When did humans develop language?

I think that humans developed language skills when they reached a part in evolution that they needed to be able to communicate so that they could evolve more, if we had not developed language we would still all be cavemen as we wouldn’t be able to evolve.

I believe sign language was the first mode of language to be created because cave men used sign language as a way to communicate by pointing and other basic signals however it was a very different form of sign language to what we use today. Speech was the second mode of language because after cave men started to sign they started to grunt to go with the sign language and eventually they got clearer and began to speak actual words. Writing was created after spoken language, it is a way to put what is spoken onto paper (or clay) it was designed to be able to tell people in the future what had happened, it was also used to keep record of things like slaves.

Writing was invented around 4000BC in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) however there is also older writing that was made up of pictures however this form of writing was not complex enough to class as actual writing. Mesopotamia cuneiform was created by pressing a reed stylus into soft clay and then letting it harden. It was a form of writing in which each symbol represented an entire word. Advantages of the invention of writing are that we can communicate with people far away and to a large community.

Ancient languages that have been lost can be deciphered by using computer algorithms.

The oldest surviving language is Tamil, it dates back to about 3500BC is spoken form and about 500BC in written form. Tamil is still spoken by about 80 million people today all over the world.

Websites:
http://www.wisegeek.com/where-was-writing-invented.htm
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/decipher.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070424044813AA0ILZJ

When was writing invented and where? What advantages does the invention of writing have for human development?

Though there is some debate surrounding exactly which group of humans was the first to create a written language, it is generally accepted that it was the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia – the so called “cradle of civilisation”. This innovation allowed the Sumerians to record transactions, educate and perform administrative duties more easily, contributing to their cultural and scientific development.

The Sumerians cuneiform (comprised from wedge shapes) written script evolved from an agricultural counting system employed in ancient Mesopotamia to manage taxes and trades. Prior to the written script, farmers would hold decorated tokens that corresponded to particular goods of theirs, such as sheep, grain or land. However, this system became cumbersome when persons owned vast quantities of agricultural items and was later simplified by substituting the physical tokens for drawn representations on clay tablets. Though originally appearing as unordered pictograms, this unification of previously separate symbols onto single tablets set the framework for the future Sumerian cuneiform, and eventually became less pictorial and more abstract, partially due to the nature of the primitive styli and clay tablets employed by the scribes. The development of phonograms and new characters to represent other non-agricultural and trade related ideas also occurred as the benefits of the written language became clear. Particularly, the establishment of phonograms allowed scribes to record the names of people and ideas that lacked standardised written representation, while previously established symbols were also adapted to this purpose. For example, “Luka” (a name now seen as “Luke”) could be represented through the use of the head (“Lu”) and the mouth (“Ka”) symbols, because of their pronunciation. This advancement was also made possible by the ordering of the characters, which were read left to right, at some point in its development.

The benefits of written language were clear in Mesopotamian society, which was full of ancient science and culture. The use of language was central to this advancement because it allowed scientific observations and culturally significant practises like religious rites and mythology to be accurately recorded and preserved. Written language, which had once been used exclusively to manage transactions and taxation, could now be used to record the movements of celestial bodies and to compose letters to friends. Scribes and their apprentices (the male children of rich citizens) also learnt and taught material from written script, showing writing’s importance in education. All of these applications of writing have been central to our development as humans, both culturally and scientifically.

The Sumerians were the first to create written language, and in doing so promoted the development of their society’s culture and scientific understanding.

Typical Sumerian cuneiform letter:


The development of some Sumerian symbols (from pictorial to cuneiform forms):


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http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/writing.html

http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm

http://www.funsci.com/fun3_en/writing/writing.htm

http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/menu.html

All images from http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/menu.html

What are some features of child language?

When a child is first born it is capable of very little in the way of speech. So how is it that by the age of 18 months a child has a vocabulary of roughly 50 words?

The path to language acquisition starts relatively early with children beginning to babble and make up their own forms of language between the ages of five and seven months. Even before they are ‘talking’ they can often recognise their mother’s voice and research has shown that babies cry in the some tone as the language of their mother tongue.

