By Onah, Petrolina Ada
There has been shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech. One general fact however is that no human being is born speaking a language. Some of the speculations about the origin of language include the divine source which holds that God created Adam and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name there of (Genesis2:19). The Hindus also hold the view that language originated from the goddess Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the universe. Other view about the origin of language is the natural sound source which holds that the beginning of human speech is based on the imitations of the natural sounds which the people of old heard around them as made by objects (Yule,1-2).
One surprising thing however is that none of the available experiments supports any of the views above. As reported in Yule (2), the speculation that infants growing up without hearing any language would spontaneously begin using the original God given language has been proved wrong. The experiment of an Egyptian Pharaoh called Psammetichus around 600B. C. with two infants proved it wrong. According to this report, “after two years in the company of sheep and a mute shepherd; the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered not an Egyptian word, but Phrygian word ‘bekos’ “meaning bread”. The children may not have picked the word from any human being, but from the sounds made by sheep. The crux of the matter is that human infant is certainly helped in his or her language acquisition by the typical behaviour of the adults in the home environment; that is, adults interact with children to improve on their language acquisition.
There has been shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech. One general fact however is that no human being is born speaking a language. Some of the speculations about the origin of language include the divine source which holds that God created Adam and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name there of (Genesis2:19). The Hindus also hold the view that language originated from the goddess Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the universe. Other view about the origin of language is the natural sound source which holds that the beginning of human speech is based on the imitations of the natural sounds which the people of old heard around them as made by objects (Yule,1-2).
One surprising thing however is that none of the available experiments supports any of the views above. As reported in Yule (2), the speculation that infants growing up without hearing any language would spontaneously begin using the original God given language has been proved wrong. The experiment of an Egyptian Pharaoh called Psammetichus around 600B. C. with two infants proved it wrong. According to this report, “after two years in the company of sheep and a mute shepherd; the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered not an Egyptian word, but Phrygian word ‘bekos’ “meaning bread”. The children may not have picked the word from any human being, but from the sounds made by sheep. The crux of the matter is that human infant is certainly helped in his or her language acquisition by the typical behaviour of the adults in the home environment; that is, adults interact with children to improve on their language acquisition.