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Asked by dentrenator to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 21 Mar 2012.
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Leila Battison answered on 21 Mar 2012:
Scientists think that once early humans started walking on two legs, this would have changed the shape of their throat, allowing them to make a range of noises and for language to start to be developed.
The first langauge was probably just words without sentences or tenses or verbs. Somthing like *point* “TREE UP FOOD” to indicate some food was up a tree. Obviously, different tribes would have had different words for things, and this is probably the source of our different languages today.
The first type of language was called a ‘pidgin’ – menaing very simplified, and then this evolved into a ‘creole’ type of language that built up sentences and put in tenses and all the other word groups.
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Adam Stevens answered on 21 Mar 2012:
There’s lots of different schools of thought on this, some people think it was caused by totally random mutations, or that it is an innate part of how our brains work. It will really be hard to work out for certain how language started, but once it did there are some very good theories about how it developed (you could compare this to say, theories about the beginning of the universe, or how life started!).
Anyway, I don’t really know that much about this kind of thing, but I think that Noam Chomsky’s theories are very interesting, that language is a really integral part of our whole make up, that it is an innate thing and only the details differ. I think it’s called Universal Grammar, and the whole concept raises very interesting questions about our brains and how we think, as well as how we developed over millions of years.
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