A long long time ago, humans went from grunts to some kind of primitive language then to an advance language.
How did a region possibly learn and agree that the sound “tree” for example meant that big thing over there?
Maybe my family would agree and say, but then our neighbours or tribe some 20km away?
Then for every word, tenses, grammar?!
I imagine it took a long time but I can’t even comprehend how you would transition from grunts to even a basic common language for a larger region like ancient China, Egypt, or aztecs.
They obviously did accomplish it, but how?
In: 44
Evolution:
*the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form.
“the forms of written languages undergo constant evolution”*
It starts small and via emmergence and evolution over time it become more complex an specialized.
Imagine a game like basketball, it first started with a bunch of people throwing a soccer style ball into a peach basket. Over time new rules developed as more people participated, and it grew into the ever changing game played world round with different versions we see today, just like language.
Short answer, they *didn’t* agree on the same words for the same thing, and especially not on the same pronunciation.
This is how you get a dialect. Regional dialects were incredibly common up until the mid 1900s. The only reason they aren’t more common now is the advent of mass media. If everyone on the continent can watch the same TV show and see the same word pronounced the same way, well that becomes the standard pronunciation.
That’s a super complicated question. But bear with me as I reaaaally simplify it:
You start with small tribal groups of hunter gatherers — at that point, you’re making noises that are proto-languages. Think “Ooga booga.” Within your small tribe of 30 people or whatever, you all learn sounds together that mean the same things. Over time, you start to get to where your tribe isn’t moving around as much, and you start farming. Since your tribe has crops now, you all kinda stay in one place.
Well, it turns out you know of another group’s existence. They’re another small tribe on the other side of the river. You’ve run into them a couple times and thankfully no serious war or anything broke out, so you didn’t have to club them with your mighty club. Well, you’ve heard them yell “urga burga.” You have no idea what that means.
Time passes and the tribes keep running into each other just passing by and stuff, cuz you’re like within a few miles of each other. Your tribe decides to trade some crops with them. We got mighty good carrots and we’ve seen that they have some awesome potatoes. We eventually find a way to meet with them. The first meeting is tense, because we can’t understand each other. Over repeated years and meetings, we start to pick up on what their “urga” means, and they kinda pick up on what our “ooga” means. Over generations, you get more and more communication, and eventually intermarriage between tribes. The two tribes eventually become one, because ya’ll are peaceful and your teens keep sneaking off to bang each other and now it’s grown and there are 300 people all living together, speaking a language that is mostly the same. The language naturally melded — one tribe found that “urga” is easier to say. The other tribe borrowed some words from the one tribe as well. Words get adopted or dropped depending on many variables — difficulty to pronounce, the words sound like their meaning, etc. Languages evolve for lots of reasons.
Repeat this process over and over until you have fully agrarian societies settling in larger and larger cities. Sometimes one city will have its own language, sometimes four cities will all end up speaking the same language.
Eventually one city creates a big army and takes over like 20 other cities. The leader of the city is like “I’m a king, yo, this is my kingdom.” At first, maybe there are like 3-4 different languages within his 20 cities. Over time, a lot of trade and mingling and marriage and criss-crossing happens between the 20 cities in the kingdom. After a long time, everyone in the kingdom basically speaks the same language.
Now kingdoms start warring and trading and eventually you have kings and emperors controlling larger and larger areas with more and more people. Whatever language the emperor’s city speaks often becomes the “main” language of the kingdom or empire. Every little city in the empire wants to trade with the main city and get close to the emperor and stuff, so they learn the new language if they have to. Or maybe over time, people are educated in the main city and end up in the smaller cities. The language keeps spreading throughout the empire.
That’s basically how it works. Languages evolve and adapt as people mingle with each other and learn to communicate with each other.
That’s not the way language works. There weren’t meetings where they decided what to call things. Let’s go back to a very prehistoric group of humans that can make sounds, but don’t have what we would recognize as a language. One of them spots an animal that is a potential threat, and they need to communicate this to the rest of the group. Maybe they try to imitate the sound the animal makes. The rest of the group picks this up, so now whenever they need to communicate about this particular animal, they make that sound. Over time, that particular sound comes to represent that animal, it has become a word with meaning.
Obviously, one word isn’t enough to form a language, and there are lots of things that don’t make sounds to imitate. But we don’t need that. Let’s go back to our animal, whose sound has become a word. Say somebody in our group has sharpened a stick, sharp like one of the teeth of our animal. Due to this similarity, they use the same sound as the animal sound to refer to their sharpened stick. This is okay, because context lets the people in our group understand which is which. But also, again due to context, the actual vocalizations are slightly different. Over time, these vocalizations become more and more different, so now we have two words instead of one.
This process of sound becoming associated with an idea, and of old sounds being applied to new ideas, gets repeated over thousands of years (humans like us have been around for 300,000 years) and language develops. Also, as groups separate and lose contact with one another, their sounds change in different ways, which is how new languages are created out of old ones.
We actually have an example of a language developing from (almost) nothing: when the deaf children of Nicaragua started attending a central school, they created a new language among themselves over the course of the next decade, with distinct grammatical features appearing in specific years etc, now called Nicaraguan Sign Language
You can watch this happen in real time as events happen and people create new memes (or invent new words and phrases) to describe it.
Some people will get the new words, and some people won’t. The more popular ones, especially the ones expressing a new idea, will spread the best.
All language is essentially viral.
The same way words like “gnarly” or “on fleek” are agreed to. A small group starts using the word, then all the “cool” kids are using the word to show membership in a group, then maybe it becomes more accepted and standard as more people use it.
Languages are not purposefully developed in meetings, they elvolve on their own when people try to communicate. Someone makes up a sound or a series of sounds to get a message across. If it’s a useful word, other people start to use it too and it spreads. It may experience a few changes along the way when traveling from mouth to mouth, which is only natural, and not every word sticks.
I reckon it’s the same with grammar – someone needed a way to express that this thing happened yesterday or it’s gonna happen tomorrow rather than right now, or this is a possibility to happen so be careful. Communication is important for survival and people are very creative with it. Useful ways to set up sentences will spread, more are invented, some are ditched, some gets modified. Language still constantly evolves the same way according to our needs for communication.
Trade, violence, taking the kids away and punishing them if they spoke their native tongue.
BUT on the fun side, do a search for “20 British Accents in 1 Video”.
They formed a committee and a couple of subcommittees (nouns, verbs etc.). Did some fundraising. Advertised it at the local watering hole. A couple of meetings and they had a new language!
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