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On The Origin Of Languages
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Book Synopsis The Origin of Language by : Merritt Ruhlen
Download or read book The Origin of Language written by Merritt Ruhlen and published by Harvard Oriental Series - Opera Minora. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What can the classification of languages tell us about human origins and human prehistory? This book presents a popular account of the origin of language. It is intended for an audience with no prior knowledge of comparative linguistics, genetics or archaeology. The present volume is a reprint of the 2009 second edition of the book, and includes the text of the first edition (1994) with minor modifications, as well as the scientific evidence for monogenesis, and a Postscript recounting developments in the field since the original publication of the book"--
Book Synopsis On the Origin of Languages by : Merritt Ruhlen
Download or read book On the Origin of Languages written by Merritt Ruhlen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the prevailing conception of historical linguistics is flawed, the author presents a series of linguistic studies which demonstrate that all extant human languages share a common origin.
Book Synopsis History of Language by : Steven Roger Fischer
Download or read book History of Language written by Steven Roger Fischer and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004-10-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted. What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is. Steven Roger Fischer begins his book with an examination of the modes of communication used by dolphins, birds and primates as the first contexts in which the concept of "language" might be applied. As he charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century, when the science of linguistics was developed, Fischer analyses the emergence of language as a science and its development as a written form. He considers the rise of pidgin, creole, jargon and slang, as well as the effects radio and television, propaganda, advertising and the media are having on language today. Looking to the future, he shows how electronic media will continue to reshape and re-invent the ways in which we communicate. "[a] delightful and unexpectedly accessible book ... a virtuoso tour of the linguistic world."—The Economist "... few who read this remarkable study will regard language in quite the same way again."—The Good Book Guide
Book Synopsis The Origin and Diversification of Language by : Morris Swadesh
Download or read book The Origin and Diversification of Language written by Morris Swadesh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morris Swadesh, one of this century's foremost scientific investigators of language, dedicated much of his life to the study of the origin and evolution of language. This volume, left nearly completed at his death and edited posthumously by Joel F. Sherzer, is his last major study of this difficult subject.Swadesh discusses the simple qualities of human speech also present in animal language, and establishes distinctively human techniques of expression by comparing the common features that are found in modern and ancient languages. He treats the diversification of language not only by isolating root words in different languages, but also by dealing with sound systems, with forms of composition, and with sentence structure. In so doing, he demonstrates the evidence for the expansion of all language from a single central area. Swadesh supports his hypothesis by ""exhibits"" that conveniently present the evidence in tabular form. Further clarity is provided by the use of a suggestive practical phonetic system, intelligible to the student as well as to the professional.The book also contains an Appendix, in which the distinguished ethnographer of language, Dell Hymes, gives a valuable account of the prewar linguistic tradition within which Swadesh did some of his most important work.
Book Synopsis Origins of Language by : James R. Hurford
Download or read book Origins of Language written by James R. Hurford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an accessible overview of what is known about the evolution of the human capacity for language and what sets human language apart from the simple communication systems used by non-human animals. It draws on a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, neuroscience, genetics, and animal behaviour.
Book Synopsis On the Origin of Language by : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Download or read book On the Origin of Language written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology, and both essays are valuable historical and philosophical documents.
Book Synopsis How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention by : Daniel L. Everett
Download or read book How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention written by Daniel L. Everett and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Language Began revolutionizes our understanding of the one tool that has allowed us to become the "lords of the planet." Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today. Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup. Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect. In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator. How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.
Book Synopsis The First Word by : Christine Kenneally
Download or read book The First Word written by Christine Kenneally and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible exploration of a burgeoning new field: the incredible evolution of language The first popular book to recount the exciting, very recent developments in tracing the origins of language, The First Word is at the forefront of a controversial, compelling new field. Acclaimed science writer Christine Kenneally explains how a relatively small group of scientists that include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker assembled the astounding narrative of how the fundamental process of evolution produced a linguistic ape-in other words, us. Infused with the wonder of discovery, this vital and engrossing book offers us all a better understanding of the story of humankind.
