Origin of Language

The "Key Issues" series makes available some of the contemporary responses that met important books and debates on their first appearance. Examining the range of contemporary literature - journal articles, book extracts, public letters, sermons and pamphlets - the series should give the reader an insight into the historical, social and political context in which a key publication or particular topic emerged. Each text has been reset and provided with a new editorial introduction to supply the necessary historical background. Public debate about language in the English-speaking world during the 19th century turned on the issue of how language began. The notion that language was a divine gift to humanity, not shared by lower creatures, was supported by the Biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals and of the Tower of Babel. It was still accepted by leading religious authorities. But this notion was seriously brought into question by the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. Those who rejected Darwinism ridiculed all attempts to conjure up language out of primitive calls, grunts and ejaculations. No animals, it was pointed out, had yet achieved communication remotely resembling the use of words. On the other side were those who held that it was possible to account for the birth of language rationally as a function of the development of human communicational needs in society. Prominent contributors to the controversy included Max Muller (1823-1900), who held the Chair of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, William Dwight Whitney (1837-1894), Professor of Sanskrit at Yale University, USA, and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), who became Oxford's first Professor of Anthropology in 1895.