Theories of Language Origin Since ancient times humans were preoccupied to find out about the origin of human

language. We cannot talk about the human language without thinking about the origin and the evolution of men. Palaeontology evidence shows that humans have evolved in time to the present conformation, but as language is not physical, there is no conclusive evidence of language origin. However there are two main ideas about language: either was given to mankind by a divinity, or it has developed along with evolution of humans, or it was invented by humans. The divine theory states that the language was given to humans by their Creator, and this idea appears in every ancient religion and mythology. In the Christian religion there is Adam who named all things; the Babylonians had their deity Nabu who gave them language; the Egyptians had Thoth. It impossible o demonstrate the validity of this theory as it is impossible to demonstrate the existence or the nonexistence of God. The divine theory blends with the idea that there was a first language spoken in Eden, called protolanguage. In trying to find out which language was the first one, Egyptian pharaoh Psammeticus and King James the Fourth of Scotland experimented with infants which were not allowed human contact, in order to verify what language they spoke. The results were the languages Phrygian and Hebrew, but as George Yule mentions, Very young children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all, the case of Genie, a girl found in Los Angeles, in 1970. From the language development point of view, another theory is the bow-wow theory, which states that the humans began imitating the sounds from the nature around them, or that their first utterances were natural cries of emotion such as pain, anger, and joy (Yule, 2010: 3). Another view is the yo-he-ho theory which states that language evolved from the grunts of men when working together, grunts which later developed into chants and then into language. This theory implies social interaction between men and suggests that the language, even in its primitive form, was necessary for communication in human groups from the early days of mankind.

Adhering to Platos work Cratylus, there was a wise person who named in a natural manner all the existing things. This theory specifies that the names given to all things are in harmony with the significance and the properties of things. The oral-gestural theory (also known as the ding-dong theory) proposed by Paget mentions the idea that first men used gestures in order to communicate, to express their ideas, and then started using lips movements which gradually led to the human speech. The Palaeontology evidence shows that the ancient hominids such as Australopithecus who lived around 4-5 million BC did not posses speech, but the more recent hominids such as the Neanderthal man wood have been able to utter a few front consonant-like sounds and centralized vowel-like sounds (Crystal, 1998: 292). The reconstructed vocal tract of a Neanderthal skull compared with the vocal tracts of an adult and a newborn modern human present similarities, and it has been drawn the conclusion that the Neanderthal man represents a stage in the occurring evolution of speech. Though, there is no evidence that the hominids had the intellectual skills necessary in order to develop at least a rough language. The term of Homo loquens refers to the fact that hominids have evolved as speaking animals, and the speech developed between 250,000 BC and 50,000 BC (Lieberman 1984 in Aitchison, 1996: 45). A part of the changes that have appeared in the hominids anatomy helped in the speech production process. The human brain has increased in size from pre-historic times to modern times, thus giving the modern man more control over the process of producing utterances. After Ploog (in Aitchison, 1996: 65), the vocal cords had been initially a protection mechanism, which prevented the water from flooding the lung or the swim bladder. The humans adopting the upright position may have triggered the lowering of the larynx (Du Brul in Aitchison, 1996: 66). This lowered position of the larynx allows humans to produce more clear and defined sounds than the Neanderthal hominid. The vocal tract of the newborn babies are very much alike the vocal tract of chimpanzees, fact which allows them to breathe and eat at the same time. But after the age of three months, as the babies grow, the vocal tract starts modifying and become like adults ones.

Humans have developed hearing abilities, too; the distinction between human voices and other noises. This is a feature that shows that humans are designed for hearing too, and the hearing apparatus is a prerequisite for speech interaction. All these changes that have appeared are linked and show that the human speech is not an accidentally product, that the development over time and the complexity of the humans vocal tract, auditory device and brain shows that humans have evolved to produce, hear and understand language.

Bibliography Aitchison, J. (1996) The Seeds of Speech, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Crystal, D. (1998) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Fromkin V., Rodman R. (1998) An Introduction to Language, 6th edition, Fort Worth: Christopher P. Klein Trask, R.L. (1999) Language: the Basics, 2nd edition, London: Routledge Yule, G. (2010) The Study of Language, 4th edition, New York: Cambridge University Press

