- Svetlana Alekseevna, not so long ago, Israeli scientists for the first time in history discovered a whole sentence written in the ancient Canaanite language. The inscription on the bone comb speaks of the desire to get rid of lice in the beard. At the same time, it is Canaanite that is called the language in which the alphabet first appeared. What role did the emergence of the alphabet play in the development of languages?
- Canaan is one of the states that existed in ancient times on the Sinai Peninsula.
According to one hypothesis, the Canaanite alphabet arose on the basis of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
However, unlike hieroglyphs, it was already an alphabetic letter.
At the same time, we cannot definitely speak about some indisputable advantages of alphabetic writing, since there is an example of the highest culture of China, which has preserved ideographic writing.
These are just two different types of writing, there is no answer to the question which one is better.
The main difference is that alphabetic writing is able to convey not only semantics, but also the sound of speech.
Any alphabet is a set of sounds fixed in a letter way, phonemes.
I note that this quality of alphabetic writing also helps us to identify the relationship of languages.
Obviously, all people pronounce sounds a little differently, so it took a lot of intellectual work to identify the minimal abstract sound particles of speech and create an alphabet.
Therefore, the alphabet could appear only when mankind reached a certain cultural level.
Since our entire civilization, in fact, is written, a whole range of social, political, and cultural issues is also associated with writing.
For example, the national language must also have a written tradition, this gives the language status.
Accordingly, there should be spelling rules, as well as a whole infrastructure that would support and update them.
19th century engraving depicting Abraham's journey to Canaan
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© Sepia Times/Universal Images Group
— Which of the hypotheses for the appearance of speech are now the most popular in the scientific community?
- So far, science does not know when and how human speech arose.
And it is not a fact that we will ever be able to establish this at all.
Very great efforts to find an answer to this question were made from the 17th century until about the middle of the 19th century against the background of the general development of culture, philosophy, science, as well as the crisis that Christianity began to experience.
In the public consciousness, the place of God began to be occupied by man himself.
And this created a lot of questions that needed to be answered: how did a person appear, if he was not created by God, how did he find speech?
So far, no one has asked these questions.
In the Middle Ages, people were looking for "Adam's language" - the language created by Adam according to biblical tradition, when he gave names to animals, plants, all phenomena ... And it was believed that, having mastered this primordial language, one could master the world.
This motif can be traced in folklore - fairy tales in which the hero gains power over some creature if he guesses his name.
In the XVII-XIX centuries, the main theories of the origin of the language were put forward.
For example, according to one of them, language arose from emotional interjections.
However, for example, the interjection of fear is the same for all nations, it is usually the sound "a".
Because it is the most physiological in this situation - try, being frightened, to pull the sound "and", for example.
Besides, interjection is not yet a word.
Therefore, this theory is highly questionable.
Another theory says that the joint labor activity of the first proto-humans led to the appearance of the language - the so-called theory of "labor cries".
True, it also weakly withstands criticism, because modern monkeys, for example, are perfectly able to conduct joint activities - to hunt.
But at the same time they do without language.
Yes, and modern people-hunters almost do not communicate in the process of hunting, all communication is carried out after.
That collaborative work does not need much speech is also confirmed by the experiments that I regularly conduct with students.
The experiment is simple: a person is asked to describe how to tie a knot.
Further, the other participant must, according to this description, tie a similar knot - so far no one has really managed to do this.
But if you show the method clearly, then it is not difficult to repeat it.
In general, the language serves to a greater extent not for situational communication, but for narrative - that is, storytelling, for argumentation.
Therefore, the language is so complicated, it is many times more complicated than it would be necessary only for communication in the process of work.
Of course, the search for the origins of human language continues, such studies are underway.
In search of an answer to this question, scientists are exploring the languages of animals.
However, animal language is always limited to situational communication, even in the most highly organized animals.
When a dog barks at an object, it does not say anything about it.
Or bees - they have a very subtle developed dance language.
But even in this case, information about some object is always transmitted in real time, apparently, nothing more.
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© Denis Moura / 500px
Is the reason for the lack of abstract thinking in animals?
- Yes, animals have neither abstract perception nor recursion - the ability to develop a narrative by completing a statement, in the spirit of "I think you think he thinks that I think you are lying."
The fundamental feature of human language is the ability to create an infinite number of combinations from a very small set of phonemes, which can express absolutely any meaning.
