Verbal communication has become one of the most important achievements of mankind. Through language, people can communicate and pass on the experience of generations. Having arisen along with labor skills, speech developed into a system of signs, individual words and sentences. Speech proficiency is an integral feature of a person that distinguishes him from the natural environment.
Hypotheses about the origin of speech
Means of verbal communication were formed very slowly, following the general development of man in the process of his evolution. It is very difficult to identify the moment when the speech appeared. But modern scientists agree that it did not arise by 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. Several decades ago, it was believed that the first words were the result of a mutation that suddenly happened to primitive man. This hypothesis is adjoined by the so-called physicalist concepts, according to which speech is only a physiological phenomenon, without any connection with a person's needs for communication and knowledge of the world.
One of the hypotheses is based on the fact that speech arose from imitating the sounds of nature.
Such views cannot explain in any way how sound signals and their combinations arose, how the rudiments of concepts were formed, and words acquired a semantic load. The concept of the evolutionary origin of speech has become much more widespread. It is based on the assumption that man stood out from the animal world, having learned to adapt to environmental conditions, including through the development of means of communication.
Speech development
Studying the behavior of great apes, scientists paid attention to how communication systems are built in great apes. It became obvious that speech originated from elementary sound signals. Primates actively use a variety of sounds, which, depending on the situation, can reflect the need for play, food, looking for a partner, or be a sign of aggressive behavior.
The so-called gesture hypothesis of the origin of speech signals is known. Its essence is that in the beginning it was sign language, not sound speech, that appeared. The first meaningful signals a person conveyed not with sounds, but with gestures that have a certain meaning. Most of these signals are instinctive, genetically embedded in a person.
This assumption makes sense, given that a significant portion of information in interpersonal communication is received by a modern person 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 with only combinations of sounds, so the need for gestural speech gradually disappeared.
In the process of the development of human society, the labor and mental activity of a person became more complicated, new objects and relationships appeared, which had to be fixed in concepts. The objective conditions for the formation of society, thus, became the reason for the complication of speech, the emergence of universal substitutes for individual objects and phenomena.
Only millennia later, abstract concepts appeared, the meanings of which were abstracted from concrete material objects.
The highest form of speech was written speech, which made it possible to preserve the content of events taking place with a person and in society for a long time. With the advent of writing, a person was able to capture messages for transferring them to other people, to return to records if necessary, without relying on memory. Possessing oral and written speech, a modern person is able to communicate effectively and deeply cognize the world.
