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Hypotheses about the origin of speech

Speech communication tools were veryslowly, following the general development of man in the process of his evolution. It is very difficult to reveal the moment when the speech appeared. But modern scholars agree that it did not originate with itself, but was formed in the course of active interaction of people with each other and the external environment. There are several hypotheses regarding the origin of speech. A few decades ago there was a belief that the first words were the result of a mutation that suddenly occurred to a primitive man. This hypothesis is joined by the so-called physicalist concepts, according to which speech is only a physiological phenomenon, beyond any connection with the needs of man in communication and cognition of the world.

One of the hypotheses is based on the fact that speech originated from imitation of the sounds of nature.

Such views can not explain howthere were sound signals and their combinations, as the rudiments of concepts were formed, and the words acquired a semantic load. The concept of the evolutionary origin of speech was much more widespread. It is based on the assumption that man has separated from the animal world, having learned to adapt to environmental conditions, including through the development of communication media.

The development of speech

Studying the behavior of higher primates, scientists have drawnattention to how the communication systems are constructed in anthropoid apes. It became obvious that speech originated from elementary audio signals. Primates actively use a variety of sounds, which, depending on the situation, can reflect the need for play, food, finding a partner or being a sign of aggressive behavior. The so-called gestural hypothesis of the origin of speech signals is known. The essence of it is that in the beginning it was just a gesture, not a sound. The first meaningful signals were transmitted by people, not by sounds, but by gestures of definite significance. Most of these signals are instinctive, inherent in humans genetically. This assumption is not meaningless, given that a significant proportion of information in interpersonal communication modern man receives in the form of non-verbal signals, facial expressions and gestures. Most likely, gestures and sounds were first used together, and then it became possible to transmit information only by combinations of sounds, so the need for speech speech gradually disappeared. In the process of the development of human society, the human work and thought activities became more complicated, new objects and relationships that needed to be fixed in terms of. The objective conditions for the formation of society, thus, have become the cause of the complication of speech, the emergence of universal substitutes for individual objects and phenomena.

Only after millennia, abstract concepts emerged, the meanings of which turned out to be abstract from concrete material objects.

The highest form of speech was written speech, whichallowed for a long time to maintain the content of events that occur with man and in society. With the advent of writing, a person was able to capture messages for transmission to other people, return to the records if necessary, without relying on memory. Possessing oral and written speech, modern man is able to effectively communicate and deeply know the world.