The Origin of Language

(by Edward Vajda)

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/origin_of_language.htm

Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans.  The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures.  This belief predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language. 

It can't be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and human society are inseparable.  Wherever humans exist language exists.  Every stone age tribe ever encountered has a language equal to English, Latin, or Greek in terms of its expressive potential and grammatical complexity.  Technologies may be complex or simple, but language is always complex. Charles Darwin noted this fact when he stated that as far as concerns language, "Shakespeare walks with the Macedonian swineherd, and Plato with the wild savage of Assam." In fact, it sometimes seems that languages spoken by preindustrial societies are much more complex grammatically than languages such as English (example: English has about seven tense forms and three noun genders; Kivunjo, a Bantu language spoken on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, has 14 tenses and about 20 noun classes.) There are no primitive languages, nor are any known to have existed in the past--even among the most remote tribes of stone age hunter-gatherers. 

Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove that the first anatomically modern humans possessed creative language. It is also impossible to disprove the hypothesis that primitive languages might have existed at some point in the distant past of Homo sapiens development.

语言的起源

纵观历史，在许多社会中，人们曾经认为语言是神赐给人类的礼物。最为人所熟悉的说法可在《圣经·创世纪》第二章、第二十节找到，这上面告诉我们亚当（Adam）为所有生物命名。这个说法表明，人类从被创造出来开始，就有与生俱来的使用语言的能力。

人们无法证明语言与人类历史同样古老，但是语言与人类社会密不可分是千真万确的。有人类的地方就有语言。我们所发现的每一个石器时代部落，都有语言，这种语言在其表达的潜力和语法复杂度上都可与英语、拉丁语或希腊语相提并论。

技术有可能复杂，也有可能简单，但是语言总是复杂的。查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）曾指出过这个事实，他曾说过，就语言方面来说，“莎士比亚（Shakespeare）与马其顿（Macedonian）猪倌并驾齐驱，柏拉图（Plato）与阿萨姆邦（Assam）粗野的野蛮人也不分上下”。事实上，在工业化前社会，人们说的语言有时候似乎比诸如英语这样的语言在语法上复杂得多（例如：英语有约七种时态和三种名词性；奇文约（Kivunjo）是乞力马扎罗山（Mount Kilimanjaro）山丘上的人说的班图（Bantu）语，它有14个时态和约20种名词类别）。现在没有简单的语言，据我们所知在以前也没有简单的语言，即使是在最久远的石器时代，从事狩猎采集的部落中也不存在。

然而，人们不可能证实解剖学意义上的首批现代人类掌握了创造性语言。同样，也不可能推翻这样的假设，即远古智人（Homo sapiens）进化时期的某个时期，简单语言也许存在过。