How did people who speak different languages communicate in the past if language barrier is a thing even now?
In: 107
One of three ways usually.
Way 1: point at item. Person says what that is called in their language. You now know the word for that thing in that language.
That doesn’t always work out the way you want it to – for example the name Canada comes from a word for “village”. But it works for simple trading pretty well.
Way 2: Often different languages from close areas have enough similarity that people can roughly understand each other. If you find people from all the stops between your language and the language you want to speak in, you can probably get most of your message across without anybody learning a new language.
For example if you were from Sweden and wanted to speak to someone from Denmark, you could probably do it without either of you learning the other language.
Way 3: if you’re living with people who don’t speak your language at all and none of the other options are available, invent a new language that you can both understand. This is what a pidgin is. The grammar is very simple or even non-existent and the words are borrowed from both languages. After a generation or so a pidgin becomes a creole (which is the same thing but it has grammar), and eventually a creole just becomes its own language.
Latest Answers