jackendoff.

>>1327373
>Language is a system of organized sounds recognizable by multiple individuals and capable of symbolizing information
Farting before your dump is the most universal language

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>>1327223
>but entirely different grammar too
Grammaticalization, analogy, and especially change in pronunciation.

Some examples:

In Proto-Indo-European the perfect tense of all verbs included a change in of the vowel in the stem, like modern English sing/sung. In Proto-Germanic change in pronunciation obscured this process and the neat system started to break down, new verbs no longer formed the perfect, instead they used the present plus the perfect of "to do", which sounded something like *dede back then. Eventually these fused and it became a suffix, the ancestor of modern English -ed. Over time irregular forms are replaced by regular forms by anology, for example the past tense of help, holp being replaced by the more regular helped.

Proto-Germanic had a class of nouns where the nominative plural was formed with an "-iz" suffix, in the prehistory of Old English there was a sound change called the i-mutation where if there was an /i/ in the next syllable the position of the tongue in the previous syllable moved closer to it, producing a different vowel (see pic). So "foot" was *fōt in the nominative singular and *fētiz in the plural, from an older *fōtiz, inflectional endings were enunciated more weakly, and had a tendancy to disappear, more on this in the next example/. This left us with fōt and fēt by the time Old English is first written, which became foot and feet in modern English, the same process also produced mouse/mice, man/men.

Grammatical relations used to be indicated by case, for example you could say "me bit dog", "bit dog me", and me would be understood as the one being bitten in every sentence, because of the form it is in, called the accusative case. Though back then most nouns would have suffixes instead of irregular forms like I/me. As the suffixes disappeared we adapted by using word order to indicate the subject and object.

>>1327223
Ultraconserved words might give you a hint.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html

>>1327254
t. augustine

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>>1327321
Hmm. Who do I believe? The research I looked up, or an overly certain anon who scoffs and says "no chance?"

I think I'll go with the research. If you could provide your own, I'd be more than glad to read it.

>>1327223
It depends if you think if language or communication is hard wired into the brain, or it isn't. Linguistics is mostly supporting hard wired, but it's still split, and there's evidence on both sides.

The ability to communicate is not a wholly human endeavor, so it is hard wired to a degree. The problem is understanding how much of it is, and how much of it isn't. And how much of it is linguistic rules, and also epistemological rules, and how those rules characterise contemporary knowledge, obfuscating fact.

>>1327533
I love linguistics

>>1327223
Exactly as pictured. Everyone on earth had the same language, built the tower at Babel, and God confused their languages to separate them and stop them from completing their abomination.

>>1328917
I wonder about idiots like you. What kind of "evidence" do you think there would be that the first humans talked to each other?

Is it even possible for you to grasp that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

>>1327254
>then narrator savagely rips WunWuns clothing off and impregnates her

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>>1327533
It's been fucking years since anything has blown my mind, but this chart about the locations of vowel sounds in the mouth just fucking killed it man. Holy shit I need to read into linguistics. How come my education was so shitty no one ever pointed this out.

>>1329306

I want more WunWun fan fiction, porn webms, anything

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>>1328953

>>1327254
>WunWun
;_;

>>1328616
Thanks for the nice source. Appreciated. 10/10 would read again

>>1329463
I keep thinking people want their questions answered.

Then people like you remind me that "ignorance is bliss" is a way of life these days.

>>1329760
You really consider the stories of the old testament to be literally true?

>>1329760
And by the way, how tall do you think the tower of Babel was? Do you think people who lived, I don't actually know how long ago this was supposed to have been built so let's say 5000 years ago, managed to build something taller than the Burj Khalifa?

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>>1328957
I never said the first humans talked to each other. I said:

>We don't know for sure. Humans been around approx. 200,000 years "anotomically" but "behaviorally" we've only been around approx. 50,000 years. That is to say, the earliest evidence of shared culture, ceremonial burial, etc. is about 50,000 years old. Various linguistic theories of the origins of language abound, just like with writing.

>We know for sure language has been around way longer than writing.

You then insisted I was wrong. I asked for evidence, and you called me an idiot.

So, are you going to post evidence, or not?

>>1329306
WunWun is a male giant from game of thrones.

>>1329321
Vowel charts are nothing new. I don't think you'd hear about them unless you went into linguistic studies though tbqh.