Republic of the Philippines

Saint Dominic College of Batanes, Inc.

Lizardo St., Brgy. Kayhuvokan, Basco, Batanes, Philippines

Readings on Language and Linguistics

A College Term Paper Presented to the Faculty of Secondary Education – English

Department.

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to the Department of Secondary Education of

English Major Subject Introduction to Linguistics.

Submitted by:
Cobo, Romnick F.
II - BSE-English

Submitted to:
Ms. Rizzalie Morne V. Montoya

September 2020
I. Summarizing

Origin of language
We simply do not know how language originated. We do not know that spoken
language developed well before written language. Yet, we have no physical evidence
relating to the speech of our ancestors and because of this absence of evidence
speculations about the origins of human speech have been developed.
Speculations to the Origin of the Language
1. Divine gift
a. Judeo-Christian beliefs, God created Adam and gave the power to name all the
things.
b. Egyptians – the creator of speech was the god, Thoth.
c. Babylonians – believed that the language giver was the god Nabu
d. Hindu – female god, the wife of Brahma who was the creator of the universe,
Sarasvati gave language to us.
2. Plato
In ancient time, a “legislator” gave the correct, natural name to everything, and
that words echoed the essence of their meanings.
3. Panini
First linguist known who wrote a descriptive grammar of Sanskrit in the fourth
century B.C.E that revealed the earlier pronunciation, which could then be used in
religious worship.
4. Greek history
a. Historian Herodotus mentioned Psamtik as an example. During his travel to
Egypt, Herodotus heard that Psammetichus sought to discover the origin of
language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly, he gave two
newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instruction that no one should talk to
them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to
determine their first words.
b. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all
people.
c. Bekos- bread, a Phrygian word (older people than the Egyptians)
5. King James IV
King James the Fourth of Scotland carried out the same experiment and
discovered the children spoke Hebrew. The Divine Source of Language could not be
confirmed.

Human Invention or The Cries of Nature?

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed that the earliest
manifestations of language were “cries of nature”
a. Bow-wow Theory
 Primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early
men and women heard around them. E.g., cuckoo, splash, bang, and boom.
  These words echoing natural sounds are called “onomatopoeic words”
 The original sounds of language came from natural cries of emotion such as
pain, anger and joy. E.g., ouch! , Ah…
b. Yo-he-ho Theory
 The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our
language. The importance of yo-he-ho theory is that it places the development
of human language in some SOCIAL CONTEXT.
 Early people lived in groups. Groups offered better protection from attack.
Groups are social organization. In a group, communication is required. So
human sounds were produced.
c. The Physical Adaptation Source
 The focus is on the biological basis of the formation.
 Human teeth, lips, mouth, tongue, larynx, pharynx and brain have been
created in such way to coordinate in producing speech sounds.
d. The Genetic Source
 The innateness hypothesis is a linguistic theory of language acquisition which
holds that at least some knowledge about language exists in humans at birth.
This hypothesis supports linguistic nativism and was first proposed by Noam
Chomsky.
 A human might have (language gene) that makes him speak.

Language and Thought

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf. They claim that the structure of a
language influences how its speakers perceive the world around them is most closely
associated.

Linguistic determinism – the strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because it

holds that the language, we speak determines how we perceive and think about the world.
On this view, language acts like a filter in reality.

Linguistic relativism – a weaker form of the hypothesis which says that different
languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore
think about the world in different ways.

At present we do not know if there was a single original language – the

monogenetic hypothesis – or whether language arose independently in several places, or
at several times, in human history. Myths of language origin abound; divine origin and
various modes of human invention are the source of these myths. Language most likely
evolved with the human species, possibly in stages, possibly in one giant leap.
Sign Language
A language that employs signs made with the hands and other movements,
including facial expressions and postures of the body, used primarily by people who are
hard-of-hearing.

The sign language of hard-of-hearing communities provide some of the best

evidence to support the notion that humans are born with the ability to acquire
knowledge, and that all languages are governed by the same universal properties.