Interestingly, babies who are brought up by deaf parents who sign develop signing at the same rate as their babbling. Even before babies have language in the form of speaking they are pointing and using hand gestures to be understood. Children begin to use their hands as expressive language even before they babble as it is easier for them to control their hands than the muscles needed for speech. This form of expressive language can be understood by most, even in adult language (travelling in foreign country and needing directions).

Many people argue that the earlier a child starts to speak, the more intelligent they are. This is untrue. Every child develops at a different rate in every area of their life. Reports say that Albert Einstein didn’t begin to speak until the age of three or four. Yet even with later speech development he is one of the world’s greatest genius’.

In the opinion of many linguists there are many reasons as to why children develop language at such a rapid rate. One of these reasons is that as a child is learning a language, it is also discovering the world; everything is new to them. Many believe that this blank slate makes language acquisition infinitely easier than learning a language later in life. As well as this, children are never without the opportunity to develop their language.

Child language will always be a research topic, and realistically all of the answers desired will never be known.

Bibliography:

Love the Lingo

http://childdevelopmentinfo.com/child-development/language_development.shtml

http://iteslj.org/Articles/McGlothlin-ChildLearn.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/23/12874.full

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-UE1bMX43U&feature=related

When did humans develop language?

Approximately 4100-3800 BCE symbols began to be used that were calved into clay to represent and record the ownership of land, grain or cattle. Here the English language began to develop. The earliest examples of this written language were found at Uruk in Mesopotamia.

Acrophony was developed in 3100 BC, this was considered to be a “One Sign-One Sound” type of written language. After this the earliest language development the Proto-Canaanite/Proto-Sinaitic was formed around 1700 BC. This was found at the torquoise mines in Serabit-al-Khadim in the Sinai. Less than 30 signs were used.

The Old Germanic language developed in 450-1100 AD. Germanic tribes invaded England to form what we now call Old English. Though many words from the Old English is still used in modern english, many english speakers would have trouble understanding old english.

Middle English 1100-1500: In 1066 AD William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England. The conquers, the Normans brought with them a form of early French. This then became the language of the Royal Court. For a while there were two forms of the language which divided the upper and lower classes within France. In the 14^th century English was more common but with more French words within the language. This language is even more like the modern day English but it would still be difficult for modern day English speakers to understand.

Early Modern English 1500-1800: Towards the end of Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift began. Vowels were pronounced shorter.

1800- Present Day: Modern English has had its language develop from the Industrial evolution and new technology such as exogaming which is used to explain gaming that you have to exercise while gaming. Australian English has adopted many words from other countries due to the Brtish empire that expanded across the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/writing.html

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_JPVES8nbkPTsRxnBH6dKC-QZXqkY2gQbqC0lwzX-7yul-QjaL_UjOiok6w_PApYx-WgoVCF6eh_g6Vp9N6upfuviQqKfPmpPTtIHR43q81K8dZ2LePgcL82CSJToQ419_jOpX2AIxtY/s1600/egypt150.gif

http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm

http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fATACyObd1w

Which language mode came first?

