Whenever I look at anatomy charts and alike, humans are basically the same when it comes to the basic components. Brain, teeth, tongue, mouth, and throat has the same body parts and proportionate sizes with other people, albeit a tiny bit off. So how come we have created very distinct languages and words which has almost no commonality with each other, instead of close and related forms of languages when our body parts are practically the same?
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Because it has more to do with external factors like culture. The human is capable of learning and producing all the sounds of every human language, especially when you are a baby. The reasons adults have a hard time producing sounds accurately from a different language is not biological but more physiological. How the brain is wired – muscle memory or lack thereof.
With rare exceptions (e.g. someone with motor dysfunction trying to speak a sign language), all humans are physically capable of speaking all languages. It’s not like people who speak Chinese designed the language around some unique aspect of their bodies.
Instead, the problem is that there was no coordination when the languages first developed. Human tribes, separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges had minimal contact with each other, and each tribe came up with its own way of speaking. That is, i’s not about the equipment but how people chose to use it.
Consider this example. You are put alone in a room to “make up a cool dance.” At the same time, a stranger is placed in a separate room and also told to make up a cool dance. You both have the same fundamental equipment for dancing – feet, arms, etc. – but the chances that you both come up with the same dance are quite low.
Languages evolve all the time. Words change definitions, pronounciiation shifts, old words are forgotten and new ones invented. That’s how you end up with slang, for instance.
Now imagine if you have two groups of people that speak the same language and you suddenly isolate them from each other for 500 years. The odds that they all evolve the same way is basically 0. And after 500 years, it’s likely that they’ve all changed so much that they can’t even understand each other anymore even though they all started from the same language. Boom, different languages.
A big part of how language works is that it is largely arbitrary. You can come up with pretty much any sound you want and assign any meaning to it you want. All you have to do to make it language is get someone else to get the same meaning out of it.
A lot of times problems will have a large number of arbitrary solutions that all work just fine, and in this case you get a bunch of local diversity as different people invent different words for the same thing and different rules for how to string them together.
because the people who created the languages never got to talk to each other. think of it as though you were put in one room and your best friend was put in another. you were both then given a new species of fruit or mammal or something, and asked to come up with a name for it. you would be capable of saying what your best friend came up with, but chances are that you did not name the new species the exact same thing.
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Take German and English, two members of the Germanic language family. The two languages used to be the same thing, but the old English settlers developed their own form of old German. This usually happens because words have different pronunciations or variations between two different people (e.g. a man from the southern United States might pronounce rights as something like rats, meanwhile a northern person would pronounce it as rights). These regional accents become dialects, which become languages. To take the example further, in an alternate southern United States, raihts is the thing all humans are entitled to, meanwhile in the north, rihts are what all men are entitled to.
Human language development was basically that, and that’s why we have different languages.
Whenever I look at anatomy charts and alike, humans are basically the same when it comes to the basic components. Brain, teeth, tongue, mouth, and throat has the same body parts and proportionate sizes with other people, albeit a tiny bit off. So how come we have created very distinct languages and words which has almost no commonality with each other, instead of close and related forms of languages when our body parts are practically the same?
In: 0
Because it has more to do with external factors like culture. The human is capable of learning and producing all the sounds of every human language, especially when you are a baby. The reasons adults have a hard time producing sounds accurately from a different language is not biological but more physiological. How the brain is wired – muscle memory or lack thereof.
With rare exceptions (e.g. someone with motor dysfunction trying to speak a sign language), all humans are physically capable of speaking all languages. It’s not like people who speak Chinese designed the language around some unique aspect of their bodies.
Instead, the problem is that there was no coordination when the languages first developed. Human tribes, separated by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges had minimal contact with each other, and each tribe came up with its own way of speaking. That is, i’s not about the equipment but how people chose to use it.
Consider this example. You are put alone in a room to “make up a cool dance.” At the same time, a stranger is placed in a separate room and also told to make up a cool dance. You both have the same fundamental equipment for dancing – feet, arms, etc. – but the chances that you both come up with the same dance are quite low.
Languages evolve all the time. Words change definitions, pronounciiation shifts, old words are forgotten and new ones invented. That’s how you end up with slang, for instance.
Now imagine if you have two groups of people that speak the same language and you suddenly isolate them from each other for 500 years. The odds that they all evolve the same way is basically 0. And after 500 years, it’s likely that they’ve all changed so much that they can’t even understand each other anymore even though they all started from the same language. Boom, different languages.
A big part of how language works is that it is largely arbitrary. You can come up with pretty much any sound you want and assign any meaning to it you want. All you have to do to make it language is get someone else to get the same meaning out of it.
A lot of times problems will have a large number of arbitrary solutions that all work just fine, and in this case you get a bunch of local diversity as different people invent different words for the same thing and different rules for how to string them together.
because the people who created the languages never got to talk to each other. think of it as though you were put in one room and your best friend was put in another. you were both then given a new species of fruit or mammal or something, and asked to come up with a name for it. you would be capable of saying what your best friend came up with, but chances are that you did not name the new species the exact same thing.
[removed]
Take German and English, two members of the Germanic language family. The two languages used to be the same thing, but the old English settlers developed their own form of old German. This usually happens because words have different pronunciations or variations between two different people (e.g. a man from the southern United States might pronounce rights as something like rats, meanwhile a northern person would pronounce it as rights). These regional accents become dialects, which become languages. To take the example further, in an alternate southern United States, raihts is the thing all humans are entitled to, meanwhile in the north, rihts are what all men are entitled to.
Human language development was basically that, and that’s why we have different languages.
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