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On the Origin of Language

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"On the Origin of Language" is a Romantic take on a most controversial subject. Rousseau's argument is that language did not originate as an evolutionary need to communicate thoughts for pragmatic social or economic purposes but for passionate reasons. Early man, in order to woo and conquest the female successfully, needed to develop a language adequate enough to persuade the female to surrender to his passion. Feelings and not thoughts provided the main thrust for the evolution of human language. To support his theory, Rousseau argues that all creatures in Nature already possessed a language adequate enough to communicate such practical needs as the mating call, the announcement of a source of food, or the approach of a predator. Such language consisted of screams, yelps, warbles, screeching, hissing, or roaring, where the sense of hearing was employed. Others employed the sense of sight through displaying colorful plumage, performing ritualistic dances, and the like. And still others deployed the sense of smell by emitting various odors, such as the smell of estrus to attract the male, the smell of feces or urine in marking their territory, etc. Speech, the language of humans, according to Rousseau, originated for the Donjuanesque display of love rhetoric. Today we are aware of the existence of a bicameral brain, where language is processed in the realm of the left hemisphere, the area appropriate for reasoned thought rather than feeling. This seems to contradict Rousseau's theory, since passion belongs in the right brain hemisphere. According to some anthropologists and neuroscientists, the left brain evolved much later than the right brain. Rational thinking, therefore, is a recent adaptation in "Homo sapiens." Linguists point out that speech or talking is the exclusive possession of the human species, "the talking animal." The question remains as to whether speech began before or after the evolving of the left hemisphere. Whether or not we accept all of Rousseau's arguments on the origin of language, his contribution to that field of research is an important one. He would be a must in any attempt to write the history of the question of the origin of language.