Modern English has many word roots in Latin and Greek, but where did the Latins and Greeks get those word roots in the first place? Did somebody just make it up out of the blue? Or did they get it from an earlier language, and if that’s true, where did they get it from?
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> Modern English has many word roots in Latin and Greek, but where did the Latins and Greeks get those word roots in the first place?
As it has been mentioned in other comments, those languages are rooted on some even earlier languages.
> Did somebody just make it up out of the blue? Or did they get it from an earlier language, and if that’s true, where did they get it from?
I would like to focus on this part, since it hasn’t been mentioned.
Yes, someone, or, instead, some group of people, made them out of the blue. People aren’t born with language “pre-installed” or something like that, it has to come from somewhere. Here’s the deal, we still aren’t sure when it began. The more we dig, the more our understanding of language increases, leading us to look in some places we hadn’t thought before.
For example, we’re now noticing that apes closely related to humans, like chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and such, have some sort of proto-language. They have calls, grunts, shouts, hums, and more that, in a way, count as a form of language, but it doesn’t have all the rules and conventions that a “formal” language has. Our current understanding of languages isn’t enough to say “languages begin here”, so we can’t say for sure -at the moment- what’s the last common language ancestor, but that won’t stop of from digging more and learning more about them.
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