Glottogenesis is the process of formation of a human natural sound language that differs from other sign systems. The problem of glottogenesis continues the more general problem of the emergence of language, which receives philosophical, sociological and psychological understanding. Glottogenesis is studied as a complex problem by linguistic methods (mainly in the field of comparative historical linguistics and historical typology), as well as with the help of a number of related human sciences. The comparative-historical method makes it possible, by comparing the proto-languages of individual macrofamilies (with a total number of no more than 10), to outline the forms of the probable original proto-language of Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., modern man), which after its appearance is about 100 thousand years old. years ago, it could have broken up into dialects that gave about 40-30 thousand. As humans moved from Africa to Eurasia and the number of ancient people increased, the beginning of separate languages (macrofamily proto-languages) began; historical typology helps to reveal the most likely ways of forming the main language categories.
Methods of anthropology and related sciences (for example, paleoneurology, which reconstructs brain features based on their reflection on skulls) allow us to roughly attribute the emergence of natural sound language in its articulate, close to modern form to the period of about 100 thousand years. It lies between Neanderthals (Homo sapiens) and the first modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens). In other words, natural language is one of the most obvious distinguishing features of Homo sapiens sapiens. In relation to Neanderthal, a different type of language is likely, since there were no articulatory prerequisites (pharyngeal cavity), which are necessary for differentiating many sounds (in particular, vowels), although this issue is controversial. From the point of view of paleoneurology, it is possible to assign the formation of speech zones in the left hemisphere (dominant in sound speech in the vast majority of people) to an even earlier period (synanthropus, about 500-400 thousand years ago). years BC). But it is possible that the left hemisphere, which in modern humans is responsible not only for speech, but also for coordinating the movements of both hands, in ancient times was responsible not only for sound signals, but also for hand gestures of human ancestors. It can be assumed that the principles of constructing a sequence of hand gestures, which served as the main method of transmitting complex meanings in the” sign language ” of hominids (a family of primates that includes Homo sapiens), were later transferred to sound sequences. The great antiquity of sign language in comparison with the sound language of the modern type is assumed by many scientists, in particular, because anthropoids (gorillas and chimpanzees), who had common ancestors with humans, have about 6-5 million years of age. There are known systems of gestures in the wild that coincide with the gestures of children in the pre-speech (“sensorimotor”, in the terminology of Zh. Piaget) period: anthropoids, when communicating with humans in captivity, are able to learn a significant number of gestures (from 100 in chimpanzees to 1000 in gorillas) and use them in constructions built according to syntactic rules. It is assumed that such systems of sign signs, along with a limited number (about 20-40) of short audio signals, were the main means of communication of hominids for about 3 million years. and only in the most recent period of human ancestral evolution (100-40 thousand years). years ago) begins glottogenesis in the proper sense of the word. The agreement of the data of linguistic comparison of all human languages (speaking in favor of the monogenesis of the theory), anthropological reconstruction of the development of the speech apparatus from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens sapiens, and paleoneurological reconstruction of the development of speech zones of the left hemisphere suggests that human ancestors, like modern humans in embryonic and early development, formed earlier zones of the right hemisphere responsible for the semantics of hieroglyphic (“symbolic”) gestures and words of a sound language, posterior (occipitoparietal) zones of the left hemisphere, which are responsible for the verbal naming of individual objects, most recently the anterior (temporal-frontal) zones of the left hemisphere, which are engaged in the construction of syntactically complex structures. It can be assumed that the sequence corresponding to this sequence of maturation of brain areas, in which the sign activity of the child develops (sign language – one-word designations of objects with words – combinations of words in sentences), to a certain extent repeats the evolutionary stages in glottogenesis. Therefore, it is possible that the period when gesture signaling co – existed with sound signaling (with a limited number of signals of the order of several dozen, as in anthropoids) is followed by a period of long-term evolution of verbal methods of naming objects by means of sequences of phonemes, the number of which in all languages is close to the number of sound signals of anthropoids, while the syntax of the early sound language (in which phonemes-components of words-were formed later from several dozen primary signals) remained very simple. The described periods of early language evolution seem to have preceded the appearance of Homo sapiens, which, unlike all previous hominids, is characterized by the development of the temporal-frontal zones and the further development of the anterior frontal zones associated with complex syntactic structures of the left hemisphere. The language of Homo sapiens sapiens did not differ in basic features from the subsequent languages of the world.