Basically the title. Languages often have complex rules and a lot of words. How everyone agreed on them? And together created the languages? What process did they go through?
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I can’t help but picture a lot of Stone Age people with too much time on their hands sitting around and deciding that declensions were just the thing to make this new language thing really gain in popularity.
In reality, it’s just evolution. Think of languages like organisms – started off very simple and got copied over and over, because that’s how we mostly learn words – copy what other people are saying. Like DNA mutations, random variations happen and some of those stick becoming new words or grammatical rules. As people spread out and became more isolated groups, languages changed enough over time that they became unique to that region.
Languages as seemingly unrelated as Persian, Sanskrit, Greek and German are all thought to have a common root language – Proto-Indo-European.
Hopefully an actual linguist will chime in here with a better explanation. It’s a fascinating topic.
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