I think the order of language modes is as follows: Sign, Speech and Written. To me this order makes sense as sign seems to be the most obvious and basic whereas the other two seem a bit more complex and could require more work.
Take prehistoric humans (cavemen) as an example, what mode of language do you think they most likely would have used first? I think they would have used signing first because it seems obvious in most cases and simple compared to the other two, for example, if the cavemen were hunting in a group and in order to remain silent but still keep the ability to lead they could of used signing like the present day military who use signing for various reasons such as: It is too loud to hear words, stealth is necessary, etc. This does not mean that they did not develop a language to talk though which I think they did.  Human babies use signing early on for example they may want something to drink and if they recognise a bottle = a drink then they could point to the bottle and they even may use some sort of sound as well (speech).
Speech to me seems more complex than signing and that is why I would say it comes second and from my general observations of human babies it seems to me that they use signing first for example they would recognise their mother and they also recognise warmth so in order to get close to their mum they reach out with their hands and arms, mother = warmth. Eventually human babies develop a larger vocabulary and learn how to use it but even though they have learned how to speak they still use signing as does everyone and as their speech improves so does their signing, maybe after continuous development of their signing and speech they might ask themselves what it might look like on paper?
A child starts to draw and from my experience of watching my little sister develop her language skills she started to make her own written language of the English language but as she grew older and she had more experience with the English language she discovered how to recognise various letters and even started to recognise words shortly after from the English language.
According to these websites: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1566748/Cavemen-may-have-used-language.html and http://crystalesp.blogspot.com.au/2007/10/cavemen-language.html  , Scientists have recently discovered a gene that is found in modern day humans and this gene is called FOXP2. The FOXP2 gene is a gene that is needed for the development of speaking as it controls the muscles to form words with the larynx. On this website http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Language_in_hand.html?id=ME_64lsKO3kC&redir_esc=y the editorial review of the book “Language in hand” explains that the author explained why signing came before speech and did this by “He then supports his proposed order of linguistic development from four approaches: exploring the unique ability of visible signs to resemble what they represent, comparing human anatomy involved in gesture and speech to the anatomy of chimpanzees and other primates, examining signed languages still in use today among both hearing and hearing-impaired communities, and observing linguistic development in children.” According to page 95 the caveman’s skull structure had less room for a vocal cavity and that as the Humans today have a more erect head this allows for a larger vocal cavity and this supports that signing may have come before speech as the cavemen would of used some sort of sound but signing probably would have been more dominant because it is more flexible. On this website http://www.lingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3395&sid=9dfc8f60b1c8800723e3b0732eb67cc2 a debate between users about what comes first out of speech and written and is generally accepted by the majority that speech came first. According to one user if you go back to the middle of the Palaeolithic they had “a culture rich in symbolism and ritual” and she argues that in order to have ritual and symbolism an idea must first be shared among the community. However another user who thinks that Written came before Speech argues with that language is the organised set of mental representations and if this is true then it is not silly to think that written came before speech and that according to scientists that babies start developing language first by recognising visual patterns as stated earlier that for example, a bottle = a drink but then this is not written. So in conclusion and in my opinion I think the order of language modes is: Sign, Speech and then Written.

How Do Humans Learn Language?

‘How do humans learn language?’

Babies start learning language at very early stage. The first sign of vocalisation is when they are 1 month old when they will make humming sound ‘ahh & oh’. At 2 months they will respond to cues and coo. Then at 6 to 8 months a baby will babble and makes vowel noises and imitate the sounds they hear such as ‘da, ma, ba, gaga and yaya’. Around the age of 11 to 14 months old they will start to say their very first words. By age 2 they will have starting building their own dictionary and say more than 10 different words. This will vary from child to child because the stages they learn will be different and it will depend on the amount of exposure they have to language.  

Initial baby talk is made up of single syllables, sometimes repeated twice e.g. ‘da da’. By 9 months they are using basic words like ‘no and bye-bye’ and starting to say a wider range of consonant sounds and tone of voice. By 18 months they can say 10 simple words and repeat words or sounds said to them they often leave off endings or beginnings of words like ‘noo-noo’ for noodles. By about 2 years of age they can string together a couple or words like ‘me milk’.

http://www.earlychildhoodeducation.co.uk/how-babies-learn-through-crawling.html

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080707142743AAxDJ5B

http://mezo.hubpages.com/hub/when-do-babies-talk

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys-first-words

Love the Lingo - Book

What is the oldest surviving language?

What is the oldest surviving language?

It is impossible to be sure what the oldest surviving language is. Spoken language could have developed thousands of years before a written language in some cultures so we would have no record of when it was created. As far as we can tell Tamil is the oldest surviving language (By “surviving” I mean still spoken by people and not only used by scholars or scientists like Latin) and it has evolved from Proto-Dravidian. Tamil in its earliest forms has been dated back to between 500BC and 200BC. It originates from an area in India called Tamil Nadu but inscriptions have been found in Egypt, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Tamil has had three different forms. Old Tamil the earliest form of Tamil, middle Tamil which was achieved by the 8^th century and modern Tamil which has been spoken for the last 400 years. Changes between the three forms include the development of a present tense, the addition of more Sanskrit words and the removal of several words. Despite this modern Tamil is still very similar to old Tamil.