Or, for example, a case system that specifies how one object relates to another - all these concepts are inaccessible to animals, like the concept of time.
Animals are able to share impressions only in the current moment, situationally.
And the human language is not for this, it is for telling.
This is a narrative that animals are not capable of.
Interestingly, simple human languages that even remotely resemble the way animals communicate do not exist.
For example, the Australian Aboriginal languages are very complex languages, or even pidgin, a language that originated on slave plantations for communication, usually between slaves and planters.
True, there are also trading pidgins.
Initially, pidgins were primitive languages, but over time they still began to develop and turned into complex language systems, the so-called creole languages, no more simple than the English, French or Spanish languages from which they arose.
But, of course, it is primarily the appearance of mind and consciousness in ancient man,
and language became a tool for its further development, not vice versa.
Consciousness is primary, language is secondary.
Although, of course, without language, human thinking, culture could not develop to the fullest.
When did the first languages appear? For example, did the ancestors of modern humans come out of Africa already being native speakers? And did the Neanderthals have a language?
“According to modern scientific ideas, which are based on data from anthropology, paleontology and physiology, the human language in our modern understanding could have appeared about 40 thousand years ago, when the modern type of human Homo sapiens began to leave Africa and settle in other regions.
As for the Neanderthals, then, apparently, they also owned some kind of language.
As the study of the remains of these people showed, physiologically they were able to talk.
The only thing is that their voices could be a little higher than the sounds that modern man makes.
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal image
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© Mike Kemp/In Pictures
Other findings also speak of the presence of speech in Neanderthals.
The fact is that language also performs a symbolic function.
A word is a symbol of a phenomenon or an object.
Accordingly, in a society that had a language, a culture of a symbol, an abstract figurative perception, should also have arisen.
The appearance of decorations that play only a symbolic role speaks of the symbolic perception of people.
And although not a lot of jewelry is found at Neanderthal sites, they are still found.
- How does modern science look at the theory of the existence in antiquity of the so-called pre-world language - a single language, from which regional languages were later formed?
— There are different scientific hypotheses: there is the theory of monogenesis, and there are also polygenetic theories.
According to the latter, languages arose simultaneously in different human populations in different places.
The latter version was closely related to the labor theory of the origin of language and was popular in the first half of the 20th century, against the background of the spread of social theories.
Moreover, this trend was observed not only in our country, but also in the world.
However, it is impossible to prove either monogenetic or polygenetic theory.
In this regard, both mathematical calculations and methods of comparative linguistics are ineffective, because we have access to the history of human languages for only 8-10 thousand years at most.
Complicating the situation is the fact that languages can change very much and quickly.
- Why is the phonetics of different languages so different, despite the fact that the speech apparatus of all people is arranged in the same way?
Variation is one of the key properties of a language.
As for phonetics, there are also different theories on this subject.
However, they should be treated with care.
The features of the phonetics of languages are often tried to be explained by interaction with the environment.
For example, the languages of Polynesia are very sonorous, loud, full of vowels.
It is said that this is due to the fact that the inhabitants of this region constantly had to shout over the sound of the sea when they sailed in boats.
But the ancestors of modern Russians did not have such a need, they lived on the plain and could at any moment come closer to talk.
Therefore, in the Russian language there are many deaf consonants that are difficult to shout over.
I repeat that this is just one of the intriguing hypotheses, more like fantasies.
Polynesian fisherman, 1902
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© DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA
- It is known that the Eskimo language has several words for snow, French has many special terms related to cooking, Russian is known as a language that allows you to convey subtle emotional nuances. To what extent is our perception of reality determined by our language, is it even possible to talk about it?
- Of course.
There really is such a phenomenon as a linguistic picture of the world, perception.
It is determined not only and not so much by language, but by culture as a whole - what is important for this human community, what do these people pay attention to in the first place, what do they constantly deal with?
And these accents are already finding their expression in the language.
For example, in the languages of the coastal peoples there are a huge number of words related to the sea, fishing.
It is even difficult for us to imagine how many different special words and terms can be on this topic.
The Nenets language has many words related to reindeer and reindeer herding, and no other language can fully convey all these semantic nuances.
When we learn a foreign language, especially if it happens when immersed in a language environment, we begin to appropriate, absorb a foreign culture.