The Origin Of Speech

Author : Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199581584
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Origin of Speech written by Peter F. MacNeilage and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observation that present-day infants learning to produce speech reveal constraints that were acting on our ancestors as they invented new words long ago. This important and original investigation integrates the latest research on modern speech capabilities, their acquisition, and their neurobiology, including the issues surrounding the cerebral hemispheric specialization for speech. Written in a clear style with minimal recourse to jargon the book will interest a wide range of readers in cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary science, as well as all those seeking to understand the nature and evolution of speech and human communication.

Author : Isaac E. Mozeson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780979261800
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Origin of Speeches written by Isaac E. Mozeson and published by . This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origin of Speeches begins by recapping the history of our views about the source of language. It then debunks the errors that infuse your dictionary, like those about how words in "unrelated" languages could only have identical sound and sense by "coincidence." It does so with both quality and quantity of data. The next chapters give anyone the skills to sleuth out the Edenic origin of any human word. One learns about letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and drop out. We discover how Edenics works much like other natural sciences, such as chemistry and physics. Like-sounding opposite words were certainly programmed, not pragmatically evolved. Our current academics and reference books consider the Tower of Babel account to be a quaint Genesis "myth." True, linguists now think there once WAS a universal human language, but they assume that it evolved chaotically, and that it also de-evolved naturally and chaotically over millennia. Now comes an epical book that documents the language of the earliest modern humans. Let's call them Adam and Eve, and let's call that global Mother Tongue "Edenic." Surely our current 6,000 languages grew from migrations and such, but this book proves that there was a "Big Bang" that diversified that special original, global language.

Author : Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Publisher : Argo Books
ISBN 13 : 9780912148137
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Origin of Speech written by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and published by Argo Books. This book was released on 1981 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : William C. Stokoe
Publisher : Gallaudet University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781563681035
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language in Hand written by William C. Stokoe and published by Gallaudet University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely reasoned argument that suggests how our human ancestors' powers of observation and natural hand movements could have evolved into signed morphemes.".

Author : Daniel L. Everett
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 087140477X
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention written by Daniel L. Everett and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Language Began revolutionizes our understanding of the one tool that has allowed us to become the "lords of the planet." Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today. Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup. Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect. In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator. How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

Author : Tom Wolfe
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316404640
Total Pages : 123 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Kingdom of Speech written by Tom Wolfe and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech -- not evolution -- is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.

Author : Edward Sapir
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.TW/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language written by Edward Sapir and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.

Author : Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674363366
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language written by Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author examines gossip as a form of 'verbal grooming', and as a means of strengthening relationships. He challenges the idea that language developed during male activities such as hunting, and that it was actually amongst women that it evolved.

Author : W. Tecumseh Fitch
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 113948706X
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.

Author : Sverker Johansson
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027294607
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Origins of Language written by Sverker Johansson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.