Sounds from the Garden of Eden: How Language Evolution Emerged from Vocal Expressions. - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

How exactly did humankinds begin to speak? How did expressive sounds evolve into a language? Evidence indicates that speech originated from ape like guttural sounds, which later evolved into front tongue sounds. The vocabulary of all modern languages evolved alongside with the migration of speech sound generation from the throat to the front of the mouth. Guttural sounds, which disappeared in most languages, and other sounds which only survived in a few languages, are phonetic fossils. Similarly, many contemporary words are syntactic fossils. It is the generation of meaning, rather than any grammatical elements, which is the very core of human language. Any theory about the evolution of language must account, above all for the transformation of sound expression from apish sounds into speech sounds. So far, research literature failed to realize the centrality of this aspect, intensively engaging, instead, in important yet secondary aspects like symbolism or proto-languages. The theory presented in this book has the potential to become the new foundation of linguistic research. About the author: Yair Shimron is a specialist in general and Hebrew linguistics, and studies the evolution of Language. This is his second book, where he elaborates on the theory introduced in his first book, The Evolution of Language and of Hebrew Language (in Hebrew), published in 2000.

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