Linguistic Theories

The entire world's conceptions and myths about the creation of language show that humans are curious about their language skills and strongly believe that it is a divine gift. However, this does not explain why humans are endowed with language and other animals are not. Even in modern times, many theories have been proposed regarding the origin of language. It will not be out of place to take a cursory review of them here.

  Supporters of continuity theories believed that the origin and development of language happen gradually, and it cannot be considered that the emergence of language happened suddenly. Although language as we see and use it today is so complex, it often does not do enough justice to the expression of new psychological complexities that have grown even more so, so that their origin cannot have been sudden.

 Steven Pinker is a staunch proponent of this view. According to him, just as human beings evolved, language also evolved gradually. A group of people who agree with this theory but have different opinions, such as language did not originate from the need to communicate with others, but evolved out of a primitive need for self-expression. However, the objectors say that these theories do not give a satisfactory answer as to why the need for expression or communication is inherent in humans.

 The next theory that originated to challenge this theory was the "Discontinuity Theory". According to these theorists, since human beings possess unique language-processing qualities that are not found in any other animal, it must have appeared suddenly at some stage in the course of human evolution.

Noam Chomsky is a major propagator of the continuity theory. His main view was that language might have arisen in a sudden, perhaps accidental, explosion of linguistic traits over hundreds of years of human evolution. He believed that some sudden changes in human chromosomes were mainly behind this phenomenon. The overall meaning of this theory is that language arose as a result of biochemical changes in the human body and brain.

Another school of thought is that language is the basic property of the human mind (brain) and genetics has made its natural structure in the human mind and that is why languages ​​were born. The reason this view has not been widely accepted is that the theory ultimately does not prove anything different.

I agree with the view that language evolves over time. However, accepting evolution does not provide an answer as to why language is created in the first place. Why should a variety of languages have emerged when humans carry similar genetic traits? These theories say that language is created either for communication or for expression. It is clear that these theories, of course, accepted Charles Darwin's evolutionism. This sequence of evolution is structured from Archaic Hominids, Neanderthals, and then Homo sapiens, the ancestors of modern humans. A distinction has to be made between this biological evolution and the evolution of language. Furthermore, evolutionists agree that Darwin's theory does not hold up to all the tests. Without going into that debate here, let us focus on the origin of language.

 In the overall development of language, it cannot be accepted that the language of all species evolved in the same way from the species from which humans originated, i.e., from hominids to homo-sapiens. Although each human species may have some, even rudimentary, language, the extinction of one species has given rise to other languages. Therefore, it is natural that along with the end of a species, their language also perished, but the spirit of language survived.

However, there is a great deal of controversy over one issue and that is whether Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred to become modern humans or whether Neanderthals became extinct because they could not survive the competition. If the first theory is accepted, then Homo sapiens must have taken the linguistic features of their ancestors. If that is the case, it has to be assumed that the gradual development of the language also took place through hybridization. Of course, the debate about what is true in this is still going on.

Although human beings spread over the earth have a language, they do not have a commonality that can be pointed out precisely. In a sense, every language is regional with independent features. Though huge claims have been made, an artificial reconstruction does not lead us to a single primitive source language. The usage of roots to determine similarities of the words to trace them to some ancient language have been failed. If there are similarities the answer must be lying elsewhere which we need to search for.

It can be said that the gradual development of language is also regional. We will see further how the regional geological features affect the human regional psychologies, culture, and language. Also, we can find in the regional evolution that there are instances where human settlements in a region were destroyed due to natural disasters, infectious diseases, and destructive wars during the prehistoric period. If this is the case, the question arises as to what the future of the languages ​​of such perishing communities is. The answer is what I have elaborated on in this book, that languages are always influenced by the local geology, and the newcomers, after a few generations, will find changes in their previous language. We have fine examples of these linguistic changes in the colonized world.

The language or vocabulary changes with lifestyle changes are also significant, which we may call linguistic evolution. For example, just as the bullock carts became redundant with the development of modern technologies, hundreds of words associated with the bullock cart are falling out of use. Man has reached the stage of cultural development only when he has built the edifice of new cultures on the ruins of old ones. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty whether the development of the language has been unidirectional, continuous or fragmentary, in the absence of any evidence.

