INCREDIBLE ART OF LANGUAGE

                When you read this summary, give a moments thought on how would the world be without language? If given a deeper thought, it would excruciate the thinker’s mind on his or her existence without a language.

                You happen to read these lines or talk about it as easy as you breathe. How do we learn to speak then? How do we comprehend each others speech? Does it exist in our genes or biologically already exist in our body system?

If it is so, why did the primitives use signs and pictorial representations to convey messages? How did language come about? There are endless questions we can put forth regarding evolution of languages and its diversity.

                Language is diverse from within a country down to community but universal in its aim – communication. A single language can have different variations in speech styles to literary styles just within a community. Best examples come from the Indian languages. Down to the south India, Tamil and Malayalam vary from region to region and community to community. However, the basic grammar of the language remains the same.

                Would you be surprised if some one asked you how you learnt to speak fluently with correct grammar! An immediate answer that sprouts in your mind is that everyone learns to speak in childhood. But, you were not given speech therapy classes, neither text books nor special homework done.

                American researchers say they haven’t been able to trace a specific time when the language developed in the evolutionary history. They have come about with a theory of anatomical characteristic possessed by humans for at least fifty thousand years. Our oral cavity and throat aren’t bow shaped like it had been for our ancestors and other mammals including apes. For humans it is almost at right angles and the voice box is placed deep inside the throat leaving resonating area for sound production along with the tongue. The vocal tract of babies isn’t very different from that of mammals and develops only as they grow.  Babies start learning to speak as early as when they are two months old. They start making sounds at the second month. At 6 months second phase babbling begins leading to single and double syllable formations at the 9^th month. When the baby is a year and a half old the vocabulary takes a great leap. At 3^rd and 4^th year linguistics question arise within them and at 6 years foundation of language is laid.

                Now a logical question hammers into our mind. If al this is biological is it possible for a child to speak when the child has never been subjected to sounds of speech and not allowed to make any sound either? The answer is a blunt no. once the age is crossed, speaking becomes a painful process and is no more like a natural outcome.

Genie, a resident of California, escaped her ordeal at the age of 13. Her parents had locked her up since she was a child and never spoke to her. She was discovered in 1970 and is the “most-tested-child” in speech therapy. But researchers say she is too old to pick up fluency at any rate.

                A child cannot learn a language which is not used in the surroundings. To make a child learn a foreign language from TV or audio cassettes which is not spoken by people around the child is a waste of time. The child may produce sounds relating to the language but it is not registered as something to be used to communicate. This is evident when we are able to speak our mother tongue or the language in our surroundings very fluently to a foreign language we learn anew.  Grammar rules of that language just take a step back.

                The skeleton of every language is its grammar without which we cannot convey a meaningful and comprehensible message. The answer to the question of an existence of a common language or mother of all existing languages is still being researched.

                Noam Chomsky, one of the most important linguists of our times has come up with an idea of ‘universal grammar’. Chomsky believes that the power of languages is biological given and there is a super processor in our brains t speak and react to languages. Every language has the same blue print and hence there exists a universal grammar which is the base of every language. This theory had become like a basic theory on evolution of languages and a project to find the ‘universal grammar’ began.

                For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Dan Everett is one of the major linguists who oppose Chomsky’s theory.  Everett, once a part of Chomsky’s project says, there is a particular tribal group near the Miaci River called the Piranhas whose language has no embedded clause. They simply string in main clauses together. This revelation has almost made the project of universal grammar dead, albeit, they are still researching on this theory and each one is trying to prove the other wrong. Dan Everett tries to prove his theory that language is not biological given but a cultural effect. He calls the absence of embedded clause in piranhas’ language as an “immediacy- of-experience principle”, this is bcoz piranhas live only in present and their language depends only on the immediate need and does not relate to the past and future necessities. He says “all people don’t live in the same century” referring to their anomalous linguistic and cultural style.

                The debate over the evolution of language is going to be a long debate for decades. Whatever be the cause of language evolution, it is just inevitable and it is likely that our world would stop this moment if all stopped "communicating". That is simply why the language is an incredible art.