Astrophysicists may have a big bang theory to explain the origin of the universe, but linguists have a bow-wow theory to explain the origins of language. That’s why this week’s video suggestion is about the many existing theories concerning the origins of our language.

The interesting clip we are proposing today has been prepared by Emrah Dolgunsöz for educational purposes, and starts answering some important questions about what language really is. For example, it underlines how language is “the fundamental way of communication and interaction, both organized and systematic” – a definition that can reasonably sound elementary; yet, we have to keep it in mind if we want to give language the universal importance it deserves.

But what are the origins of language, exactly? What you will learn from this video is that linguistic experts are still not sure about its origins, but obviously they have many theories to propose. To name just a few:

• The Bow-wow theory says that “nature and especially animal sounds are the starting point of linguistic systems”.
• The Ding dong theory assumes that “human named sounds and names after sounds produced by objects around”.

Read the full article and watch the video in TermCoord here: http://termcoord.eu/2015/10/video-fix-the-big-bang-of-language/

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