How the tongue began. The story of the greatest invention. Everett D.

“How the language began” offers the reader an original, detailed history of the language as a human invention - from the emergence of our species to the appearance of more than 7,000 modern languages. The author disputes the popular theory of Noam Khomsky about the innate language instinct among representatives of our species. According to Evetta, historically, speech developed gradually in the process of communication.

The book tells about the language from the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach, on the one hand, paying great attention to the mutual influence of the language and culture, and on the other, the characteristics of the brain that allowed the person to speak. Although fossils and linguists brought us closer to understanding how the language appeared, the discoveries of Everett turned over the modern linguistic world, thundering far beyond the borders of academic circles.

conducting field research in the Amazonian tropical forests, he came across the ancient language of the tribe Hunters-gatherers. Suffering the traditional theories of the origin of the language, Everett came to the conclusion that the language was not a feature of our species. In order to figure it out, a wide interdisciplinary approach is needed, taking into account both the cultural context and the features of our biology.

This book tells that we know what we hope to find out and what we never know about how people came from the simplest communication to the language.