6. INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON CONTEMPORARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
A STUDY ON JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S VIEWS ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a famous French philosopher known for his social and enlightenment views on human nature and the essence of man in the 18th century. JeanJacques Rousseau, who deeply influenced many thinkers from Romantic and Enlightenment philosophers to Kant, was a pioneer in many subjects like the famous thinkers of the era, and he also managed to break down the walls of his own ideas with his own thoughts. He was both a pioneer of the Enlightenment period and did not refrain from criticizing the social inequalities, cultural differences and the effects of passion on social contracts during the Enlightenment process. In addition to his research on social issues, he also wrote essays on the origin of languages and the musical and passional foundations of the first language resulting from social consensus. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essays on the origin of languages, the dominant view is that the roots of the first language stem from kinetic needs, vocal and verbal passions. The distinction between language and speech is a concept that has interrelated and separable aspects, as in the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, a famous representative of the French school, a century later. While language is a common system of agreement, speech is a means of communication that arises from the combination of passions and needs. Speech has been pointed out as the most obvious concept that separates communication between humans from communication between animals. Speech is an individual performance and feeds on personal passions. Accordingly, speech may also include individuality and subjectivity, while language is the product of a common social contract. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essays examining the origin of languages, the comparison of the need and passion aspects of the first language, the view that songs and melodies fed by passions are based on melodic imitation in a way compatible with music theory, one of the theories of the emergence of the first language, and the feeding of the first language from metaphorical substances, his views on modern prosody starting from the first writing, and the general and local differences in the origin of languages have been investigated. In this study, the relations of the first language with music, melody and imitation will be examined based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essays on the origin of languages, supported by the perspectives of other linguists who are related to his approach.