ANCIENT HISTORY |
| An Egyptian papyrus (the
Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, dated to c.1700 BC but perhaps copied from
a 3000 BC
original) records diagnostic details of 48 medical cases, including one
of a person who suffered localised brain damage and lost the capacity to
speak. This is often cited as the first recorded diagnosis of aphasia (loss
of speech capacity due to brain damage). |
|
| The Greek historian Herodotus (5th Century BC) records
a story of one of the Egyptian pharaohs, who conducted an experiment to
see which culture and language was the oldest by ordering two children
to be raised in linguistic isolation. He wanted to see what words the children
would spontaneously produce. |
|
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES |
| Early European encounters with great apes stimulate
speculation about their intelligence and linguistic potential. |
|
| The German rationalist philosopher Johann Gottfried
von Herder, in his 1772 essay ‘On the Origin of Language’,
argues that humans can adapt to such a wide range of environments because
they are able to think reflectively about the world they see (and not respond
instinctively). He argues that reflection requires the ability to categorise
phenomena and give them names. Language is then simply the external expression
of the use of reason. |
|
| The French romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
in his 1781 essay ‘On the Origin of Language’, argues that
the first words were used to express our emotions. |
|
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
|
| In the second half of the nineteenth century, doctors
begin to get a better understanding of which parts of the human brain are
involved in speech and language processing. Their research is based on
studying brain-damaged patients whose brain damage has caused them to lose
normal language abilities. |
|
| Charles Darwin writes, in 1871, of the possible route
by which language might have evolved gradually from the simpler forms of
communication seen in other living species of animal. |
|
| The German linguist F. Max Muller (lived 1823-1900)
derides Darwin’s and other theories which suggest that language could
have been derived by gradual evolution from the kinds of vocal signals
seen in other animals today. |
|
| La Société de Linguistique de Paris (the
newly-set up French learned society for the scientific study of languages),
founded in 1866, bans discussion of the origin of language on the grounds
that this is pure speculation. |
|
| In 1891 the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois finds the
first fossils of a human ancestor species in Indonesia, and calls them
Pithecanthropus erectus – ‘the ape-man who walked upright’.
He cannot tell whether or not this species used language. |
|
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ONWARDS
|
| A partial skeleton of a Neanderthal is recovered at
La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, in 1908. A debate ensues – still
not resolved – about the linguistic ability of this very close relative
of our own species, now of course extinct. |
|
| Noam Chomsky, an American linguist (born 1928), argues
that humans are born with an innate, or hardwired, knowledge of a universal
grammar. He observes that all languages share certain rules and that children
learn languages with astonishing speed. |
|
| Studies of vervet monkeys in Africa, in which their
alarm calls are recorded and played back to them from concealed loudspeakers,
show that they are sensitive to acoustic cues signalling different kinds
of predator (eagle, leopard, snake). |
|
| There are several attempts to train captive great apes
to communicate with humans using language, from the 1920s onwards. It emerges
that chimpanzees cannot learn to use a spoken vocabulary, and results of
sign language experiments are mixed. Later work with a keyboard apparatus
shows however that humans and chimpanzees can communicate using words and
using some basic grammatical rules for combining them. |
|
| Genetic studies of a family whose members display selective
deficits in speech articulation leads to the identification (controversially)
of a ‘speech and language’ gene. Further studies suggest that
this gene evolved into the form found in modern humans some time in the
last million years, and a copy of the same form of the gene is recovered
from the bones of a Neanderthal. |
|
| Bones from the root of the tongues of two extinct hominin
species are excavated and show a change from a chimp-like to a human-like
form, implying the evolution of greater control of the articulatory apparatus. |
|
| It is suggested that human language evolved to enable
us to manage large networks of social relationships. |
|