Modern science

 Modern science believes that Broca's center in the human brain is the origin of language. It was discovered in 1861 that an accidental hit to this center could disrupt a person's ability to speak, so this center was named after its discoverer, Paul Broca. But soon (in 1876) Karl Wernicke realized that there was another nucleus in the brain that, if affected, impairs language comprehension and expression. This part of the brain was named Wernicke's area. Further, it was realized that many parts of the brain are interdependent about language and many parts of the brain are working for the actual act of speaking. However, exactly why and how the origin of language (or the process of learning it) occurs is not yet fully understood.

 Noam Chomsky believes that humans are born with a universal grammar and that is why children begin to understand and speak the complex nature of language at an early age. Universal grammar is not a negligible concept since universal psychology has some kind of local geological traits that make every human being psychologically equal exhibiting local geologically influenced traits.

 More recently, Tecumseh Fitch proposed the "mother tongue" theory based on Darwin's kin-selection theory. According to this theory, language may have emerged from the urgency of communication between mother and child. This theory suggests that the language may have expanded as the same method was used for close relatives as well. Of course, this theory was also objected to. Other animals also try to communicate with their offspring, but no language originates from it.

We can easily see some features of the language. The human larynx has the ability to produce complex sounds that other animals do not. Words are a sequence of sounds, which carry a certain meaning and is consistent at least in his group. When words are structured into grammatical sentences to give them a wider meaning, language comes into existence. A listener in the regional group understands what has been uttered. Another important thing is that language continues to evolve, but the fundamental structural tendency of the language does not change.

Linguistic psychology or psychology of languages is an interdisciplinary branch that deals with the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, utter, and produce language. Its area is limited to cognitive science as it moreover deals with how language is processed in the brain and the meaning derived and expressed thereof. Moreover, it deals with a major question of how the child acquires and comprehends the language. Language production is a factor that deals with how people produce language, either in written or spoken form, which can be comprehended by others. To convey meaning, language produced should be rule-governed; otherwise, the language spoken or written may not be able to convey what the speaker intended.

In short, linguistic psychology deals with peripheral objectives but does not try to touch the core of the very subject i.e., the origin of languages. It is limited to cognitive science and deals with the associated issues of learning and speaking languages.

Chomsky believes that language is an innate faculty of humans, making them distinct from other animals. He also postulates the universal grammar that makes children understand the complex nature of the language in early age. He also proposed that in the remote past some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, which reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain. Some linguists posited that the languages must have emerged in primates that gradually developed with an increase in brain volume over the ages.  Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the brain have been considered to be responsible for language. However, it was learned later that various parts of the brain participate while producing and uttering the language, so we cannot point out a specific region of the brain responsible for language. The fact is brain collectively participates in creation, uttering, and comprehending the language with the help of the assisting organs.  

There is no doubt that the origin of languages is mostly attributed to the urge to express and the need for communication. Proponents of continuity theory, such as Pinker, hold that language is mostly innate and some hold that it has developed from the animal conversation of primates. A few, like Anderson, believe that the language was invented only once and that all modern spoken languages, being descendants, are somehow related to each other.

Though various other theories are floating around as well, we have taken an overview of the major theories that have been prominent at present. We can easily determine that the main question of the origin remains unanswered because most of the theories are speculative.

Humans can think and produce complex sounds because of their developed larynx. Other animals, too, have a larynx that produces certain meaningful sounds, cognizable with their pitch of sounds and actions. They too pass on certain messages and deliver expressions to some extent. Unlike Humans, other animals lack cohesive thinking processes and memory, which could be a limiting factor for the non-development of organized languages in other animals. Also, it may be the fact that we human beings are unable to comprehend animal language because it might have a totally different structure and sound waves indiscernible to us and because it does not need words and grammar but sound frequencies to make their specific language.

It can be postulated that the faculty of logical thinking emerged first in the human brain which helped him to construct meaningful language. The complexity of the language developed with the growing complexities of life in far later times. We have seen in the earlier chapter that the invention of agriculture forced humans to invent new vocabulary and grammar to convey the complex world they had newly entered. His early language suddenly lost meaning but on the foundation of the same roots, he expanded his linguistic horizon. He needed, no matter how rudimentary, mathematics as well. With this advancement, not only did vocabulary grow, but grammar also took a complex form.

The earliest journey was from sounds coupled with gestures to primary words devoid of any grammar. It sufficed his early needs. Because of their developed larynx, they could easily produce or imitate sounds from nature and other animal kinds with independent sounds. This must have amazed humans at the early stage, which they turned into a useful tool, i.e. language.

