Edward Burnett Tylor [SEP] native language
Edward Burnett Tylor
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 18322 January 1917) was an English anthropologist, the founder of cultural anthropology.
Tylor's ideas typify 19th-century cultural evolutionism. In his works "Primitive Culture" (1871) and "Anthropology" (1881), he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. Tylor maintained that
a role for oral gesture in the origin of spoken language, such as those of the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who called his method "generative philology". An implication of the phememe hypothesis is that Primordial Language lacked double articulation, which the American linguist Charles F. Hockett proposed as a central design feature of human language. According to this principle, linguistic signs are made up of building blocks, such as phonemes, which are themselves meaningless, e.g. "cat" is composed of the phonemes