Because hard-of-hearing children are unable to hear speech, they do not acquire
spoken languages as hearing children do. However, hard-of-hearing children who are
exposed to sign languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken
languages. Sign language do not use sounds to acquire meanings. Instead, they are visual-
gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to represent
words and grammatical rules. Hard-of-hearing children have difficulty learning a spoken
language because normal speech depends largely on auditory feedback. Special education
(also known as special-needs education, aided education, exceptional education, or
SPED) is the practice of educating students in a way that addresses their individual
differences and special needs. Although, hard-of-hearing people can be taught to speak a
language intelligibly, they can never understand speech as well as a hearing person. 75%
of spoken English words cannot be read on the lips accurately.

American Sign Language

The major language of the hard-of-hearing community in the United States is
ASL. ASL is an outgrowth of the sign language used in France and brought to the United
States in 1817 by the great educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

Animal Languages
The idea of talking animals is as old and as widespread among human societies as
language itself. All cultures have legends in which some animal plays a speaking role.

“Talking” Parrots
Most humans who acquire language use speech sounds to express meanings, but
such sounds are not a necessary aspect of language, as evidenced by the sign languages.
Reports of an African gray parrot named Alex suggest that new methods of training
animals may result in more learning than was previously believed possible. When the
trainer uses words in context, Alex seems to relate some sounds with their meanings.
This is more than simple imitation, but it is not how children acquire the complexities of
the grammar of any language.

However impressive these features, the ability of a parrot to produce sounds

similar to those used in human language, even if meanings are related to these sounds,
 cannot be equated with the child’s ability to acquire the complex grammar of a human
language.

The Birds and the Bees

Most animals possess some kind of “signaling” communication system. Among
certain species of spiders there is a complex system for courtship. The imitative sounds of
talking birds have little in common with human language, but the natural calls and songs
of many species of birds do have a communicative function. They also resemble human
languages in that there are “regional dialects” within the same species, and as with
humans, these dialects are transmitted from parents to offspring.

Bird calls convey messages associated with the immediate environment, such as
danger, feeding, nesting, flocking, and so on. While, bird songs are used to stake out
territory and to attract mates. Some species of birds can only acquire their song during a
specific period of development. In this respect bird songs are similar to human language,
for which there is also a critical period for acquisition.

A forager bee is able to return to the hive and communicate to other bees where a
source of food is located. It is does so by performing a dance on a wall of the hive that
reveals the location and quality of the food source.

For one species of Italian honeybee, the dancing behavior may assume one of three
possible patterns:
- Round, which indicates locations near the hive
- Sickle, which indicates locations at 20 or 60 ft. from the hive
- Tail-wagging, for distance that exceeds 60 ft.

17th century, the philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes pointed out that the
communication systems of animals are qualitatively different from the language used by
humans.

Can chimps learn human language?

In their natural habitat, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other nonhuman primates
communicate with each other through visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile signals. They
can signal danger and can communicate aggressiveness and subordination.

In early experiments researchers raised chimpanzees in their own homes

alongside their children, in order to recreate the natural environment in which human
children acquire language. The chimps are unable to vocalize words despite the efforts of
their caretakers, though they did achieve the ability to understand a number of individual
words.

Stages of Language Acquisition

 Language Acquisition is meant process whereby children achieve a fluent control
of their native language (Varshney, 2003:307). The ability to get and understand the
language is inherited genetically but the particular language that children speak is
culturally and environmentally transmitted to them. Children all over the world acquire
their first language without tutoring.

Mechanism of Language Acquisition

There have been various proposals concerning the psychological mechanisms involved in
acquiring a language.
 Behaviorism – focused on people’s behaviors, which are directly observable, rather than
on the mental systems underlying these behaviors. Language was viewed as a kind of
verbal behavior, and it was proposed that children learn language through imitation,
reinforcement, analogy, and similar processes.

Stages in First Language Acquisition

When human is born, he does not have suddenly the grammatical of his first language in
his brain and completely with its rules. The native language is acquired through some stages,
and every stage is passed near to adult’s language. There are six stages in children’s first
language acquisition, namely:

1. Pre-talking stage / Cooing (0-6 months)

According to Bolinger (2002:283) pre-talking stage or cooing is the vowel-like
sound responding to human sounds more definitely, turns head, eyes seem to search for
speaker occasionally some chuckling sounds. For example, Miles (at the age of 4 months)
demonstrating the cooing stage of language acquisition. He is producing vowel-like
sounds (especially, the back vowels [u] and [o]) in the sounds of “oh”, “uh”, and “ah”,
typical of "cooing".

