Exercise to go through the origins of language during the Stone Age.

1. ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE

2. VOICE BOX
 Your voice box cannot be fossilized but the hyoid
bone at the back of the tongue can be found.
 Neanderthal skeleton has the same bone (60,000
years ago).
 Archeologists found no difference between their
bone and ours.
 They think the Neanderthal could speak but maybe
at a basic level.
 Some believe that Stone Age humans had some
way to talk to each other.
 This would have allowed people to work more
closely together and share culture/knowledge.

3. HOW DID LANGUAGE START?
 What ways can we communicate without using
words?
 Sounds/Tones
 Hand Gestures
 Body Language
 Facial Expressions
 Simple words to develop things, do not develop
conjunctions/adjectives

4. LANGUAGE EXERCISE
 Come up with 5 key words for the situation given to
your group. Develop a sound for them and use the
other means of communication to tell your
message. Communicate them to the class.
 What challenges did you have?
 What challenges would there have been between
different groups during the Stone Age?
 What do you notice about language today?
 Differences/similarities?

5. LANGUAGE
 Many words are shared by various languages
throughout the world.
 Most are surrounded around the conditions and
environment of early people.
 Snow, winter, bear, horse, dog, and snake are all words
found to be common in Indo-European languages.
 On the other hand there are no common words for
elephant, camel, bamboo, tiger, etc.
 We might think of these languages as tribes who
moved away from the main original family and set
up home in different parts of Europe.

6. LANGUAGE
 Some languages are related
 Does not mean that you can understand each other, but
they will have some words in common.
 Modern English: combines French and Old English
(Latin and Scandinavian) making it both Italic and
Germanic.
 English is a „mongrel‟ language because it
continues to adapt, other languages try to keep out
foreign influences

7. INDO-EURO LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATIONS
 Germanic: Low German, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon,
Old English, Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, German,
Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish
 Celtic: Breton, Manx, Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic,
Welsh
 Italic: Latin, Romanian, French, Portuguese,
Spanish, Italian
 Hellenic: Classic/Modern Greek
 Balto-Slavonic: Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat,
Polish, Czech
 Indo-Iranian: Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Romany,
Sanskrit

8. THE SALMON
 Salmon was a plentiful/nourishing source
 All along rivers going from Baltic to North Atlantic
 It still lives in Russia, Scandanavia and Baltic areas
and is known as “laks”
 Celtic people don‟t use that phrase, branched off and
gave a new name replacing the original
 English word for salmon derives from the Latin
word for „leap‟
 Spanish use “salmon” where the Portuguese use
“salmao”
 The word “lax” or “leax” does appear before 1300 in
Old English but “salmond” appears in 1488
 It has fallen out of use in Greece (no salmon) but
the Turks use the word to refer to „fish‟ in general