Word is a sequence of sounds. How could early humans decide that a certain sequence of sounds uttered by one person delivers some intelligible meaning? Language is to be understood by others and by the speaker of it; if not, it is meaningless. In the absence of meaning, there cannot be a language.

Here we come across the social or collective mind. People living in a certain land (or geography) possess a certain set of minds which we call general psychology. The universal mind made human beings develop languages from their imminent need for survival. Language came with humans when they appeared on the face of the earth. It was within the human species in abstract form, and only because of this, they could give meaning to the sequence of sounds in a unique way. Languages did differ because there were sets of people spread across the globe living in their specific geographical and geological surroundings that impacted their mindsets, and hence the different languages emerged. Specific thinking order in humans belonging to certain sets could have recognized easily what a certain series of sounds meant. It could have been an innate faculty that made comprehending the meaning of sound sequences very easy for the people living in the same geological setup.  Utterance of the word “Tree” when first invented, no detailed explanation was required. Just a gesture or pointing out a tree could suffice. The words for the abstract psychological phenomenon, though individually invented, could be understood by others since the general psychology was similar. Here, cognitive psychology came to help while developing words to give meaning to life or the world. The syntax was the outcome of this process. It varied from region to region, either slightly, or if geological formations were too different, causing different sets of psychology, it would drastically differ. Language groups differ based on the sequence of the sounds that form words and the syntax. This order is determined by the order in which the specific people think. The thinking process of the people living in certain regions determines their language and the way it is spoken, which is always influenced and determined by the geological structures. The relationship between the physical characteristics of the geology and the human mind is thus eternally formed and exhibits cultural diversities.

The specific order of thinking depends on the general psychology of the people among whom the particular language is developed. Choices of the sequence of sounds to make a certain word that has a specific meaning differ from language to language. The order of the words set to make a meaningful sentence, and grammar; too do differ because it is influenced by the general psychology of a particular set of people.

The cognitive process of people living together in similar geological and geographical conditions becomes similar though there are definite geographical variations in the thinking patterns and the languages, to which we call “group languages”. Language is a manifestation of the collective psychology.  With the growing complexities of life, languages become complex, gets modified, polished, perfected, and transformed over time hence they undergo various changes. Even today in tribal societies where lifestyle is less complicated their languages too are simple. Even some languages do not need tenses or genders.

 Language is an expression of the inner self of the human being. The word comes later, meaning comes first, or the opposite also happens, which we can call the innate ability of the human being to process language. Human thinking and thinking processes take place in the biological or neurological language in the brain, which is later converted into a certain meaningful series of sounds, pauses, and full stops. The brain processes it before it is uttered. However, we are not aware of the language in which the brain thinks and processes the language. However, we can call it “Neurological Language.”

We have little proof, except material culture, to understand how and what early humans could have been thinking. However, around 40,000 years ago, we find a cultural explosion taking place across the globe. We have many proofs from the excavated finds to show that elaborate burials, pottery, and ornaments were part of their life. The concepts of beauty, continuity, the threat of death, and the concepts of the afterlife can be understood from these remnants, and one can imagine eternal curiosity becoming part of their minds. From cave paintings of Altamira to Bhimbetka, we can see that while fighting with the odds, they were entertaining themselves with art and dance. The innate need to express the self and think about life and the afterlife is evident from such proofs. Material culture and languages go hand in hand in every human civilization.

Michael Maystadt (Illinois State University) says that around this time anatomically modern humans started to behave and think like modern humans. It does not mean that earlier humans lacked in thinking. As the brain evolved, the thinking of humans also evolved and so did the languages. The intense psychological need to communicate, express, and command became the foundation of the languages.

The origin of the language is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a collective process of the social mind of the people residing in certain geographical areas. Because it is geography that decides how the social mind will function and express itself. Language is the cumulative outcome of it. As a universal mind acts the same, every group of people has developed languages, in their own way. The influence of territorial geological elements clearly influences human language and culture. In similar territories, adjoining or distant, having common geological features we find different languages, but as their basic structure is somewhat similar, linguists set it in some or other group of the languages, thinking some branch of such language-speakers might have migrated to that place in unknown and unattestable past. However, the demographic movement of the people is not necessary for making a language group. 