Today Tamil is still spoken by about 8 million people in regions of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Mauritius and in 2001 1863 newspapers were printed in Tamil. I think that qualifies Tamil as a surviving language and the fact that it is  over 2000 years old seems like good enough evidence for it being the oldest.

Is it only humans that have language?

Humans are the only creatures that use language, but all animals can communicate. They don’t talk like we do, but they do all have their own ways of communicating with us, others of their species and animals of different species. Most animals use sounds, but they also use sign, touch and scent.
For example; whales sing to their mates, ants leave a trail of smell for others to follow, baboons use touch to show affection and to groom, and dogs wag their tails to show that they are happy or friendly. Some might use all four. Cat’s meow when they are hungry, rub against peoples legs to show affection (or to tell you they want something), twitch their tails when they’re unhappy, and rub against objects to leave their scent and mark their territory. These four ways of communicating are divided into four headings; visual (sign), auditory (sound), tactical (touch) and chemical (scent).
Like us, some animals of the same species, but in different regions, have different dialects. An example of this is the Blue Whale, which, depending on where they are from, might use a different pattern of tones, pitches and pulses. The same goes for some different types of birds, who can even become bilingual; they can learn to use different dialects in order to communicate with their neighbours. Some animals also use sounds in order to warn each other about predators.
While we can also use sounds and signs to communicate, we mainly use language. Language is impossible for other animals, due to the way their larynx works. Scientists are still looking into this, but humans are the only creatures that use proper language.

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/animals-communicate.htm

‘What are some features of child Language?’

‘What are some features of child Language?’

When a baby is born, they tend to communicate through facial expressions and body language. They start their language by gurgling, cooing and making other little noises and begin experimenting with sounds whilst making their own sounds.
As the child grows they begin repeating syllables like “da-da-da-da” and mixing syllables.

Around the ages 1 ½ to 2years the child learns how to speak through observation , they start using words and combining them to what is called ‘two-word utterances’  like “Dada-chair” meaning “That’s dad’s chair.”
The child uses their language to express their needs and their wants, by pointing at things and making simple noises that sound like the object or word they are trying to say.

Children begin using language to express and tell others what to do.  They realise language is used to communicate to people and form relationships and they start to see the meaning of the words they use and realise that language goes beyond just what you need or want.
Children start using language to express their feelings and opinions, they start realising that language is more than just demanding for things and that can be used for praise.
The child begins to gain information about their environment and the world, and begin in the stage of their life where they ask questions about everything and are pretty determined to get answers E.G “Mummy, how do trains move? Why?”

At some stage the child starts using language to create imaginary situations, tell stories and share them with their peers. They begin recognising objects and naming what they are. In the last function of child language, the child uses language to talk about new things and learn to represent themselves through language.

Bibliography:

http://www.studentroom.co.uk/wiki/Revision:Child_LanguageAcquistion_-_Speaking.

http://www.englishessays.org.uk/resources/english-essays/funtions-language-children.php.

Kate Burridge and Debbie de Laps, 2010, ‘Love The Lingo – VCE English Language units 1 & 2’  Victorian Association for the Teacher of English 2010, Collingwood, Victoria. Pages 87-92.

Is it only humans that have language?

 - Do animals communicate? How? Which ones?

 - How does human and animal language differ?

Yes, animals do communicate with all different types of communication. The common one they use is sounds. Sounds can mean all different types of things to each and different animal the common one is mating calls and to do that they use sounds. If a dog is angry or sees that danger is coming they will send out a loud bark to communicate.

Touching is another form of communication for Animals for example chimpanzees greet each other by touching hands. Elephants entwine their trunks to show affection, giraffes touch each other’s necks to also show affection. Horses rub noses to also show affection.

