How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (ePub)

How Language Began offers the reader an original, extended history of language as a human invention, from the origin of our species to the rise of over 7,000 modern languages. The author challenges Noam Chomsky's popular theory of an innate language instinct in our species. According to Everett, historically, speech developed gradually in the process of communication. The book talks about language from the standpoint of an interdisciplinary approach, on the one hand, paying great attention to the mutual influence of language and culture, and on the other hand, to the features of the brain that allowed a person to speak. Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to understanding how language began, Everett's discoveries have turned the modern linguistic world upside down, thundering far beyond academia. While doing field research in the Amazonian rainforest, he came across an ancient language of a hunter-gatherer tribe. Challenging traditional theories about the origin of language, Everett concluded that language was not a feature of our species. To understand this, a broad interdisciplinary approach is needed, taking into account both the cultural context and the features of our biology. This book tells what we know, what we hope to know, and what we will never know about how humans got from basic communication to language.