25 September 2022

Writing a research based informative essay about language | Guideline

Imagine if you could not use words. Think about it; no language means you cannot express your opinions accurately. Sign language is not as effective as language in conveying information. Language is the best identifying factor of human beings, a trait we do not share with other creatures on earth. It allows us to dominate our planet and communicate across continents. Writing a research based informative essay about language best reflects this monumental human invention.

The Evolution of Human Language

Bernard Campbell accurately defines our situation, "We simply do not know, and never will, how or when language began," in "Humankind Emerging."

The first important thing to consider is that language development has puzzled linguists since the twenty-sixth dynasty in early Egyptian society. Christians define language as the purview of God. This shows that no one can say they know about the exact origin of language, but we have various sensible notions to follow.

Where Do We Begin Knowing What We Do?

"For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere. ... there are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistorical shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise."

-Christine Kenneally.

The Quest For Knowledge

Lack of evidence has not influenced people's interest in learning about the origin of language. Many theories have come up over the years with varying degrees of success. While they have critics, often facing ridicule or discounted as farces, these theories have partly contributed to what we know about this subject.

We will explore some of the oldest language origin theories using their disparaging nicknames to see how language may have evolved.

Evolutionary Game Theory

The emergence of language is a crucial part of humanity's evolution. It is an unrivaled innovation that radically altered human society's characteristics, similar to fire. Evolutionary game theory explains the origin of language based on a protolanguage. Proponents of this theory argue that these languages could have evolved in nonlinguistic societies. These people learned to associate specific objects with various signals in this era.

Early language evolution is likely filled with mistakes in perception and signaling. These people probably overcame this setback by combining a smaller set of easily notable sounds into words. The evolution of word formation allowed these societies to encode a language into an infinite number of objects. These people combined words into sentences, defining the best conditions for evolving grammatical rules. This reduced mistakes in communicating through natural selection.

The Ding-Dong Theory

Pythagoras and Plato favored this theory that claims speech came about due to various indispensable object qualities in a person's environment. Theorists argue that people originally made sounds that were in tune with the world around them. However, this theory lacks persuasive evidence from rare situations involving sound symbolism. It shows that language unlikely has an intricate connection with sound and what it means.

The La-La Theory

Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist, stated that language could have evolved from sounds linked to play, love, and song. This theory's weakness was first illustrated by David Crystal in "How Language Works." He says Jespersen fails to indicate the evident gap between the rational and emotional components of expressing speech.

The Tower of Babel Theory

This theory explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. It is an axiomatic statistic that language experiences continuous changes. Speakers of a particular language will continue changing their language together under normal circumstances. However, if they experience a rift, physically isolating a particular group from the rest, it is a matter of time before the separate groups experience a divide from the others.

A single speech community is separated, and each party starts experiencing linguistic changes independently. It advances a diversification of languages. The communities eventually develop varying dialects, which ultimately results in different languages. This process can explain diverse Romance languages as Latin speakers lived in varying European communities. They elicited distinct languages, namely, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

The Bow-Wow Theory

According to the proponents of this theory, language was born when our predecessors began imitating natural sounds in their environment. In this way, the speech was marked by echoic words, thus, onomatopoeic, using words such as meow, moo, bang, and splash. We must note that a few words are onomatopoeic and vary based on language. Different cultures have varying words to explain sounds, such as a dog's bark elicited as ham ham in Albania and au au in Brazil.

Writing a Research-based Informative Essay

Writing an informative essay is a crucial skill that will help you explain different concepts at work or school. A research-based essay on language is a descriptive paper explaining a situation, thing, event, or person aimed at developing a vivid image. As the previous sections illustrate, describing an item, such as language, requires in-depth knowledge of the subject. Language is a complex and convoluted subject that needs extra work to ensure you remain unbiased in your research.

You cannot assume a particular position is true when writing a descriptive essay and must exhaust every possible situation relevant to the subject. Remember to remain impartial; otherwise, you will alter the nature of your paper and lose points for writing an argumentative or persuasive essay. Take extra caution to avoid these problems since you're purely looking for information to offer the reader.

Winding Up

The terms "research-based" and "informative" should say everything about the type of essay you are required to write in our case. A language paper should include as much information as possible on its origin and development to provide the reader with a broad range of topics to explore. You should conduct research to intrigue your audience. Be careful to note the variations in language theory when offering your reader information on the subject.

William James said language is an expensive and imperfect way to express thought. Do not feel overwhelmed with the information overload required when writing a research-based informative essay about language. We have experts that would gladly take the load off your back. Reach out to us for excellent deals on creating a masterpiece on language.