Language history

[Gelsemium]

Anyone know the history behind languages? How did languages appear and how did the different languages started to multiply? I think the phenomenon must have happened with writing because everyone is speaking for centuries.

[Baburra]

I think language breaking off into other sub-languages is natural, as we always see smaller groups within bigger ones develop their own sub cultures and languages. It's probably just natural for people who spend a good amount of their time in said group to develop into an official subgroup.

As for tracing the language back, I was taught a bit of this when I was learning Chinese, and it is indeed very interesting because you get to see how the Chinese characters started out as once only being drawings, and now it's evolved into a whole language with pretty much a word/word combination for almost every thing and event imaginable.

[fredkawig]

I still stick with the tower of Babel story, the one written in the Bible, we used to have one language to communicate but because of the chaos it created and the people thought to their hearts to build a tower to supersede God and become higher than him, God intervened and separated all the people's and confused their languages so we may not understand each other. And true enough, we are once again going back to a single language which makes us understand each other.

[Rosa]

There is a story been told in the bible of the Tower of Babel and that is how I believe language came about. It is said that men spake one language and had decided to build a tower to reach the heaven. God was not pleased with their plan and so he confounded their language. They started speaking in new and different languages and so orders could not be followed and because of the confusion the tower was not completed.

[shamzblueworld]

I think when the migrations happen, people travel from one place to another and in time they add new stuff to their language and hence new language emerges.