All religions and mythology contain story of language origin. Philosophers through the ages have argued the question. Scholarly works have been written on the subject. Prizes have been awarded for the beat answer to this eternally perplexing problem. Theory of divine origin , language as a human invention , and evolutionary development have all been put forward.
Linguistic history suggests that spoken languages of the kind that exist today have been around for tens of thousands of years at the very least , but the earliest deciphered written records are barely six thousand years old. The origin of writing is discussed in chapter 12. These records appear so late in the history of the development of language that they provide no clue to its origin.
Despite the difficulty of finding scientific evidence , speculations on language origin have provided valuable insights into the nature and development of language , which prompted the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen to state that linguistic science cannot refrain forever from asking about the the whence and about the whither of linguistic evolution. A brief look at some of these speculative notions will reveal this point.
Nothing , no doubt , would be more interesting than to know from historical documents the exact process by which the first man began to lisp his first words , andthus to be rid forever of all the theories on the origin of speech.
in the Beginning