Language a universal phenomenon

“The reason for my interest in it is because that's the crucial property that distinguishes humans from animals. That's why humans are creative - why humans 50,000 years ago were creating new tools. It's a unique biological phenomenon. One can't help being interested in it."

― Noam Chomsky

Language

Language

“You and I belong to a species that has a remarkable ability: everyone can shape events in the brain of the other, with great accuracy. [...]This ability is language. While simply producing sounds with his mouth , everyone can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas in the mind of the other. It's such a natural skill that we tend to forget how amazing it is.”

Steven Pinker

Lucas van Valckenborch, 1594, Louvre Museum

6. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Genesis 11:6-7

The Tower of Babel

The narrative explains the origins of the multiplicity of human languages

God was concerned that humans had too much freedom to do as they wished, so God brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another

The Tower of Babel

Historical linguistics has long wrestled with the idea of a single original language

In the Middle Ages, and down to the 17th century, attempts were made to identify a living descendant of the Adamic language.

What about modern linguistics?

The Theory of Language Families

Language family is a group of languages related through

descent from a common ancestor, the proto-language

The term makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree

Language families can be divided into smaller units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family

Language family Languages belonging to the same family share

characteristics that are not attributed to contact or borrowing but to genealogical relations

The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly, in the case of languages with long recorded history, eg Latin

Usually many features of a proto-language are being recovered by applying the comparative method

Language isolates languages that cannot be reliably

classified into any family they have relatives, but at a time depth

too great for linguistic comparison to recover them

the Basque language is an absolute isolate A language isolated in its own branch

within a family is often also called an isolate. This is the case of Armenian within Indo-European

Language Family The genetic classifications given in the

language entries name 136 different language families

Six of these stand out as the major language families of the world: Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo-european, Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Trans-New Guinea

Together they account for nearly two-thirds of all languages and five-sixths of the world’s population

Language Families

European Languages Modern Greek Ancient Greek Hellenic ⟻ ⟻

branch of the IE tree Italian and Spanish Latin Italic branch of ⟻ ⟻

the IE tree Bulgarian South Slavic branch of the ⟻ IE tree Polish West Slavic branch of the ⟻ IE tree Estonian Finnic branch ⟻ ⟻Uralic language

family

The Indo-Europeans The people speaking the Proto-Indo-

European language (PIE), a prehistoric language of Eurasia

They lived during the late Neolithic, 4th millennium BC, in the forest-steppe zone to the north of the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe

were a nomadic tribe and expanded in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC

The Indo-Europeans

Scheme of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the Kurgan

hypothesis