Explain the Communication?

origin

and

development

of

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and mans own distinctive cries. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. A 1994 article in the Time magazine titled How man began the following bold assertion was inscribed No single, essential difference separates human beings from other animals.1 Yet, as an obvious contradiction to such a statement, all evolutionists believe that communication via speech is uniquely humanso much so that it often is used as the singular, and most important, dividing line between humans and animals. Like P. Liberman wrote in his book, Eve Spoke Speech is so essential to our concept of intelligence that its possession is virtually equated with being human. Animals who talk are human, because what sets us apart from other animals is the gift of speech.2 (Emphasized in the original text)3 Having been derived from the Latin word communis (to share), communication is the activity wherein information encrypted in signs, verbose, written form are conveyed on varying levels, such as interpersonal, intra-personal and mass communication. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space, except that they should share an area of communication commonality. Communication can be traced back to the deep abyss of history, prehistoric time can be stated as the exact time when communication came into being; a period when the concept time was not even defined or understood, thus it can be summed up that communication is the axel upon which human civilization has rotated and evolved over time. Communication over its vast period of existence has undergone tremendous changes and has evolved hand in hand or in tandem with humans; significant changes in communication technologies (medium and tools) evolving along with shifts in political and economic systems, and by extension, systems of power4. The range of communication can
1 2

How man began, Time Magazine: Lemonick, M.D., (1994) Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution: Liberman, P. (1998) 3 True Origin Article; The Origin of Language and Communication: Harrub, Brad and Thompson, Bert and Miller Dave (2003) 4 The bias of communication: Innis, H. A. (1951)

vary from very subtle process of message conveyance to full scale conversation to mass communication all of which can be layered with meaning and subtexts that can be deciphered only by the parties that are conversing. Human communication was revolutionized with Speech, Symbols and Writings all developed and evolved in specific periods of times.5 The origin of communication and its extensive evolution is an oft debated topic, particularly the evolution of speech often discussed with clinical precision and at time consider a ridicule or a rhetoric question still remains a topic of intense contest amongst linguistics and communication scholars.6 Speculation about the origin of language has been common throughout the 19th century, but had reached no conclusive results. Another empirical hope in the 19th century was the comparative method of historical linguistics, the discovery of which was one of the triumphs of the period. Between two languages the resemblances are sometimes so extensive and orderly that they cannot be attributed to chance or to parallel development. The alternative explanation is that the two are divergent descendants of a single earlier language. English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages are related in just this way.7 Approaches to the origin of language can be divided according to their underlying assumptions. 'Continuity theories' are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form: it must have evolved from earlier prelinguistic systems among our primate ancestors. 'Discontinuity theories' are based on the opposite idea that language is so unique a trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and must therefore have appeared fairly suddenly during the course of human evolution. In 1861, historical linguist Max Mller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language: Bow-wow. The bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Mller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds. Pooh-pooh. The Pooh-Pooh theory saw the first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise and so on. Ding-dong. Mller suggested what he called the Ding-Dong theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words.

5 6

The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental: Diringer, David (1982) The Origin of Speech: Rosenstock-Hussey, Eugen (1981) 7 The Origin of Speech: Hockett, Charles F. University of Columbia. (1960)

Yo-he-ho. The yo-he-ho theory saw language emerging out of collective rhythmic labour, the attempt to synchronise muscular effort resulting in sounds such as heave alternating with sounds such as ho. Ta-ta. This did not feature in Max Mller's list, having been proposed in 1930 by Sir Richard Paget. According to the ta-ta theory, humans made the earliest words by tongue movements that mimicked manual gestures, rendering them audible. Most scholars today consider all such theories not so much wrongthey occasionally offer peripheral insightsas comically nave and irrelevant. The problem with these theories is that they are so narrowly mechanistic. They assume that once our ancestors had stumbled upon the appropriate ingenious mechanism for linking sounds with meanings, language automatically evolved. Many animals are capable of using sounds to communicate, however, there is an enormous difference between the coo of a Cuckoo or the trumpet of an Elephant, and an actor standing before an audience reenacting W. Shakespeares Hamlet. This colossal chasm between humans and animals has led to a multiplicity of theories on exactly how man came upon this unequaled capability. Many researchers have focused on the capabilities of animals sounds and gestures in an effort to understand the physiological mechanism underlying communication. But there is a single, common theme that stands out amidst all the theories: The worlds languages evolved spontaneously. They were not designed.(3above) The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol: a conventional representation of a concept. The oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic. Just as the small child first learns to draw before it masters more complex forms of communication, so Homo sapiens' first attempts at passing information through time took the form of paintings. The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave, dating to around 30,000 BC.8 The Cro-Magnon people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.9 While the connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics in the ancient days the concepts and words of drawing and writing were one and the same Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein'. 10
8 9

Visual Communication with Infotrac: Images with Messages: Lester, Paul M. (2005) Paper Published by the Linguistics Department, University of Munich: Michael Rappenglueck (2000) 10 The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental: Diringer, David (1982)

The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000BC. It is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.11 A pictogram is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of protowriting whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered in chronological order. They were the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC12 Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like 'heat', 'light', 'day' or 'Great God of the Sun'. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only 'legs' but also a verb 'to walk'. The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorize a system uniquely.(11below). The next stage was the development of alphabets; The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt. By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as
11 12

History of Alphabet: Diringer, David (1977) The Invention of Writing a Paper Published by Western Washington University (2000)

pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian unilaterals were not a system and were never used by them to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BC for or by Semitic workers, but one cant read these early writings and their exact nature still remain open to interpretation. In 1979, the recently installed Nicaraguan government initiated the country's first widespread effort to educate deaf children, a center for special education established a program initially attended by 50 young deaf children. By 1983 the center had 400 students. The center did not have access to teaching facilities of any of the sign languages that are used around the world; consequently, the children were not taught any sign language. Rather the language program instead emphasized spoken Spanish and lip-reading, and the use of signs by teachers limited to finger spelling. The program achieved little success, with most students failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words. The first children who arrived at the center came with only a few crude gestural signs developed within their own families. However, when the children were placed together for the first time they began to build on one another's signs. As more and younger children joined, the language became more complex. The children's teachers, who were having limited success at communicating with their students, watched in awe as the children began communicating amongst themselves. Later the Nicaraguan government solicited help from Judy Kegl, an American sign-language expert at Northeastern University. As Kegl and other researchers began to analyze the language, they noticed that the younger children had taken the pidgin-like form of the older children to a higher level of complexity, with verb agreement and other conventions of grammar.13 Though the origin and evolution of Communication can be a tricky question, just like the question of evolution and that of the paranormal, and though it is difficult to come to a conclusion about communication and all its underlining complexities yet as in the New York article (Error: Reference source not foundError: Reference source not found) quotes from a young man from the Center: I can remember my childhood,' Aleman signs, 'but I can also remember not having any way to communicate.' His palm wipes his forehead, suggesting someone erasing a blackboard.
13

A Linguistic Big-Bang, New York Times Article by Osborne, Lawrence (1999)

Whether self-evolved or originated along with the free flowing time, Communication has helped us to understand one another and has helped us recognize the true meaning that we express to one another with multiple layers of emotions in multi-dimensional ways.

We have two ears and one mouth, so that we can listen as much as we speak
Epictetus, Greek Sage and Philosopher.