{"id":3437,"date":"2015-06-22T09:05:46","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T13:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=3437"},"modified":"2020-10-01T14:52:10","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T18:52:10","slug":"a-brief-history-of-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2015\/06\/22\/a-brief-history-of-language\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Itchy<\/a><\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s hard for us humans to keep time in perspective. I suppose it\u2019s a good thing\u2014after all, if we were constantly thinking about the fact that we\u2019ve been around for about 200,000 years and for 98.5% of that time we never wrote anything down, we probably wouldn\u2019t be able to function in our day-to-day lives. As a side effect, however, we have trouble putting things into historical context or take account of relativity (see: the comic above). Also, if you\u2019re like me, everything you learn slowly drips out of your ears at night, and you occasionally have to replenish the stocks.<\/p>\n

To that end, let\u2019s visit\u2014briefly, entertainingly and quite incompletely\u2014the history of languages on this planet.<\/p>\n

Birth of Language<\/strong> (60,000 \u2013 200,000 years ago<\/em>)
\nThat number is a total shot in the dark. We have no idea when language as we know it was created, how it was created, why it was created or even really what language is<\/em>. Do the grunts of apes count as language? Was language developed in one place and spread with mankind across the globe, or is it innate within us, and rose across the world at various points simultaneously? Did other Homo sapiens <\/em>relatives speak language as well, or is it unique to us? We just don\u2019t know. You\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n

Age of the Proto-Language<\/strong> (4,000 \u2013 10,000 years ago<\/em>)
\nA \u201cproto-language\u201d is a hypothetical \u201croot\u201d language, from which, theoretically, several language families bloomed and branched into sub-groups, languages and dialects. If a language family is a tree, the proto-language is the base of the trunk. Again, we don\u2019t know a whole lot about them, as most are purely speculative. But scholars place their use, if they did exist, somewhere around this time. The big, important proto-language you might want to know about is Proto-Indo-European, the great-granddaddy of every European and Near Eastern language from Albanian to Latvian to Urdu to Yiddish. Other language families like Sino-Tibetan may have had a proto-language, but\u2026we just don\u2019t know<\/em>, get it?!<\/p>\n

The First Written Word<\/strong> (1,000 BCE \u2013 2nd<\/sup> century BCE-ish<\/em>)
\nWhen people got the bright idea to start putting quill to parchment, or chisel to stone, or blood to tanned leather, languages stopped wandering about quite as aimlessly and began settling down and starting families and sprouting more dedicated groups. Around here you\u2019ll find the \u201cbirth\u201d of such noble old languages as Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Old Chinese, as well as \u201cnewer\u201d languages later on, like Hebrew, Latin, Old Persian and Aramaic. They weren\u2019t, of course, actually born<\/em> by dint of them being written down, but otherwise \u2013 say it with me \u2013 we just don\u2019t knooooooow!<\/em><\/p>\n

The Old Timers<\/strong> (First millennium CE<\/em>)
\nThe Middle Ages was good for a lot more than just mead and catapults. Thanks to the explosion in writing, we\u2019re able to get more precise with our dating (we know a little moooooore!<\/em>) and salute venerable languages such as Old English (Anglo-Saxon\u2014think Beowulf rather than Shakespeare), Old High German, Old French, Classical Arabic and so on. Rather than just fumbling about in the dark as before, we can trace our contemporary languages to these fellows with confidence. They\u2019ll be followed by Middle and Middle High versions, each at varying stages at various times, which may look the same to you as the Old ones but are not, so don\u2019t even think about it.<\/p>\n

Standardization<\/strong> (1500 \u2013 1900 CE<\/em>)
\nWorld conquerors have always known that the best way to assimilate a people into your empire is to squash their local religions, customs and languages and force them to speak what you speak. Alexander the Great knew it, Julius Caesar knew it, and Genghis Khan knew it but couldn\u2019t be bothered, and so just killed everyone he met. However, it wasn\u2019t until about this time that world-conquering became a less successful pursuit and the standardizing of languages actually stuck, mostly because bureaucracy is irritating enough without competing languages on all the forms. Some, like the Italians and Spanish, created a standard based on literary classics, while most others, such as the French, English, Tibetans, and Chinese just used the dialect from their capital city, or whatever dialect they considered to be \u201cpolite.\u201d This period includes the standardization of Sign Language, which had existed in myriad forms throughout history, but only now became normalized, by the French.<\/p>\n

The Age of the Artificial <\/strong>(1900 \u2013 present<\/em>)
\nAs if in response to the rapid extinction of languages and dialects after standardization, people have recently started making up their own languages. An intrepid young man named L. L. Zamenhof developed Esperanto as an idealized lingua franca<\/em> for the world; J. R. R. Tolkien created Quenya, a fully-realized invented Elvish tongue around which he built his Middle-Earth of the Hobbit <\/em>and Lord of the Rings<\/em>; and Marc Okrand\u2019s Klingon language, created for the fictional Star Trek <\/em>alien race of the same name, is actually spoken fluently by many people. I suppose I could include computer programming languages such as C++ or Java here, but I\u2019m not sure they count\u2014they\u2019re more mathematical than linguistic. In any case, the most recently created language is Na\u2019vi, created for James Cameron\u2019s film Avatar<\/em> in 2009 by linguistic professor Paul Frommer.<\/p>\n

So there you have it, an extremely broad and generalized overview of the history of languages. Who knows where the future will lead? Resurrection of extinct languages due to time travel? A return to regional dialects thanks to advanced translation technology? Or perhaps we\u2019ll all use Esperanto? Let\u2019s speculate and argue about it in the comments below!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

Sometimes it\u2019s hard for us humans to keep time in perspective. I suppose it\u2019s a good thing\u2014after all, if we were constantly thinking about the fact that we\u2019ve been around for about 200,000 years and for 98.5% of that time we never wrote anything down, we probably wouldn\u2019t be able to function in our day-to-day…<\/p>\n

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