We have to understand this because it has been constantly postulated that the language families have a single ancestor source language that emerged in the distant past in certain hypothetical tribes to spread later because of human movements.

Suppose a group of people living within certain geographical boundaries moves away to settle in new territories. What would be the status of their language? The question is peculiar. Though the fact is that the people or tribes wandered in known territories, some tribes may have settled in the land beyond their known horizons. To establish communication, they would have learned the local languages that could have impacted their own vocabulary and grammar, and in the process, a hybrid language might have formed. The movement of the people is not always a natural instinctive journey, but a need for survival. Either they settle in their respective lands permanently, if they migrate, or return to their homeland when they think the situation back home is right. If they stay there permanently, what happens to their own language or if they come back to their homeland, what is the change in their language? No proof is presented to explain what compelled early so-called PIE speakers to migrate in different directions. They even do not explain from where they came to that hypothetical location and what their original language/s was. From a few skeletal remains we have extracted genes and have formulated a theory that speaks about the linguistic history of a group of people when genes do not tell us at all what language they spoke!

But, even if we consider the migration theory to be true, first we have to agree that from someplace, some group of people, speaking a certain proto-language did move in many directions in batches and at different times. Wherever these groups finally landed, those lands must have been occupied by different groups of people speaking some kind of their own language. These lands couldn’t be vacant devoid of any population having their own language. It is proposed that to impact the languages of the local people the newcomers must outnumber them or establish a permanent rule over them to enforce language and culture upon them. We cannot agree with this as unless the fundamental psychology cannot be impacted by outside forces, no foreign language can be enforced upon local people. They can learn a foreign language or they can borrow the vocabulary but they will always fit it in their own linguistic features.

If we take the Indo-European group of languages for example, we find its spread right from Europe to most parts of Asia. To make settlements in such a vast region, PIE speakers, originally settled in any hypothetical homeland, should be too large in number to impact the languages of the local people spread over that vast region, no matter how they achieve this. Even if they had to invade such a vast territory, they would need enough trained manpower to wage wars and subjugate all the populations. Even if we consider this was the case, in batches they migrated in different directions in two or three waves, how could they leave any significant mark to change the basic structure of the local languages, unless they outnumbered them? And if they waged wars, subjugated people, and enforced their language and customs, why is there not even the slightest single proof yet surfaced? Could it be possible to cause such a drastic change without changing the root psychology of the locals? Even aggressive Islam or the British who ruled half of the globe could not do this! The language of the aggressors can become a second language of the subjugated people, but it cannot completely change the basic structure of the local languages. 

The Indian case is quite typical. In the Indian subcontinent, there are two distinct language groups, Indo-European and Dravidian. Both the regions speaking two distinct languages are geographically connected… not separated by sea or difficult mountain ranges. We cannot imagine any reason why IE should stop its spread southward of Maharashtra and leave further regions uninfluenced.

Didn’t so-called IE speakers reach there any time in remote history?  It is not the case. So-called IE speakers, whether migrating from their original homeland or from North India, sure had reached southern regions. Still, we find no IE impact on the structures of those languages except for some exchange of vocabulary or imitations.

The surprising fact is, beyond these four Dravidian-speaking States, in an island country, Sri Lanka, separated by the sea, is spoken the so-called IE language. Surprisingly, the people who could not influence the language of geographically connected regions could impact the language of the people living in the land far beyond, but not in the land that lay between. This sounds like a fairy tale, isn’t it?

However, proponents of the PIE speakers’ migration theories staunchly believe in this wild hypothesis. Some scholars think that the original migrants mingled with the local populations, but left a linguistic genetic mark on the languages of the local people; thereby making them part of the IE-speaking group. However, they do not answer, if is there any linguistic gene that can pass on language through biological contact? Had it been the case the entire world would have become linguistically tattered. This theory is racist and supremacist and misleads the genuine linguistic history of the origin. 

Coming back to the questions, in human prehistory, the populations were limited. Human beings had settled in respective regions long before 10,000 BC. They were semi-nomadic for their profession of cattle herding and primary agriculture. In 2013, archaeologists unearthed evidence of early agriculture at a 12,000-year-old site in the Zagros Mountains in eastern Iran. Mehrgarh's site indicates that the human beings of that region knew about agriculture 10,000 years ago. There may be some more unearthed sites that would indicate the earliest agriculture on the globe. The fact remains that agriculture helped human beings to settle in the respective regions. Kenoyer asserts that “….These data indicate that foragers were present in the exact locations where we later see the emergence of settled agro-pastoral communities during the Early Food Producing Era (7000-5500 BCE) and the Regionalization Era (5500-2800 BCE).”

