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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Thog points at a stone and says “rok”. Everyone else in the cave starts saying “rok” when they want to talk about it.
The development of language, whether written or spoken, it a long series of people agreeing on what sound refers to what object or what a symbol means, then teaching that to other people. The natural evolution of language takes a long time when starting from nothing.
The most important thing to understand is that they were not “suddenly” able to understand each other. It was a slow process over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
It starts with the fact that there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to communicate the presence of danger to others. Most animal species and even some plants have developed this ability.
Over time, many animals found it advantageous to be able to communicate other kinds of things, like the location of food, or the ability to refer to a specific individual (Dolphins have unique names for other members of their pod)
The slow march towards greater complexity in communication resulted in the evolution of complex spoken and written languages, based on the needs of the cultures where they evolved.
Language is just sounds that we associate with particular meanings. So let’s go back to a time just before language. Our group of prehistoric humans are thirsty, and need water. One of them finds a creek, and wants to communicate that to the rest of the group. They have the ability to make complex sounds, so our human imitates the sound of flowing water. Let’s say further that, over time, *every* person in our group starts making that sound whenever they find water, and only water. We now effectively have a word for water, as our group has associated that sound with the idea of water. Repeat this process over and over again, adding new words and modifying old ones, and you get a spoken language.
As for writing, it worked pretty much the same way. Pictographs that were associated with specific objects, and then over time became associated with sounds. Simultaneously, these pictographs were modified, simplified, or elaborated on to become one of the various writing systems we have today.
There was an excellent documentary about the development of written language from drawing pictures. I think it was PBS. I’ll see if I can find it and edit , but I remember being fascinated watching it.
If you consider that bees have a dance language to talk about pretty flowers, then language is just the externalization of internal thought. So maybe that’s how language develops, “I feel this way, here let me show you.” And then everyone agrees.
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
Language is an innate ability we have evolved. Many animals have vocalisations for communication, and language is just that, only it has developed to be especially complex. It was never ‘invented’ per se, it developed organically, probably from before we were human.
I think it is important to note the difference between spoken language and writing.
The concept of writing was invented, much the same way the concept of the wheel or the telephone was invented. And writing systems had to be actively devised and deliberately taught – whereas with spoken language babies just naturally acquire the language they’re surrounded by.
No human community lacks language, but throughout human history probably most have lacked writing.
I think there is a lot of misapprehension about this. You see people claim they ‘pronounce a word as it is written’ to argue that their way of speaking is somehow more valid. It betrays a flawed understanding of how human languages work – they are primarily spoken, and writing came along latterly to transcribe speech and record it.
The story I heard about the origin of written language in a history class was that in Babylon, there was a storehouse keeper.
His job was to keep track of stuff in the store room, and he eventually found it easier to use symbols to denote what stuff was in there and just keep a running talley of when stuff was added and when stuff was taken out, then just do an audit to make sure the numbers were right
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.
Ever see 2 babies meeting for the first time? First it’s frustration that they can’t get the other to do what they want. As it progresses they find ways to communicate their desires. Give that a few hundred or thousand years and boom.
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