Language

The word language comes from the Latin lingua, meaning tongue. There are over 6 000 languages and major dialects  spoken today, and though they have their differences, they also have their similarities. Read on to discover more about language.

 
Ape 14k 
Building the Tower 33k 

  
Communication 
Writing 
Timeline 
Ancient Egyptian Language 
 

 
Welcome to Loglan 
Information about the "logical" artificial language. 
Foreign Languages for Travelers 
This excellent site provides the basics if you want to learn how to speak a new language. 
Say Hello to the World 
Learn to say "hello" in over 30 different languages, plus find links to resources about languages, cultures, and language learning on the Web. 
 

Below are some general things we know about languages: 

1. People develop the ability to use systems of vocal communication.
2. Different systems make different languages.
3. We generally learn one language — our "mother tongue" — and then we learn other languages to varying degrees, but most of the world is monolingual.
4. Language was thought to be only used by humankind. Other members of the animal kingdom communicate, but it has been found that perhaps some animals such as dolphins have actual languages. 

The production of language probably started first with the Neanderthals  100 000- 30 000 years ago. Modern human language, however, might only be 30 000- 40 000 years old. 

Throughout History, language has been an essential part of life. Even as far back as the "dawn of man," the ability to name something has separated humans from animals — it means the ability to control or possess. There are examples of this in various religions. For instance, in the bible: 
 

In India, the god Indra supposedly invented speech, and in Norse mythology it was also a product of the gods. They've also been said to have created writing. 
 

The Tower of Babble 

The story of "The Tower of Babble" is another example from the Bible. It is an interesting interpretation of the creation of language. The story is taken from Genesis 11:1-9, but paraphrased. 

Long, long ago, everyone in the world spoke the same language. People lived in tents, and moved about from place to place. On day, a group of people stopped somewhere they really liked. Someone said "Let's stay here forever!" and everyone thought it was a good idea. They built a city, and they named it Babylon. They made bricks from clay and constructed permanent buildings to live in, instead of tents. 

Everything was progressing nicely, but the Babylonians (that is what they called themselves) wanted something more. They wanted something that would show the world how much better than everyone else they we re. Someone suggested they build a tower to the heavens. An old man scratched his chin thoughtfully and said "I don't know if we'd reach Heaven, but I remember my grandfather telling me about a great flood. If we built a tower, we could survive a flood like that." 

So that's what they did. They made a base 100 metres square, and they built level upon level on top. They were all so proud of themselves that they made up a song to sing while they worked. 
 

God looked down on the people, and he thought to himself, "Humans have made great progress!" But then he heard the workers' song. He liked the fact that people were growing in knowledge, but not that they were growing in pride. He had to do something before things got worse, so — bang! he mixed up all the languages of the Babylonians. No one could understand anyone else. They began to argue, and then to fight. They gave up building the tower and wandered away from the city in small groups. Eventually, the tower collapsed, and that is how it got the name "The Tower of Babble" and also how the peoples of the world came to speak different languages. 

No one really knows for sure how language originated, however. People have tried to single out the oldest language, but since languages are constantly evolving and changing, it's been impossible to tell. Even so, until the 1800's, many people thought that Hebrew, the language of the Bible, was the original human language. 

It's possible that many different languages arose simultaneously in different locations, with no common ancestor. This theory is called polygenesis. It's also thought that perhaps there really was one original language. This theory is called monogenesis. 
 

Language and Thought 

Language is directly related to thought. Think about it — when you think, you think in words. You even dream in words. Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, wrote "Speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind." The problem with this definition is that it is either too broad, erasing any specific meaning, or that it's too narrow, excluding many common uses. Therefore, more recent definitions of language have been along the lines of this: "A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group communicates."That definition was written by Bernard Bloch and  George L. Trager, two U.S. linguists, in 1942. 

Medieval  and rationalist  thoughts were that humans, as rational and thinking creatures, invented language to express their thoughts and ideas." But after looking at the relations between thought and speech, it makes more sense to say that language is the means of thought itself, and that our rationality grew with the growth of speech. 

We haven't yet determined the extent of "linguistic relativity" (the interdependence between language and thought) but we know for sure that it exists. 

Structure 

There are three levels to language: 
 

1. Phonetic (sounds)
2. Morphemic (sound combinations [words])
3. Syntactic (word combinations [sentences])

Written Languages 

There are many different kinds of writing systems. 

a) systems with symbols for every morpheme  
b) syllabaries — systems with symbols which represent every syllable 
c) alphabets — systems where each symbol theoretically stands for a sound in the spoken language. 

No language has uses one pure system however. For example, Ancient Egyptian uses a partial alphabet, but also a system with symbols for many of its words. And in English, which uses the Latin alphabet, there are some sounds not represented by symbols (such as th). 

Speech evolves and changes much more than written language. Written language sometimes ignores pitch or stress, leaves out vowels, and/or uses punctuation and capitalization. This makes it much more complicated than speech, and harder to change. 

Dialects and artificial languages 

A dialect is a variation on a language, which is used in other places or by different social groups. There are a many, many dialects in the world. 

There have been many proposed "international languages" which would be, in theory, used to overcome linguistic differences and communication blocks. These have been called Languages of Wider Communication or LWCs. Sometimes, existing languages, such as English or French (which are already spoken as a second language by many) are used as LWCs. Some people feel that everyone should learn one LWC in addition to their mother tongue. Other LWCs have been artificially made, such as Esperanto. It has regular grammar, easy pronunciation, and its vocabulary is based on Latin, ancient Greek, and the Romance and Germanic languages. But for people who speak other language families. Esperanto is difficult to learn. It never really caught on much. 

A newer artificial language, LOGLAN (logical language), is supposedly free of culture and lets people speak their thoughts clearly. There are few sounds and grammatical rules, and the vocabulary of LOGLAN was taken from the eight most widely spoken languages worldwide. 

Artificial languages may sound like the perfect solution, but there are problems. Even if everyone learned one of these languages for international dealings, the language would probably change in no time. New words would come along, and people in different places would name new things differently. Soon, we'd have dialects of Esperanto that no one else could understand, and the whole process would start over.... 

Apes and monkeys 
Some kinds of apes have been successfully 
taught human Sign Language. They are 
surprisingly intelligent. However, they cannot 
learn speech because their vocal anatomy is 
quite different from ours. 
 
 

Tower of Babel 
This picture of the building of the tower of Babel 
is from a French Bible made in 1250 C.E.