Animals also show a lot of emotions through body language and different forms of communication such as anger such as gorillas they stick out their tongue when they’re angry. Monkeys use facial expressions for a lot of things. A frown of a Rhesus Monkey is a clear sign of unease.  

Animals can also communicate through sending out smells (Airborne Chemicals) to get messages to other animals. Pheromones are an important part in reproduction and other social situations. Animals also use scent for many ways such as to mark out territorial boundaries, to warn off predators, or to attract prey.

Another form of communication for animals is body language. For example the bees will dance when they have found nectar. The bee in the hive will dance and the dance directs other bees to the location of the nectar.  Dogs will wag their tails as a sign of pleasure/ happiness.

Our form of communication is what makes us different to animals. Such as they need communication for pure survival while as we have gone past that.

The websites I used:

http://www.alaskawellness.com/may-june04/communicate.htm

http://www.animalcommunication.com.au/

When did humans develop language?

When did humans develop language?

Humans are social beings.  Language is a critical tool in our communication; without language, everything we have ever developed – or ever will develop – would be impossible.  Language was developed thousands of years ago, and we continue to decipher early methods of communication in an effort to prevent them from dying altogether.  The first forms of communication were quite primeval, and yet infinite possibilities have advanced from this early development.  Without language to communicate with others, humans would have been severely restricted in their capabilities.  Even animals have methods of communication which enable them to hunt and coordinate in larger groups.  Communication allows for greater efficiency, and humans would have discovered early on that they could not survive without language. 

The first forms of language would be quite basic, as any innovation is in its beginnings.  Signs and physical gestures are a less refined method of communicating than speaking and writing, but can be used to great effect.  Spoken language would have been a natural progression, as verbally expressing thoughts would enable greater efficiency and more freedom.  By speaking aloud, humans and animals are able to communicate messages over vast distances.  Writing has been used by human civilisation for thousands of years, but is relatively new in comparison to the other two modes of language.  Early writing systems were not formulated using the same alphabets we see today, but commenced using pictures and symbols representing words.  The Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphics, using a series of images to record information and communicate stories or messages.  Indigenous people like Aborigines painted images and performed dances and rituals to tell their Dreamtime stories.  The foundations of writing have been in place for thousands of years, but the written forms of language we use are newer by comparison.  Written language still appears in various forms, such as in China, where symbols can represent a whole word or phrase.  English is thought to have originated in the 600’s.  Based on the Roman alphabet that was brought to Anglo-Saxon England, this system was used by Christian missionaries and church officials.  These have been remarkable achievements for mankind, and are arguably what distinguishes us from animals.

As technology progresses and communications are the foundations upon which our society is built on, language is as critical as ever, and it is exciting to think what it will unlock in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Love the Lingo

Kate Burridge and Debbie de Laps

VATE

Victoria, Australia

2010

http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp

http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html

People begin to learn language just when there an infant. Children learn language with no effort at all even though it’s a very complicated skill. A child learns 3,000 words a year, while a person will speak 370 million words in a life time.

 When you’re a baby we listen to people around us and pick up on things we hear. People have found out that before a child has said its first word it has already started learning the rules for language. It takes about 2 years for a child to say it’s first word, before then you just here normal baby noises like ‘ahhh’ and things like this. These signs are good though, it just means it’s learning to say words.

The very first way a baby will communicate to you is through crying and screaming very loud letting you know there’s something wrong. A baby will respond to the mother’s voice because that’s who the baby has heard every day for the past months.

Many people say children learn to communicate by imitating other people but this isn’t completely true. They imitate people’s sentence structure and verbs, so they can make their own sentences. For example, you might hear your child say things that you haven’t heard before like “Mum, I’m going to sit on the swing while eating my pretzel.” This isn’t a common sentence that you would hear and imitate, and by looking at things children say like this, it helps prove they don’t just copy what we say.

