Basically what i am asking is how were people suddenly able to understand each other and form words for things? Also how did they then take those words and create letters and writing in a way that other people could understand?
Another question I have is when did languages actually develop and how do we even know?
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Spoken language, we really got no clue. All we know is that it would’ve had to have been gradual, and that it would’ve likely developed out of some default animal sounds (grunting, warning cries, etc)
Written language on the other hand, we know a bit more. Written language has developed roughly 5-6 seperate times in human history, often from ritualized drawings. If you start assigning specific meanings/words to specific images, you get a pictogram.
Eventually people stopped adding all the detail to those pictures, until the symbol itself was just an abstract set of lines representing a single word. These are logographs, and this is how Chinese writing traditionally worked. Logographies were some of the first types of writing system. But much like spoken language, written languages evolve over time.
Egyptian hieroglyphs for example became ideographic; each character represented a more broad idea, and additional characters could be used to clarify meaning. A common method of doing this was to use a thing called “rebus” to clarify the pronunciation of an ideograph; rebus being those read-the-picture type games you did as a kid. So when reading ancient Egyptian, you might see the characters “☀️🏃” used to mean “son”, because a son is a 🏃 that sounds like the word ☀️.
)Edit: Minor clarification — Egyptian Hieroglyphics didn’t evolve from Chinese; they’re completely unrelated. It’s also not the case that Chinese is “less developed” than Egyptian or English writing)
Rebus was a sort of gateway drug to into other forms of writing in the case of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. People started to use a stripped-down set of simplified hieroglyphic characters purely to represent the sounds in a word (originally just consonants).
This was originally just a chicken-scratch script; just intended for short personal notes, and because most people didn’t have the time to learn all the actual, fancy hieroglyphs. These glyphs would eventually develop into the Latin script you see on screen, as well as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Celtic scripts.
TLDR: It’s a long and interesting story, but I recommend the video “Thoths Pill” on YouTube. It’s by a channel called Nativlang. It basically takes you through the broad strokes on the evolution of writing through the eyes of a time traveler.
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