Tongue and Language
Image credit: Macadamer
Tongue and Language
The tongue is an important organ in our body, not only as part of the digestive system, it’s also indispensable in the production of speech, the feature that distinguishes human beings from other animals. This is why tongue is called "lingua" in Latin. Without the tongue, there are no languages.
The ability to speak is absent in animals other than humans. Even the most intelligent primate, chimpanzee, cannot speak and can only learn the sign language. Some birds like parrots and myna can produce short phrases of human speech, but just through mimicry. It can be seen that speaking is a unique ability found in humans only. The speaking apparatus includes the tongue, the mouth, and the vocal cord. The control and coordination of these organs to speak is through regions in our brain called “the language centre”. Recent studies have found a special gene “FOXP2” in our DNA which determines the development of the language centre in the brain. Consequently this special gene is absent in other animals. How did human beings get this gene? It’s probably not through evolution. We can propose that speaking is a gift human received from his creator.
Speaking is a learned skill. Your language is what you have learned from your mother. It can be deduced that languages were passed down from one generation to the next. Languages did not develop out of nowhere independently from each other and must have a common origin. According to DNA studies, all humans are from one woman in South Africa. Similarly, the origin of all languages must also come from Africa.*
In the Bible, Genesis 2: 7~17, God formed the man and put him in the Garden of Eden and told him what he shall do and what he shall not do. Hereby the man got both the speaking and the hearing abilities at the time of his creation. He can converse with God without difficulty. Obviously God and the man use the same language. From that time until the Tower of Babel event, Genesis 11: 1~9, all the people on earth had one language and the same speech. After the Babel event, because God confounded their language and scattered them over the surface of all the earth, people began to speak different languages in their own locations and they also lost the ability to communicate with God directly.
From the view of modern medical science, if one's language centre in the brain is damaged, even minimally, one's speaking ability can be altered seriously. In some cases, after injury of the language centre area, like in a stroke, people can speak but not intelligible to others.
Today there are thousands of languages over the world. Different languages still have common words depicting the same things. This reveals the relationships between different languages. By careful comparison we can even find the root words in different languages. Just like stem cell can develop into many sorts of other cells in our body, root words can become other forms through addition of a prefix or a suffix, or even both with the meaning unchanged. “Tongue” in different languages is a good example to explain this phenomenon.
There are many ways to say “tongue” in different languages. We can categorize and group some of these languages by similarities in their pronunciation:
•Ji or tsih, found only in Taiwanese.
•Dil, dila, diva, leda, lidah, lela, found in Turkish, Azerbaijani, and some Austronesian languages.
•Til, keel, kieli, found in Uzbek, Kazakh, Estonian, and Finnish.
•Jezik, jazyk, yazik, ezik, found in most European languages.
•Jibha, jihaba, jibro, jubaan, found in most Indian languages.
Comparing the above groups carefully, we can find that the root words “Ji, di, ti, ki, zi” are imbedded among these groups. The changes within the groups are minimal. The relationship of the above languages is already taking shape, but further studies on language evolution and human migration can make it more clear in the future.
*Is this how Eve spoke? Every human language evolved from 'single prehistoric African mother tongue'
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