Who invented talking

It's always inching along and changing to a new language. Take all of those changes happening to every word all the time and it means that you're going to get two different languages, one on one side of the mountain and one on the other side. There is no reason. The order of the alphabet has never made any sense. All we know is that the people who invented the first alphabet put the letters in a certain order.

When they passed those letters on to other people, and those people passed the letters on to us, we kept the letters in that order. Those letters weren't needed in the languages those people spoke, but as the alphabet got passed down to people speaking other kinds of languages, people wanted new letters: x, y and z were those letters. They are only in so many words, they are kind of the peculiar letters. They were invented later and it seemed natural to tack them on to the end.

Listen to the full podcast to hear some of them. Read the full transcript. VPR News. Vermont Edition. VPR Classical. Inside VPR. Play Live Radio. Next Up:. Available On Air Stations. The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language. Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors.

And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet , bat , and boot sound like different words.

This line of thinking became known as laryngeal descent theory, or LDT. Its authors argue that the anatomical ingredients for speech were present in our ancestors much earlier than , years ago. In fact, they propose that the necessary equipment—specifically, the throat shape and motor control that produce distinguishable vowels—has been around as long as 27 million years, when humans and Old World monkeys baboons, mandrills, and the like last shared a common ancestor.

Read: A rare universal pattern in human languages. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf.

Ultimately, the talented scientist held more than 18 patents for his inventions and work in communications. Young Alexander was an intellectually curious child who studied piano and began inventing things at an early age. Both of his brothers passed away from tuberculosis by the time Bell was in his early twenties. When he was just 12, the young Alexander invented a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes that could quickly remove husks from wheat grain to help improve a farming process.

At age 16, Bell began studying the mechanics of speech. In , Bell, along with his family, moved to Canada. The following year, he settled in the United States. While in the U. In , he opened the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston, where deaf people were taught to speak. While teaching, Bell met Mabel Hubbard, a deaf student. The couple married on July 11, They went on to have four children, including two sons who died as infants. In , Bell started working on the harmonic telegraph — a device that allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a wire at the same time.

While trying to perfect this technology, which was backed by a group of investors, Bell became preoccupied with finding a way to transmit human voice over wires. By , Bell, with the help of his partner Thomas Watson, had come up with a simple receiver that could turn electricity into sound. On March 7, , Bell was granted his telephone patent.

Watson, come here. I want you. In , the U. In addition to the telephone, Bell worked on hundreds of projects throughout his career and received patents in various fields. Some of his other notable inventions were:.