Why is language a difficult problem for science? – Local news, police, about Mexico and the world | Sun Toluca

It is believed that the age of the language is at least 50 thousand years, but most linguists consider it much older, and some estimate that it may reach half a million years, but why is it difficult to study science?

First of all, it is very difficult to define a language itself, since it contains transitional expressions that leave no trace, it is never static, it changes over time, it is infinitely flexible and almost universally present.

The complexity of human language makes it unique, it allows us to interact with our peers and enables us to talk about the past, present or future and transfer knowledge.

This was announced in an article published by BBC News Mundo on February 28, in which several specialists tackle a complex problem that got lost in time, with some even admitting that it is currently known more about the Big Bang of the universe than in human language.

Wendy Sandler, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Haifa in Israel, notes that although language is our most valuable tool, whether it is written, spoken, signed, whistle, or any form of it, we still know very little about how it originated. .

Maggie Tallerman, a linguist at the University of Newcastle, estimated that she may be at least 50,000 years old, and it is also possible that despite the diversity of the different languages ​​that exist in the world, they all descend from a common ancestor, because according to our genetics, we come from a population Relatively small in Africa.

Morten Christiansen, one of the authors of the study “Language Evolution: Consensus and Controversies,” published in Trends in cognitive science in 2003, said that it is realistic that our chances of knowing the true origin of a language are relatively low.

However, one of the most prevalent hypotheses – which has been discussed – is that language in humans first arose through hand gestures.

Specialists considered it very likely that both gestural and oral language were together from the start and evolved simultaneously, but it is possible that the reasons that prompted early humans to speak were to exploit the environment and consume different foods.

Language gradually evolved as an innate discipline to encode increasingly complex information (for example, who did what to whom, when, where and why), and then it arises from the interaction of three different adaptive systems: individual learning, culture transfer and biological evolution.

In the end, gestures prevailed (although they are still used), however, to discover how language originated, it is necessary to understand how our brain functions, how it is constructed and even how learning, culture and development interact, all of this makes it a difficult problem for science.

“We know more about the Big Bang in physics than we do about the human Big Bang,” said Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and co-director of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University in New York.