Evolution of language
Language did not exist before man made his appearance on earth. When he started living as part of a group rather than live in isolation, he felt the need to share his needs, feelings, emotions and thoughts. It is the tendencies within him which were catering to the needs that enabled him to create a language in consultation with the other members of the group. Thus out of a need for communication and comprehension language got created. Thus, language which was evolved out of a basic need during the early man’s time has gone through lot of changes as it appears in the modern age. Dr Montessori could identify certain semblance between the evolution of language with the early man and language began on a functional level and got developed systematically. In the same manner the language development in a young child is very vague and only functional. Gradually it assumes a complex structure where the child has a considerable semantic and syntactic potential.
Out of the very human breath, sounds emanate and exist only for a fleeting moment. But, when these sounds are brought together in a particular manner, they serve as the basis for language. The well articulated combination of sounds result as words. These sounds themselves individually are meaningless but when combined in a particular manner to form a word, they assume a significant meaning, thus giving rich expression to the language. It is man’s intellectual capacity that enabled him to create a language beginning with limited number of sounds towards unlimited application. A particular meaning given to a word is in fact what a group of people have agreed upon with mutual understanding.
Though individually words may have some semantic component, yet words by themselves do not complete the language structure. Many words have to be strung together to form a sentence. These words have to be placed in the right positions so that the sentence as a whole communicates a thought. This positioning is again arbitrarily agreed upon by the members of the group. This arrangement is what makes up the structure of that language. Every language has its own system and this is what is called the syntactic structure. It is in this manner the spoken form of language has been in a particular language, the syntactic and the semantic structures have to be preserved.
With the evolution of the spoken language man was able to comfortable communicate. However he realised that the spoken form has certain limitations. His thoughts could not be conveyed to people who were separated by time and distance. So he has to create yet another form of language which would help him communicate across time and distance. Yet this from could not be unrelated to the spoken form. Further, in order to work with a long train of thoughts which had to be done purely as a mental process, he needed yet another sophisticated form of language. These circumstances enabled him to create a graphic form for the language which is called writing. Having created writing as a means of communication with others, he also had to get ready to receive the communication. This meant that he has to acquire yet another related skill called reading. The creation of writing and reading enabled man to progress.
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