An
introduction to Language and History of Languages
Evolutionary Theories on the Origin of
Speech:
Adam was the First Human to Talk and Communicate
Language is a human Knowledge for dealing something. Because Adam was the First Human to Talk and communicate with his Creator for his
want and need .whatever we don’t know what was that language. That sound or language
was diverse.
In a chapter he titled ‘What, When, and Where
did Eve Speak to Adam and He to Her?,’ Philip Lieberman commented:
‘In the five-million-year-long
lineage that connects us to the common ancestors of apes and human beings,
there have been many Adams and many Eves. In the beginning was the word,
but the vocal communications of our most distant hominid ancestors five million
years or so ago probably didn’t really differ from those of the ape-hominid
ancestor.
Using biblical terminology, Lieberman
had written a year earlier: ‘For with speech came a capacity for thought that
had never existed before, and that has transformed the world. In the
beginning was the word’.
When God created the first human beings—Adam
and Eve—He created them in His own image (Genesis ). This likeness
unquestionably included the ability to engage in intelligible speech via human
language. In fact, God spoke to them from the very beginning of their
existence as humans (Genesis ). Hence, they possessed the ability to
understand verbal communication—and to speak themselves!
God gave very specific instructions to the
man before the woman was even created (Genesis). Adam gave names
to the animals before the creation of Eve (Genesis). Since both
the man and the woman were created on the sixth day, the creation of the man
preceded the creation of the woman by only hours. So, Adam had the
ability to speak on the very day that he was brought into existence!
That same day, God put Adam to sleep and
performed history’s first human surgery. He fashioned the female of the
species from a portion of the male’s body. God then presented the woman
to the man (no doubt in what we would refer to as the first marriage
ceremony). Observe Adam’s response: ‘And Adam said, “This is now bone of
my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was
taken out of man”’ (Genesis ). Here is Adam—less than twenty-four hours
old—articulating intelligible speech with a well-developed vocabulary and
advanced powers of expression. Note also that Eve engaged in intelligent
conversation with Satan (Genesis ). An unbiased observer is forced to
conclude that Adam and Eve were created with oral communication
capability. Little wonder, then, that God said to Moses: ‘Who had made
man’s mouth? ... Have not I, the Lord? Now therefore, go, and I
will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say’ (Exodus ).
The Tower of Babel—and
Universal Language
Nobody knows exactly
how many languages there are in the world, partly because of the difficulty of
distinguishing between a language and a sub-language (or dialects within
it). One authoritative source that has collected data from all over the
world, The Ethnologue, listed the total number of languages as 6809.
The Bible’s explanation
of the origin of multiple human languages is provided in the Tower of Babel incident
recorded in Genesis (see Figure
1). Scripture simply and confidently asserts: ‘Now the whole earth had
one language and one speech’. When Noah and his family stepped off the
ark, they spoke a single language that was passed on to their offspring.
As the population increased, it apparently remained localized in a single
geographical region. Consequently, little or no linguistic variation
ensued. But when a generation defiantly rejected God’s instructions to
scatter over the planet, God miraculously intervened and initiated the major
language groupings of the human race. This action forced the population
to proceed with God’s original intention to inhabit the Earth (cf. Isaiah ) by
clustering according to shared languages. Duursma correctly noted: ‘The
Babel account suggests that several languages came into existence on that
day. It is presented as a miraculous intervention by God.
Figure
1. Peter Breugel (1525-1569); oil painting
(1563) of the Tower of Babel—the historical event during which God confused the
human language
This
depiction of the origin of languages coincides with the present status of these
languages. The available linguistic evidence does not support the model
postulated by evolutionary sources for the origin of languages. Many
evolutionary linguists believe that all human languages have descended from a
single, primitive language, which itself evolved from the grunts and noises of
the lower animals. The single most influential ‘hopeful monster’ theory
of the evolution of human language was proposed by the famous linguist from
MIT, Noam Chomsky, and has since been echoed by numerous linguists,
philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists. Chomsky argued that the
innate ability of children to acquire the grammar necessary for a language can
be explained only if one assumes that all grammars are variations of a single,
generic ‘universal grammar’, and that all human brains come ‘with a built-in
language organ that contains this language blueprint’.