Population movements were rare and that too occurred in extreme circumstances, such as climatic disasters or epidemics. There were wars between the tribes, but they too don’t suggest demographic migration of the subjugated tribes. The battle of ten kings, described in the Rig Veda, and the battles enumerated in the Avesta suggest that either victorious king would enslave the subjugated people or extract heavy ransoms from them. Largely most of the tribes mentioned in the Battle of Ten Kings still reside in their respective regions and are known after them.

India has experienced foreign aggression since known history. From the Greeks to the Shaka, Hun, Kushan, etc., invaded India. Few ruled temporarily, some for several centuries. They, too, had their own distinct culture and languages. But could they impact the fundamental linguistic and cultural structure of northern India? There could have been a slight exchange of vocabulary and cultural elements, but it could not change the basic structure of the culture and languages. Rather, the invaders, including Muslims, adapted to the local languages and cultures, which is evident from the languages and symbols used on the coins of foreign rulers.

So, even if the invaders are superior, they cannot enforce their languages. Although human has an innate ability to learn other languages, either for political compulsions, professional benefits or religious studies, the original language does not disappear unless such speakers are too small in number or become extinct. The adaptation of any foreign language also shows specific, distinct characteristics. Otherwise, though people can learn as many languages, the basic structure of their own language remains unaffected. The new languages learned are pronounced locally, not the same way they are originally spoken.  Pronunciation of Sanskrit, though a tight artificial language with set rules of utterance, is pronounced differently in every region of India. The same applies to English and Hindi.

There has been rule by North Indian kings or emperors in the southern States. There have been cultural and commercial exchanges between the South and North for an unknown time. Still, we do not find any language impacting the other to change its basic linguistic structure, except for the exchange of some vocabulary. Such exchanged elements are seen as being adopted as suitable to the local forms.

The migrations, invasions, or rule of some people, thus cannot alter the structure of the languages local people speak. Known examples from history don’t support this theory. Biological relationship with the group of languages is thus a deliberately nourished hoax. It rather stresses the superiority of some people who migrated and enforced their language upon the local people.

Even in the group language, every language falling in the same group significantly differs from others. Every language has its own specialized vocabulary. Every region has a specific style of pronunciation. The group languages are said to have genealogical relationships or languages that share common innovations that are not attributed to contact or borrowing. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, i.e. features of the proto-language, but there are many features in the same group of languages that are absent in proto or so-called common ancestor languages. Still, they find a place in certain families because they are said to be established with shared innovations, though not directly descending from the common ancestor of the entire language family. Germanic language is a fine example of this. Germanic languages share vocabulary and grammatical features that are believed not to be present in Proto Indo-European language. Rather, linguists believe that the innovations took place in proto-Germanic, which was a descendant of PIE. 

We can see clearly that the concept of the common ancestor language, shared features, and innovations in descendant family languages cannot be the explanation for the formation of a language family. The group languages are categorized by common features that can be artificially reconstructed in some proto-language, and if not, those are simply treated as innovations, but thought to be in descending line with the common ancestor language.

However, such a proto-language does not exist today. No one knows what the exact form of the languages our distant ancestors spoke. It is artificially reconstructed from the most common words, which are found in the hypothetical language family, to ascertain the original or source word/root. This is an artificially constructed language; many times, with the help of computer programs, those give different results with different programs and hence mostly become speculative and controversial. Rather, the PIE language issue is treated by many scholars as theoretically disguised racist propaganda.

However, we must admit that there are languages that have some or more common features that form a family. To form a family, there is no need for physical movement of the people speaking some kind of proto-language. 

We have seen in the previous chapters that the faculty of languages in humans is very ancient and is related to human psychology. Human genetics, too, is influenced by regional characteristics and does carry recognizable regional markers.

Hence, we can define the net of languages, which some call a language family, with the help of geological characteristics that influence general psychology and so the language of the people. We do not need to trace it back to the population movements of the past as it has no proof to substantiate language-spread-theories and hence remains controversial.

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