Origin of Language

Still a Mystery

I've alread wrote about "Tower of Babel".  I came to wonder how we obtain the ability of speaking language.  According to this page, the origin of how we start to speak seems to be still a mystery!  

Oh, I love mystery but so amazing to know that it hasn't been unraveled yet. I thought this page is really interesting and decided to print out later, haha.

*Quote from "the conclusion"

The fact of the matter is that language is quintessentially a human trait. All attempts to shed light on the evolution of human language have failed—due to the lack of knowledge regarding the origin of any language, and due to the lack of an animal that possesses any ‘transitional’ form of communication. This leaves evolutionists with a huge gulf to bridge between humans with their innate communication abilities, and the grunts, barks, or chatterings of animals. 

‘By the age of six, the average child has learned to use and understand about 13,000 words; by eighteen it will have a working vocabulary of 60,000 words.  That means it has been learning an average of ten new words a day since its first birthday, the equivalent of a new word every 90 minutes of its waking life’

I remember feeling lovely to know that the babies can hear what their mothers talk to them before born. Well, we know about the development of the brain like this site explains and there might be other hypothesis like the way we can stand, but this part under there is fascinating for me to read, Please skip to read this part,  just for my interest (*^_^*)

*Another quote*

Imagine the conundrum in which evolutionists find themselves when it comes to speech and language.  The animal that comes closest to producing anything that even vaguely resembles human speech is not another primate, but rather a bird.  Deacon observed:

 ‘In fact, most birds easily outshine any mammal in vocal skills, and though dogs, cats, horses, and monkeys are remarkably capable learners in many domains, vocalization is not one of them.  Our remarkable vocal abilities are not part of a trend, but an exception.’[26]

For instance, a famous African gray parrot in England named Toto can pronounce words so clearly that he sounds rather human.  Like humans, birds can produce fluent, complex sounds.  We both share a double-barreled, double-layered system involving tunes and dialects—a system controlled by the left side of our brains.  And just like young children, juvenile birds experience a period termed ‘sub-song’ where they twitter in what resembles the babbling of a young child learning to speak.  Yet Toto does not have a ‘language’ as humans understand it.  Humans use language for many more purposes than birds use song.  Consider, too, that it is mostly male birds that sing.  Females remain songless unless they are injected with the male hormone testosterone.[27]  Also consider that humans frequently communicate intimately between two or three people, while bird communication is a fairly long-distance affair.