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W h e n d i d L a n g u a g e S t a r t ?

15,000 B.C. Lesaux, France Cavedrawings.

Historians date them to be from around 15,000 B.C.

6,000 B.C. Proto-Indo-European language

develops. Sixty Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Germanic and Hellenic languages are allthought to have evolved from this one language.They are the first languages for about a third of allpeople.

5,000 B.C. The

first writingappears inSumer. It evolvesinto the wedge-shaped writingstylecalledcuneiform.Cuneiform wasoriginally used torecord things liketrade.

3,400 B.C. The

Egyptians are using hieroglyphics and hieraticwriting. Hieratic writing is a quick, cursive style ofhieroglyphics.

3,000 B.C. The Proto-Indo-European language is

spreading out to Europe and Asia where othergroups of languages will eventually evolve.

2,000 B.C. The Greek language appears around

this time. In Egypt, an early alphabetic writing wasinvented by Semitic laborers.

1,600 B.C. The Phoenicians develop a phoneticalphabet.

1,200 B.C. Chinese writing develops and is very

complex. Writing is found on oracle bones. Theseare found in 1899 and explain much about Chineseculture.

800 B.C. Egyptians use demotic writing. Its a

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developed version of hieratic writing, much morelike handwriting. Looking at it, you can hardly tellthat it had evolved all the way from hieroglyphics.

500 B.C. Classical Chinese is written on bamboo

strips, cloth, and wooden tables.

400 B.C. The first real grammar is used in India

in a document on the structure of the Sanskritlanguage.

400 B.C. The Qin script is made the main writing

of China by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty.Previously, many different dialects of Chinese wereused.

200 B.C. The Tolkappiyam is written to explain

the grammar of the Tamil language. It introduces

ideas of separating words into verbs and nouns andtalks about the alphabet having vowels andconsonants.

200 B.C. The Roman Empire conquers all of Italy,

almost all of Europe, and some of Africa and Asia.This directly results in the development of theRomance languages Spanish, French, Italian,Portuguese, and Romanian.

179 B.C. The

Rosetta stone iswritten and has

three languageswritten on it Greek, Demotic,

andHieroglyphics. It has the same paragraphwritten in all three languages and was later used todecode Egyptian hieroglyphics.

1370 A.D. The Bible is translated into English.

This made it possible for the common people to beable to read it.

1456 A.D. The first printing press is invented in

Germany by Johann Gutenberg. This makes booksmuch more available increasing literacy.

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1755 A.D. The Dictionary of the English

Languageis written by Samuel Johnson. It givesstandardized spelling to the English Language.

1799 A.D. The Rosetta stone is found in Egypt by

the French. By using the Greek on it, they are able

to translate the hieroglyphics and demotic writingon it.

1880 A.D. Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof

develops Esperanto, a universal language that hehopes will create harmony between people fromdifferent countries.

1916 A. D. Ferdinand de Saussure, a French

linguist, writes A Course in General Linguistics. Hetheorizes that language is a socially organizedstructure of meanings and rules.

1936 A.D. The British philosopher A. J. Ayer

writes Language, Truth, and Logic. He states thatlanguage is shared knowledge and confirmedthrough experience.

2000 A.D. Languages from around the world start

disappearing at an alarming rate. Some expertsestimate as rapidly as one every 2 weeks.