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Child Acquisition of Speech Sounds Since their first days of life, children communicate through crying, whimpering or cooing. Those utterances are a part of the prelinguistic stage and they are just reactions to hunger, discomfort or announce the need to be cuddled. The linguistic stage begins around 6 months, when the infants begin to babble, and it is followed by the one-word stage, two-word stage and then they produce longer utterances which resemble sentences, which finally will develop into adult-like speech. In order to acquire language, there are some necessary criteria that need to be fulfilled: children have to interact with their parents/caregivers through language, and they have to be physical able to hear and to produce sound speech. Studies have shown that with the beginning of the babbling stage, the first consonants that are acquired are the bilabial sounds (by the place of articulation), such as [m], [p], [b]. The constructions CV are preferred, so the first childs utterances resembling words are [mamama], [papapa], [bababa] but this seems to be just a not cognitive element of practice, as in exploring the capacities of the vocal cords. Other common consonants observed to appear during the babbling stage are [t], [d], [n],[k], [g], [s], [h], [w], [y], while less common ones are fricatives as [f], [v], [], affricates such as [],[], and [l], [r]. (Dr. Lisa J. Atalianis, lecture from 27 November 2010). The one-word stage begins around age one when the children start producing recognizable words by naming everyday objects they are aware of with individual terms, usually monosyllabic, which function as whole sentences, called holophrastic sentences (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 322). The utterances usually express an action, represent an emotion or operate as naming function. By this time children have acquired the pronouncing of vowels. There have been observed patterns in childrens articulation of utterances: they cope with the pronunciation of words by the means of substitution, deletion and reduplication.

The substitution appears in the case of the word see which is often pronounced as [ti:], where the fricative [s] has been replaced by the stop [t], and the word gone is pronounced as [dn], where the velar consonant [g] has been replaced with the alveolar consonant [d]. The avoidance of consonant clusters is also a substitution process: the word sky becomes [kai] or [gai], where the consonant cluster [sk] has been replaced with one of the velars [k] or [g]. (Crystal, 2002: 242). The deletion of speech sound is observed in the uttering of words like hat, cat, and foot, which are pronounced as [ha], [ca], and [foo], and the case of the word banana, which becomes [nana], and where there is observed another phonological rule that appears: the unstressed syllables are deleted. The reduplication appears when children try to cope with words that have more syllables: water becomes [ww], house becomes [dd], necklace becomes [nk]. Thus, the difficult utterances are simplified and adapted to the phonological level of the child. The fis phenomenon demonstrates that children hear phonological differences that they cannot still pronounce at this stage. The two-word stage follows around age eighteen to twenty months, when the children combine different words linked to their actual situation; the utterances have semantic and syntactic relation, but no syntactic or morphological markers (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 324), as seen in the utterances byebye boat, more wet, it ball, dirty sock, here pretty. By this age, the consonant inventory of children includes the plosives such as [p], [t], [k], [b], [d], [g], nasals such as [m], [n], fricatives such as [f], [s], and the approximant [w]. The next stage in the children language acquisition, often called telegraphic speech appears between the age of two and two-and-a-half; the children seem to be capable to build rough sentences and to place the words in the sentences in correct order. The sentences comprise open-class content words but lack function words such as is, the, to. Around the age of three to four, children possess a considerable vocabulary and their pronunciation is almost at an adult level, containing the plosives [p], [t], [k], [b], [d], [g], the nasals [m], [n], [], fricatives such as [f], [s], [], [v], [z], affricates such as [],

[], the approximants [w], [j], [r], and the lateral [l]. (Dr. Lisa J. Atalianis, lecture from 27 November 2010). The early theories in the behaviourist school state that humans develop language because they are taught to, and the brain, through an intense process of learning, gathers all the information from childhood, through the processes of imitation, reinforcement and analogy. Studies have shown that the language is not acquired by imitation of the adult speech, because the children make speech errors such as sheeps and wented, errors they have never heard in adult utterances. Another theory of language acquisition suggests that children acquire correct language because they are positively reinforced when they say something right and they are negatively reinforced when they say something wrong (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 329), but it has been observed that the negative reinforcing occurs rarely, in the cases when childrens utterances are wrong not in the grammatical content but in the meaning of the statement, as is the case of Eve. When stating a truthful but grammatical incorrect sentence, Eve was not corrected by her mother (Brown Roger et all, in Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 329). Another view of child language acquisition mentions that children develop language through analogy, but this theory fails along with the reinforcement theory and the imitation theory (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 331), fact which led to another view of the child language acquisition: the innateness hypothesis. Linguist Noam Chomskys states that the human brain has an innate capacity, through an acquisition component, called Language Acquisition Device which allows humans to develop language, and there is a Universal Grammar, a principle contained by all grammars, and the fact that childrens speech errors fall within the bounds of syntactic, phonological, and morphological natural linguistic process (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 338).

Bibliography Crystal, D. (1998) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Fromkin V., Rodman R. (1998) An Introduction to Language, 6th edition, Fort Worth: Christopher P. Klein Trask, R.L. (1999) Language: the Basics, 2nd edition, London: Routledge Yule, G. (2010) The Study of Language, 4th edition, New York: Cambridge University Press

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