Language

[alex717]

Perhaps our creator gave us an innate ability to organize and memorize, would this be enough to explain how humans developed language?

[validity]

That would depend on whether the responder believes in a creator.

[rhinogrey]

Originally Posted by alex717

Perhaps our creator gave us an innate ability to organize and memorize, would this be enough to explain how humans developed language?

No, I don't think that is enough. First of all, simply saying a creator gave us an innate ability is not enough to convince me that the ability you speak of is indeed innate. Clearly we humans now have the ability you speak of--how could anyone deny the fact that we learn by abstracting patterns out of empirical data? Could this ability not have evolved over time? Could it not have evolved simultaneously with the development of language?

[jgweed]

The development of language, it is probably safe to say, was a lengthy process involving mutually interdependent biological, mental, and societal changes that originated with speech and later extended itself to writing.

[absence]

It seems to me that we developed language naturally out our need to define and make ideas, things, needs, wants, defined and attainable. Without communication survival becomes near impossible. We are communicating in one way or another at all times, body language, speech, thought, to tame the unattainable around us and fix it into a box that we can understand based upon our past experiences and teachings that allow us to fulfill our needs and desires.

[Mykael_Deschain]

Yes I more or less agree..

Spoken language is nothing more than expression. It isn't needed to survive on a primitive level. Though it seems to be necessary for the expression of meanings and ideas.

Although i don't believe it was needed for continued survival of our species.

[Welshie]

There's a condition (I forget what it's called) where people's senses get mixed up; they 'taste' sounds or 'hear' colours etc. Certain things get associated with certain other things - sounds get associated with certain things that correspond to the other senses.

There's evidence to suggest that we all have this condition, just most of us have it only to a small degree.

Take for example two shapes; one of these is rounded like a cloud, and the other one is spiky. I tell you that one of them is called a Kiki, and the other is a Boobah; you have to tell me which is which.

This becomes much more obvious when you can see the shapes, but about 99% of people would say the rounded shape is the 'boobah' while the spiked shape is the 'kiki'. It seems language is built right into us as a species.

I can see how this could be interpreted different ways, though. For example; it's possible that this developed in our species, and it allowed us to develop simple language which developed into complex language from there. It's also possible that there is a God who created us with language; and wrote the language directly into our genetic makeup.