At the age of 6 months a child will respond to their name, respond to human voices with eyes and turning their head, respond appropriately to friendly and angry tones. 12 months use one or more words with meaning, understand simple instructions and practices inflection. In 24 months they can name a lot of object and can combine words into short sentences. Then right up to 8 years where they now can follow very complex directions, control rate pitch and are now very well developed in the world of language.

How do children learn language?

      When do children start learning language?

Children start learning language before they are born. Five months into pregnancy a baby’s hearing develops and it begins to hear everything its mother says. From that moment the baby begins to hear and start to process every word it hears. The transition from simple hearing to processing the words and learning language can be thought of in three steps:

1. Learning sounds- A baby is born with the capacity and ability to make every sound in every language. It can produce all of the 150 sounds that make up every language in the world. Then, through hearing its parents speak, the baby picks up which sounds it will need to speak the same language as their parents. This process of learning and eliminating the phonemes that aren’t required is known as ‘phonemic awareness’. This is important to a child’s reading skills that will develop in the future. This happens after about 6 months.

2. Learning words- In this stage a child learns what sounds mean and what sounds go together to mean different things. They also learn word boundaries. This is the recognition of where one word ends and another begins. They also learn that adding morphemes such as an ‘-s’ to the end of a word means that there is more than one of something. This begins to happen from around 8 to 12 months of age. 

3. Learning sentences- In this final stage a child learns how to place words in the correct order to make a sentence. They also learn what makes sense and what is grammatically correct. This stage usually happens at around 30 to 36 months old.

Through this process children all over the world learn to speak the language of their parents. They learn to use one of the primary sources of communication this way that without it, it would be very difficult to function in society.

Websites used-

http://www.indiaparenting.com/boards/showmessage.cgi?messageid=3241&table_name=dis_healthissues

http://giftedkids.about.com/od/gifted101/a/language_learning.htm

Where did writing first develop and where.-maggie.

The history writing records the development of expressing language by letters or other marks.In the history of how systems of representation language though graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbol. True writing, in which the entire content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development, and is distinguished from proto-writing in that the latter typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it difficult or impossible to confidently reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance.

Writing is thought to have been invented independently first in Mesopotamia (specifically, ancient Sumer) around 3200 BC. Though there are a quite a few apparent un-deciphered texts, but most think that they were proto-writing, and not real writing at all (a few examples of witch would be Indus script of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization in Ancient India or rongorongo script of Easter Island. The writings on the earliest tablets (they were made of clay) are simple pictures, or pictograms, which represent an object or an idea. Because clay is a difficult material on which to draw lines and curves, the Mesopotamians eventually reduced pictograms into a series of wedge-shaped signs that they pressed into clay with a reed stylus. This wedge-shaped writing is called cuneiform (and it looks awesome).

This great technological advance allowed news and ideas to be carried to distant places without having to rely on a messenger's memory. Like all inventions, writing emerged because there was a need for it. In Mesopotamia, it was developed as a record-keeping vehicle for commercial transactions or administrative procedures. There are also texts that served as "copy books" for the education of future scribes. Eventually, cuneiform script was used to produce some of the greatest literary works in recorded history.

http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/cuneiform-writing-system-ancient-mesopotamia-emergence-and-evolution

http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/consortium/vammesopotamia5.html

http://www.chevroncars.com/learn/history/first-written-language

When did humans develop Language?

When did humans develop language?

In my opinion, the reason humans started to speak, to develop language, was because we needed too, it was part of our evolution. It was due to the necessity humans felt to survive as easily and efficiently as possible, and language made that far more achievable.

 Sign was the first type to come onto the scene, hand gestures and movements to simply make our thoughts known, though a lot different to the Sign Language we know today, (used primarily for the deaf to communicate to others around them), it’s based on the same concept. Next came speech, which made things simpler yet more complex all at once, as it was easier to comprehend what people were saying rather than looking at their hands, but on the other hand, there was a whole new world of words and meanings to learn. The latest mode of Language is Writing, which once again evolved the way we communicate, news could spread around the world and inform millions, and it was a much faster and more efficient way to communicate to someone far away.

