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 dont have any insight as to the actual *creation* of language and how it truly started out, but in general just like other evolutionary stuff things dont start out complex. They start out very rudimentary, and only then they begin to evolve slowly over generations from that starting point. After a long time what started out simple may seem fairly complex.
Maybe someone else has some more specific insight tho, its very interesting
I take it you don’t have children. Watching them learn a language is remarkably organic. Meaning is defined by usage. I give my child a spoonful of rice and say “eat your rice”, and there are three sounds to decode, “eat”, “your”, and “rice”.
If, after that, I drop the rice and say “oops, I spilled the rice”, that same sound is accompanied by the same white stuff, the child makes a connection between that sound “rice” and that object.
If I am in a prehistoric society, language develops in the same organic way. Certain sounds become associated with certain things/actions/people etc., and regular usage begets communal agreement and meaning.
If I go to another country and everyone drinks a tasty drink they call “juice”, and I want some, I can ask for “juice”, mimicking their sound. If that produces the desired result, I can assume that the name of the drink is “juice”.
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.
This happened so far back in prehistory we have no idea about it.
In modern times the spontaneous development a few new languages has been observed, one example being Nicaraguan Sign Language that developed in Nicaraguan schools for the deaf in the 1980s. These languages have been studied to understand the formation of a language from several smaller more personal systems of communication.
It is extremely hard, probably impossible, for us to know how the very first languages came about. They dont leave any physical remains like tools until writing, which is long after the languages. We can compare existing languages to get some idea of their predeseccors, but you can only go so far back.
I think early languages would have been about gesture and tone of voice as much as words. An angry grunt would communicate well whatever the actual sound. Objects would have been given names by common usage, so you could point at a child and it means ‘child’ and then gesture would have indicated size. In due course more specific words would have been used eg baby, infant, toddler, etc
Probably language evolved more when it started to be written down.
Who am I, Noam Chomsky?
We do not even know if the very first language was used by Homo sapiens, language is so old that it has been with us on evolutionary scales.
After you just refer to something with a sound you can make, and the other person agrees then you can start stringing them together. Rules eventually form, even if nobody fully knows the rules some things will be right and wrong.
I gave my toddler water. She said “gua gua”. I said ” no, it’s water”. Now the whole family calls it “gua gua.”
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