Since most animals have some sounds that they can make and most members of a single species make the same sounds, why do humans have so many very different languages and is there a single language that is the most natural for humans to speak?
In: Culture
Animals *don’t* actually make the same sounds, not innately. Some are genetically programmed in the sounds they make, in which case any variation from the normal pattern makes their communication ineffective, meaning they’re less likely to reproduce. Others, like birds, tend to mimic the noises their parents are making, which means that the “language” of a population can drift over time just like the languages of human populations do. Because human language is contextual, it changes based on what people hear, how people need to communicate, who people need to communicate with and the concepts they need to communicate. There is no “most natural” human language.
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Your question sort of answers itself. Humans use the same “library” of sounds to construct many different languages. In that way, we are the same as animals.
We know that birds and whales can learn different songs depending on the region where they live. That would be analogous to different human languages.
Is there a human language that preferentially uses the “best” sounds or the fewest sounds? That is difficult to answer definitively.
> Why do humans have so many very different languages.
Because of sexual competition. People use language as a signal for intelligence, and intelligence gets you laid. How can you use language to demonstrate intelligence? By inventing and remixing. Then natural linguistic evolution happens. Birds have high variance for colorful plumage, for the same reason.
> Is there a single language that is the most natural for humans to speak.
There is guaranteed to be a correct answer to this, but there is no way anyone can figure it out. I predict this thread will be full of people who claim it’s subjective and therefore there is no answer by definition but I think that’s just a lazy cop out. I don’t think we will know unless we build a super intelligent AI that is to us as we are to chimps and it tells us.
Maybe a language based solely on vowels. But that’s little more than a stab in the dark. Have you heard Portuguese? These fuckers have names like João.
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