Explaining this ‘innate ability’, a
‘universal grammar’, and the ‘built-in language organ’ of humans has proven to
be, well, impossible! Steven Pinker, the eminent psychologist also of
MIT, candidly lamented this very fact in his best-selling book, How the Mind
Works. In addressing the failure of ‘our species’ ’ scientists to
solve these types of plaguing, perennial problems, he wrote:
‘The species’ best minds have flung
themselves at the puzzles for millennia but have made no progress in solving
them. Another is that they have a different character from even the most
challenging problems of science. Problems such as how a child learns
language or how a fertilized egg becomes an organism are horrendous in
practice and may never be solved completely.’ [emphasis added].
However, the existing state
of human language nevertheless suggests that the variety of dialects and
sub-languages has developed from a relatively few (perhaps even less than
twenty) languages. These original ‘proto-languages’—from which all others
allegedly have developed—were distinct within themselves, with no previous
ancestral language. Creationist Carl Wieland rightly remarked: ‘The
evidence is wonderfully consistent with the notion that a small number of
languages, separately created at Babel, has diversified into the huge variety
of languages we have today’.
The Brain’s Language
Centers—Created by God
In contemplating
how language arose, evolutionists frequently link the development of the brain
to the appearance of languages. But when one considers that more than
6,000 languages exist, it is incomprehensible to suggest that the invention of
language could be viewed as some sort of simple, clear-cut addition to human
physiology made possible by an enlarged brain unique to Homo sapiens.
Terrance Deacon commented on the intricacy of evolving a language when he
wrote:
For a language
feature to have such an impact on brain evolution that all members of the
species come to share it, it must remain invariable across even the most
drastic language change possible’ [emphasis in original) .
The complexity
underlying speech first revealed itself in patients who were suffering various
communication problems. Researchers began noticing analogous responses
among patients with similar injuries.
Figure
2. Left hemisphere of human brain with
language centers—Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area—highlighted.
The ancient Greeks
noticed that brain damage could cause the loss of the ability to speak (a
condition known as aphasia). Centuries later, in 1836, Marc Dax described
a group of patients that could not speak normally. Dax reported that all
of these patients experienced damage to the left hemisphere of their brain.
In 1861, Paul Broca described a patient who could utter only a single
word—‘tan’. When this patient died, Broca examined his brain and observed
significant damage to the left frontal cortex, which has since become known
anatomically as ‘Broca’s area’ (see Figure 2). While patients with
damage to Broca’s area can understand language, they generally are unable to
produce speech because words are not formed properly, thus slurring their
speech.
In 1876, Carl Wernicke discovered that
language problems also could result from damage to another section of the
brain. This area, later termed ‘Wernicke’s area’, is located in the
posterior part of the temporal lobe (see Figure 2). Damage to
Wernicke’s area results in a loss of the ability to understand language.
Thus, patients can continue to speak, but the words are put together in such a
way that they make no sense. Interestingly, in most people (approximately
97%) both Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are found only in the left
hemisphere, which explains the language deficits observed in patients with
brain damage to the left side of the brain. Evolutionists freely
acknowledge that:
The relationship between brain size and language is
unclear. Possibly, increased social interaction combined with tactical
deception gave the brain an initial impetus. Better nourishment due to
meat-eating may also have played a part. Then brain size and language
possibly increased together.
But, the human brain is not
simply larger. The connections are vastly different as well. As
Deacon admitted: ‘Looking more closely, we will discover that a radical
re-engineering of the whole brain has taken place, and on a scale that is
unprecedented’. In order to speak a word that has been read, information
is obtained from the eyes and travels to the visual cortex. From the
primary visual cortex, information is transmitted to the posterior speech area
(which includes Wernicke’s area). From there, information travels to
Broca’s area, and then to the primary motor cortex to provide the necessary
muscle contractions to produce the sound. To speak a word that has been
heard, we must invoke the primary auditory cortex, not the visual
cortex. Deacon commented on this complex neuronal network—which does
not occur in animals—when he wrote:
‘Many a treatise on grammatical
theory has failed to provide an adequate accounting of the implicit knowledge
that even a four-year-old appears to possess about her newly acquired language.
Figure
2. Left hemisphere of human brain with
language centers—Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area—highlighted.
