Recently, I have been very interested in language, especially how there came to be so many vastly different languages today. My theory before researching this topic was that there must have been one original language from which all other languages were derived, and regional accents that developed eventually become so different until they became their own distinct language. This cycle has been perpetuating for ages, and is still continuing today.
While researching I inevitably came upon the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story (I had heard that the Tower of Babel was the cause of different languages, but new none of the specifics before reading about it), the Tower of Babel was built by humans who all spoke the same language. The purpose of the Tower was to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. God knew about the man’s goals and believing that it would only cause people to leave Him, He made it so that no one could understand each other and spread them across the earth. Since I am not a very religious person, I was unsatisfied with this answer and continued to search.
I next came upon an answer that I believed was much more practical and had evidence to support its claims. Most of us have probably heard of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian) that were derived from Latin. We know that these languages are related to one another because we are able to analyze their texts and can see that they all share similar roots. From further analysis it was determined that there was an even more ancient ancestor that was shared not only by these 5 languages, but also by Germanic and Slavic languages. However Germanic and Slavic languages have no ancestral languages that had written texts and the similarity was determined by phonetics. These unknown ancestral languages are called Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic. And it was determined that there was an even older ancestor that includes most Indo-European languages. There is then an even older language that is more encompassing called Eurasiatic languages that includes the Indo-European languages, as well as Altaic (Turkish, Japanese, Korean, ect…), Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish, ect…), Eskimo-Aluet, and Chukchi-Kamchatkan languages. It is believed that this continues back even further to when modern man evolved fifty-thousand years ago, and there is DNA evidence gathered from bones of this species of man that has been used to draw correlations between when the genes began to rapidly change and the development of language. For a more detailed explanation and interesting examples visit this site.
After researching this topic, I am even more intrigued by language and would like to explore in a future blog post how we determined what a rock was and how we associate a definition with a mix of sounds.