2. Babbling stage (6-8 months)

Babbling is the sounds which infants produce as consonant-vowel combinations,
Steinberg (2003:147). The sounds which are produced by infants but not all the speech
sounds are same in language of the world such as [ma-ma-ma] or [da-da-da] and [ba-ba-
ba] or [na-na-na].

3. Holophrastic stage (9-18 months)

Fromkin (1983:328) defined holophrastic from holo “complete” or “undivided”
plus phrase “phrase” or “sentence”. So holophrastic is the children’s first single word
which represent to a sentence. Children using one word to express particular emotional
state. For example, Debby’s mother recorded the words she had pronounced during the 8
months after the appearance of her first word at 9 months (this was [adi], used both for
her "daddy") During the two weeks from 17 months - 17 months and a half, she more
than doubled her vocabulary.
 4. The two-word stage (18-24 months)
Two-word stage is the mini sentences with simple semantic relations. As Fromkin
(1983:329) states that children begin to form actual two-word sentences, with the
relations between the two words showing definite syntactic and semantic relations and
the intonation contour of the two words extending over the whole utterance rather than
being separated by a pause between the two words. The following “dialogue” illustrates
the kinds of patterns that are found in the children’s utterances at this stage. Basically, a
child at this age is already able to produce the consonant sounds like [j], [p], [b], [d], [t],
[m], and [n].

5. Telegraphic stage (24-30 months)

Telegraphic is merely a descriptive term because the child does not deliberately
leave out the no content words, as does an adult sending a telegram, Fromkin (1983:330).
When the child begins to produce utterances that ere longer than two words, these
utterances appear to be “sentence-like”; they have hierarchical, constituent structures
similar to the syntactic structures found in the sentences produced by adult grammar.

6. Later multiword stage (30+months)

According to Bolinger (2002:283) at this stage is fastest increase in vocabulary
with many new additions every day; no babbling at all; utterances have communicative
intent. There is a great variation among children, seems to understand everything said
within hearing and directed to them.

II. Perspectives
Language does not have the exact information on where it was actually began that
brought the different speculations to its origin. These includes the divine origin,
Plato’s Theory, Panini’s Sanskrit and Greek History. I learned that through some
researches and experiments, language was formed through the cries of nature. And it
was later on the studies of Sapir and Whorf concluded the process on how we acquire
our language. At present, it is not yet proven and the theories still remain at the past.
And, the interesting part is that as we go on with our life to explore and determine our
history.
Sign language is concerns with the use of symbols including the hand, facial
expression and body to communicate to other people. This is an aid-language used by
the hard-of-hearing children who was born with special needs. They are not outcast to
their right to study for there is still a platform for them to feel special. The American
Sign Language is a community where they aid the needs of the hard-of-hearing
people. There is also connection between the nature of animals in communicating as
it was imitated by our ancestors in communicating to their tribe.
Language acquisition is the ability of a children in acquiring their first language
independently. There is a difference between acquisition and learning. A child can
 learn how to walk with his/her own, while learning needs an attention in able for the
child to learn how to read and write. There are stages in acquisition of language
namely: Pre-talking stage, Babbling stage, Holophrastic stage, The two-word stage,
Telegraphic stage, and lastly, the Multi-word stage.
III. What is the implication or importance of your readings to learning and teaching?
The vital role of reading to the different aspects of learning and teaching is that it
will guide us to the different variables in practicing the proper ways of
communicating to other people. It is giving us the idea to reflect about the origin of
our language. It is in order to understand more the basics of communicating for it is
giving us the ideas on where it was began. It will be helpful in the actual field of
teaching for it shows the different aspects on communicating as well as on sharing the
ideas of where it was actually began.

IV. Bibliography
o Fromkin, Victoria. et al. (2010). Introduction to Linguistics. Philippines Edition.
Philippines. Anvil Publishing.
o Bolinger, Dwight. (2002). Aspect of Language. Second Edition. America:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
o Fromkin, Victoria. (1983). An Introduction to Language. Third Edition. New
York. CBS College Publishing.