I searched up previous questions like this out of curiosity (and as per rule 5), but the most I found were simple things like physical objects or contextual filler words. I’m still quite confused about how both the first spoken and written languages were deciphered. I understand pointing at a rock and saying “rocher” in French and “felsen” in German and then knowing what a rock is in their language, but there are so many filler words or just nonphysical words in general that I couldn’t imagine how people started understanding each other.
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Languages didn’t just pop out of thin air. They developed over time, branching out. Most European languages are part of a language family called Indo-European, and they’re believed to all stem from one language, called Proto Indo-European, spoken thousands of years ago. The fact is that for most languages, there was never really a time when people ONLY spoke that that language, there were always people speaking multiple, who could translate.
For isolated languages, like Native Americans, it was basically “kidnap them, take them to Europe, and force them to learn”.
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