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?
In: 23
There are a few things that your question incorrectly assumes, you need to correct these assumptions in order to understand the answers
>how were people suddenly able to understand each other
it wasn’t *sudden*, it was not that on a Monday everyone was grunting, but by the Tuesday they were saying “rock” and “water” and “food” – it was a process that took centuries if not millennia to move from grunts to particular growls/noises to something resembling words
from watching animals learn techniques for hunting/eating/tool making especially over generations, we can see they learn and pass on information, and build on it over generations we can apply this same idea to human language (although there are different schools of thought, this is one I believe to be correct)
so over time, the need for humans in parts of the world to distinguish between a ‘safe’ cave/lake and one that lions/predators stayed needed unique grunting noises or some such distinction, later (centuries or millennia) these grunting noises became more elaborate as different tribes of humans moved to areas with lots of animals/caves/lakes/dangers, so for example in Namibia there maybe only needed to be 2 types of grunt for ‘safe lake’ and ‘dangerous lake’, in France maybe they needed 12 types of grunt for ‘safe lake with fruit tree’ ‘safe lake with deer’ etc. (note: I’m using Namibia and France as random examples to illustrate a point, not to make any comment about their languages IRL)
eventually the grunts became a tribal language, and then war meant that certain tribes dominated others, and the tribal language of the dominant tribe was used by more and more people as the tribe expanded through war/births/etc. and as the tribe got bigger, new grunts were needed to distinguish between different things that were not needed when the tribe was small
but because spoken language preceded writing by millions of years (at least), we have no idea exactly how language formed in early humans, we can only speculate
>Also how did they then take those words and create letters and writing in a way that other people could understand?
This is a big one – it is NOT the case that humans began speaking and then next week a writing system was invented – the earliest structured writing we have found is around 3500BC and the earliest writing at all is from 5000BC, now humans in the stone age were roaming the world from 3 million years ago (3million compared to 5000 is a difference of at LEAST 2.9 million years, we can say it was definitely a very long time between spoken language being used and the first writing, even if it wasn’t a gap that big, it was almost certainly in the range of hundreds of millennia between speaking and writing at minimum)
To ‘need’ writing, you need a large group of people in 1 place where you can’t just talk to people – you need writing in order to convey messages over long distances, or to hold long messages, but you only need long messages if you have lots of people in 1 place – there is a reason cavemen didn’t write, they didn’t need to, they (as far as we know) lived in smaller groups that talking was fine, but once you have 1000+ people in 1 place, you need writing
the earliest writing system we know of (cuneiform) is fascinating – it started off as a way for bankers/priests/taxmen to record incomes and quantities of foods etc. then it evolved into basic pictures to communicate more ideas beyond numbers, then the pictures became simplified wedges/lines, and the simplifications eventually turned into complex symbols that only vaguely resembled the original picture (ofc this isn’t true for every symbol, but it gives you an idea of the evolution of writing) – all writing originated because human civilizations needed efficient taxation
cuneiform was taught to select scribes, but most people were illiterate so it was ‘easy’ to teach these few people the meaning of words and symbols – but different cultures (Egypt Greece, Rome, etc.) invented their own writing systems and there needed to be translators and scribes that went between the different civilizations to make sure things were correct, it wasn’t the case that everyone used the same alphabet/writing system, misunderstandings were very very common
letters came MUCH later (the west uses latin-derived letters, but this is not universal, for example china and japan don’t use letters at all, and russia/greece don’t use the same letters the ‘west’ does, etc.) and came about through various different cultures inventing their own systems of writing, and again through war/famine/etc. 1 type of writing dominated (latin) and we still use it today in English (a in latin is the same as a in English for example)
very very long comment, but it’s a very complex subject, hopefully its all ELI5 level
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