![]() ![]() His idea strengthened the hypothesis of a gestural origin of the language (manual gestures), as in the sign language of the deaf and mute, even if we must be careful not to confuse gestures with signs. ![]() So far, what is important is to understand that between sign and thought there is a more direct and closer relationship than that between word and thought, as Lev Vygotskij described in his masterpiece Though and language of 1938. This required a mental operation and the existence of a consciousness to create something that is for something else, as when we pronounce sounds (the phonemes) giving them a precise meaning. Anyway men had to give sense to what they said, they had to create in the mind of their interlocutors an equivalent meaning of gesture, otherwise they could not communicate. Men have always been so, even before beginning to pronounce one word. In our evolution the variety of gestuality was already present before sound was necessary, otherwise the articulate language would have had difficulties in emerging.įundamentally man is a symbolic animal. Substantially the gesticulation and the language should not be considered antithetical but complementary. In truth, the articulate language could be evolved not to confer a simple enrichment of the gesticulation to the hands, but to involve them in activities that would become more and more linguistic. Therefore the erect position freed his hands that would later have been used to enrich the meaning of gestures that in our ancestors were very abundant and that combined with rudimental sounds, even if they did not constitute a real language, nevertheless they were very close to being one. ![]() Homo erectus (1.6-07 million years ago) could have spoken, even if with difficulty, with an accentuated iconic gesticulation, while proper structured grammar and semantic components have appeared more recently with Homo sapiens. If things are so, the articulate language has probably originated in a period in which man had already perfected the walking in the erect position, had freed his hands from the land walking as a quadruped, that is before he became Homo sapiens. The third hypothesis instead introduces the idea that the origin of the articulate language came about between the above mentioned periods with a form of language called proto-language.If he had, certainly it would have been without the articulated capacity of Homo sapiens. The Neanderthal man, our contemporary, did not speak properly and never could have. The articulate language is said to be born not before 35 thousand years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period. ![]()
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