Book Synopsis Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music by : Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Download or read book Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean-Jacques Rousseau the writer-philosopher was a practicing musician and theorist for years before publication of his first Discourse, but scholars have neglected these fertile, inexhaustible ideas because they were either unavailable in a critical edition or viewed as standing outside the aegis of his system of thought. This graceful translation remedies both those failings by bringing together the Essay with a comprehensive selection of the musical writings. Many of the latter are responses to authors like Rameau, Grimm, and Raynal, and a unique feature of this edition is the inclusion of writings by these authors to help establish the historical and ideological context of Rousseau's writings and the intellectual exchanges of which they are a part.
Book Synopsis The Evolution of Language by : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.
Book Synopsis The Social Origins of Language by : Robert M. Seyfarth
Download or read book The Social Origins of Language written by Robert M. Seyfarth and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How human language evolved from the need for social communication The origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language—in its modern form—remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution. In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language. Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Benjamin Wilson, Christopher I. Petkov and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.
Book Synopsis Roots of language by : Derek Bickerton
Download or read book Roots of language written by Derek Bickerton and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Herder: Philosophical Writings by : Johann Gottfried Herder
Download or read book Herder: Philosophical Writings written by Johann Gottfried Herder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-05 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Book Synopsis Empires of the Word by : Nicholas Ostler
Download or read book Empires of the Word written by Nicholas Ostler and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.
Book Synopsis The Gestural Origin of Language by : David F. Armstrong
Download or read book The Gestural Origin of Language written by David F. Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Gestural Origin of Language, Sherman Wilcox and David Armstrong use evidence from and about sign languages to explore the origins of language as we know it today. According to their model, it is sign, not spoken languages, that is the original mode of human communication. The authors demonstrate that modern language is derived from practical actions and gestures that were increasingly recognized as having the potential to represent, and hence to communicate. In other words, the fundamental ability that allows us to use language is our ability to use pictures or icons, rather than linguistic symbols. Evidence from the human fossil record supports the authors' claim by showing that we were anatomically able to produce gestures and signs before we were able to speak fluently. Although speech evolved later as a secondary linguistic communication device that eventually replaced sign language as the primary mode of communication, speech has never entirely replaced signs and gestures. As the first comprehensive attempt to trace the origin of grammar to gesture, this volume will be an invaluable resource for students and professionals in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy.
Book Synopsis The Study of Language by : George Yule
Download or read book The Study of Language written by George Yule and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-10-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides a straightforward and comprehensive survey of the basic issues and topics involved in the study of language. Its twenty chapters range over speculation about the origin of language, the relationship between language and animal communication, the principal concepts involved in linguistic analysis, the new fields of discourse analysis and computer understander systems, sign language, current views on how children acquire language and how adults learn new languages, how languages change over time and how language is affected by various social, cultural and regional factors. Written in a clear and lively style, with frequent examples from English and other languages, this textbook is designed to introduce the non-specialist reader to issues that fascinate and sometimes frustrate professional linguists. Students taking an introductory course on the nature of human language will find the carefully selected study questions, discussion topics and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter particularly useful. Both as a coursebook and as a book for the general reader, The Study of Language as an exciting way to explore how language works and the role it plays in human life.
Book Synopsis Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin by : Peter L. Patrick
Download or read book Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin written by Peter L. Patrick and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, up-to-date volume reports on current practices and use of Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (LADO). Readers will find chapters on how it is done, where it is used, how it is used, and learn about recent developments on the use of LADO reports in judicial practice, and current controversies in the field. LADO is a highly controversial topic, and a relatively new branch of forensic linguistics that is used by most European and some non-European governments. When asylum seekers cannot submit documentary proof of their origin, their language can be analysed in order to assess whether their linguistic profile is in accordance with their stated origin. Around 10,000 such language analyses take place annually. This volume is based on the series of meetings of the Language and Asylum Research Group held between 2010 and 2012 and convened by the editors, and offers a state-of-the art perspective from researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders working on or with LADO.
