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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Morphology is the study of patterns of word-formation within a language. It attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of speakers. In the context of historical linguistics, formal means of expression change over time. Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
Etymology (/ ˌ ɛ t ɪ ˈ m ɒ l ə dʒ i /, ET-im-OL-ə-jee [1]) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. [2] In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. [1]
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, [1] involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. [2]Language use was first systematically documented in Mesopotamia, with extant lexical lists of the 3rd to the 2nd Millennia BCE, offering glossaries on Sumerian cuneiform usage and meaning, and phonetical vocabularies of foreign languages.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
In historical or evolutionary linguistics, monogenesis and polygenesis are two different hypotheses about the phylogenetic origin of human languages. According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue.
Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper ...
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. [1] [2] [3] The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics ...