Does anyone else ever wonder why we speak different languages?

Question

Or who it is that names things? Like who decides a dog is called a dog and a tree is called a tree? Or how we have came from just being able to mumble and grunt to having such a vocabulary? Pickles ma brain!

When you think about it though someone, sometime or another named something and now that has spread all over the world. How would it spread in the olden days? Pre-media? Better stop now my brain hurts!

Sorry, one more thing. If someone called a tree a tree all them days ago. Surely other people called it something else/somewhere else? So how everyone went with tree? Really I need to stop now!!

Answer 1

I used to wonder all the same things, and now I'm studying them in college. Whaddya know.

The large capacity of our brain coupled with the anatomical formations in our mouth allow for speech and symbolic assignment of sound to concept ideas. There are plenty of instances in which twins, triplets, quadruplets, and so on have developed their own language in socialization with one another. Through socialization with their parents and outside sources, they lose that language. The most common sounds worldwide are those that infants make (m, n, l, y, w, b, d, h), so you'll find that in the earliest languages, ideas and objects that are important to infants incorporate those sounds (mama, dada, doggy, moomoo (milk or cow), beddy-bye, ow-ee!, booboo, peepee, poopoo). As we mature, we're able to make more sounds and use them in labeling the world around us. That's just a little bit about the development of language first.

From generation to generation, sounds, words, and even grammar change naturally. They just do. I don't talk like my parents. One modern example is the American phenomenon of quote-introducing 'like' (she was like "totally"). Before modern media, this process of diversification would have happened even faster as groups lost contact with one another. People in the Southern United States talk very differently from those in the Inland Northern United States (y'all, ain't) and this split may continue and sounds will become more and more different. So whoever spoke the first complete human language would have dispersed all over the planet, lost contact, and sound change would've taken its course.
Also, foreign populations influence speech. Ebonics is based on general Bantu grammar with an English lexicon. The Romans conquered Europe and Latin became the lingua franca, but it was 'bastardized' by the local populations who applied Latin to the languages they already spoke, so that modern French has remnants of the Gallic language.

I hope your brain is less pickled now.

Answer 2

In the early days of our existence as H. sapiens, we lived as nomads, by hunting and foraging; such a lifestyle could not sustain large groups and so, as soon as the group size reached a certain level (anthropologists differ in their estimates of the actual number), a sub-group would split off and go its own way. Within a few generations and without the benefit of any standardising grammar, the two languages would be come mutually unintelligible. Until the advent of agriculture and settled communities, this process was repeated many thousands of times, over a period of perhaps three million years. The vast majority of the languages that developed in this way eventually died out but the small proportion that survived are probably the ancestors of today's languages.

As for the second part of the question, I have seen an example of words appearing spontaneously. When my wife and I went to northern Nigeria in the 1970s, we employed a steward, called Buba, who was a Cameroonian. Although he had never been to school, he spoke a little French - but not a word of English. I spoke quite good French, but my wife spoke none at all, so they developed their own language. Initially, this consisted of mostly signs and gestures, but gradually words developed. Some were onomatopoeic, like bedeh-bedeh, meaning 'talk, speak or say' and some just appeared from nowhere, like ke meaning 'if'. Within a couple of months, my wife and Buba were able to have long conversations in their own language. (Luckily, I wasn't the jealous type!) However, within six months or so, they had both started to pick up the local lingua franca, Hausa, and their own language died a natural death.

Answer 3

It's likely that language originally developed with one group - but that group split up, and spread out over the entire planet. Back then, there was no mass or long-distance communication. First, there were just little changes - think of the very slight difference in dialect between two rural villages close to each other.

Over many generations, those differences added up, and the languages became more and more different - there was practically no communication between the group, after all, except the very occasional traveler, or meetings of two nomadic groups. Back then, there were no dictionaries or grammar books - nothing was fixed, so languages permanently developed. They ended up being so different as to be mutually unintelligible - and then they still kept developing further.

(They still do, but since the invention of dictionaries, grammar books, and recordings, certain things are much more fixed than they used to be, since there's now an agreed-upon standard.)

Answer 4

Someone, somewhere did name something and it did spread all over the world.

George Shillibeer invented the omnibus in London in 1829. The name is Latin for 'for all'.

Since then, the name for a public, passenger-carrying road vehicle, whether omnibus, shortened to 'bus or modified to 'autobus', has spread throughout the world. The word is virtually the same in every language (except perhaps a few that for reasons of historical accident don't have one because their speakers haven't yet come across one).

Answer 5

What are the chances of someone in South America and someone in China looking at a tree and deciding that they would give it exactly the same name?? Very remote.
Here in Wales we have different names for different objects depending on whether you live in the North or the South. e.g.:-
funnel....twmfat (N)....twndish (S)
wheelbarrow...berfa(N)...wilber(S)
milk...llefrith(N)...llaeth(S)
If such differences occur in such a small country is it any wonder that distant countries have different languages?

By the way only the English speakers call it a tree..
Welsh..coeden. French.. arbre. Portuguese...arvore.

Answer 6

How about the definition of Ireland and England as two nations divided by a common language.

Answer 7

one theory is that we all spoke one language origionaly. It was called the Adamic language. Then God caused people to speak diferent to stop the construction of the tower of Bable. That is one of the teories out there. Some words such as milk are very closely pronounced in many different languages.

Answer 8

Yeah all the time. Who invented words and why did they invent all different languages. How does a toddler learn to say curb when no one told them that was its name. The questions could go on and on. Wait a minute who said that these words made any sense ????

Answer 9

i understand that I genuinely have the means to talk a minimum of three diverse languages to everybody else ! those are Claptrap, Double Dutch & Gobbledegook ! i might particularly decide to objective to earnings Esperanto as a 4th language !

Answer 10

Christians believe in the tower of Babel story.

Muslims believe that people simply went their different ways/paths on the planet and developed new forms of idioms.