The first language to actually have a written form was the Mesopotamian writing system, and was originally drawn on big clay tokens. This all started in around 3500 B.C. Today we have technology that can literally decipher ancient languages, which all started 2 years ago, where MIT researchers developed computer software that could translate the extinct Semitic language of Ugaritic into modern-day Hebrew. The language has 30 letters, and the computer correctly found 29 of their Hebrew forms. About one-third of Ugaritic words have Hebrew root words, and the system correctly identified 60% of them. This was a big leap forward at the time, and means that now there are around 8 elusive languages we have yet to discover, not many considering all the languages out there.

There are many different languages in the world, some of which not even used any more, and some still being discovered and uncovered, others kept secret. Scientists around the world spend their days decoding these languages, finding new words and meanings, to further their knowledge of the world.

  
The oldest surviving language in the world is Tamil, still spoken by around 52 million people today. It dates back to around 500 B.C., and is spoken in some areas of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, the USA, UK and Australia.
 
Language is what makes us different from the animals, where they communicate for pure survival, we have gone past that, and it’s now used for socialising, leading, and informing, it keeps us entertained, it broadens our knowledge, and it will never stop evolving.

Websites Used:

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/24988

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_old_is_the_Tamil_language

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tamil.htm

http://askville.amazon.com/writing-invented/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=2454687

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/MUS/ED/TRC/MESO/writing.html

http://news.discovery.com/tech/computer-translates-ancient-language.html

How do humans learn language?

How do humans learn language?

A baby starts talking as early as the age of 6 months; they may not be saying full words but be talking “baby” talk. A child should be able to speak 5 or 6 words by the time they are 1 year old. The first way a baby learns to communicate is by crying, a baby will cry if they are hungry, or upset. Another way a baby communicates before they can talk is by smiling and making cooing noises. A baby first learns receptive language. Receptive language is what you understand when other people talk to you. When babies first learn to speak they here the patterns in a sentence so one pattern is a word and when that pattern dies down and a new one begins babies know that it’s the start of a new word. When a parent is talking to their child, they simplify what they are saying so the baby can understand; once their child starts to develop their language the parents will develop their language along with the growth of their child. When a new baby is born, it will respond to its mother’s voice more than any other voice it hears. The way we talk to babies is called parentese. Babies prefer the singsong lilts rather than the adult tones; it is even believed to help babies learn language.

Bibliography

http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/babies_connecting_nutshell.html

http://www.justmommies.com/articles/baby-talking.shtml

http://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html

Love the Lingo VCE English Language Units 1&2

Deb Roy: The birth of a word

Do animals communicate? How? Which ones?

Animals may not be able to speak like we do, or write like we do, but they do have other ways of communicating, eg. Wolf howls, frog croaks, dog barking and cats purring.

Animals rely on non-verbal and verbal communication, sometimes they’ll howl, other times they’ll communicate by leaving scent markings behind or how Dolphins splash their tail on the water and how the Peacock spreads its feathers to attract female peacocks.

One study that was conducted showed that Iguanas have well-shaped ears, even though they can’t communicate vocally, it’s so they can hear the warning calls of the paradise flycatcher, the Iguana and flycatcher have nothing in common besides sharing the same habitat and raptors like to snack on them, so when the Iguana hears the flycatcher sounding the alarm, it’ll know to be on the lookout for predators as well.

Meerkats use three different types of communication; non verbal (body language), sounds and scents.
Meerkats purr to show contentment and attachment, they chatter when nervous and squeal when danger is about.
when one “gang” enters another territory the scent part comes into play, Meerkats claim the area they live in by admitting a scent.

Gazelles have a very prominent way of communicating by ‘stotting’, which involves Gazelles jumping into the air with all fours held stiff and backs arched – they tend to do this before running when they see a predator.
Stotting is one of the most common ways a Gazelle communicates to predators.

Gabrielle sparks.

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/animals-communicate.htm  

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/meerkats-communication1.htm

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/gazelle-body-language.htm