LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF LANGUAGE

To that end, let’s visit—briefly, entertainingly and quite incompletely—the history of languages
on this planet.

Birth of Language (60,000 – 200,000 years ago)

That number is a total shot in the dark. We have no idea when language as we know it was
created, how it was created, why it was created or even really what language is. Do the grunts
of apes count as language? Was language developed in one place and spread with mankind
across the globe, or is it innate within us, and rose across the world at various points
simultaneously? Did other Homo sapiens relatives speak language as well, or is it unique to us?
We just don’t know. You’re welcome.

Age of the Proto-Language (4,000 – 10,000 years ago)

A “proto-language” is a hypothetical “root” language, from which, theoretically, several language
families bloomed and branched into sub-groups, languages and dialects. If a language family is
a tree, the proto-language is the base of the trunk. Again, we don’t know a whole lot about them,
as most are purely speculative. But scholars place their use, if they did exist, somewhere
around this time. The big, important proto-language you might want to know about is Proto-Indo-
European, the great-granddaddy of every European and Near Eastern language from Albanian
to Latvian to Urdu to Yiddish. Other language families like Sino-Tibetan may have had a proto-
language, but…we just don’t know, get it?!

The First Written Word (1,000 BCE – 2nd century BCE-ish)

When people got the bright idea to start putting quill to parchment, or chisel to stone, or blood to
tanned leather, languages stopped wandering about quite as aimlessly and began settling down
and starting families and sprouting more dedicated groups. Around here you’ll find the “birth” of
such noble old languages as Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Old Chinese, as well as “newer”
languages later on, like Hebrew, Latin, Old Persian and Aramaic. They weren’t, of course,
actually born by dint of them being written down, but otherwise – say it with me – we just don’t
knooooooow!

The Old Timers (First millennium CE)

The Middle Ages was good for a lot more than just mead and catapults. Thanks to the explosion
in writing, we’re able to get more precise with our dating (we know a little moooooore!) and
salute venerable languages such as Old English (Anglo-Saxon—think Beowulf rather than
Shakespeare), Old High German, Old French, Classical Arabic and so on. Rather than just
fumbling about in the dark as before, we can trace our contemporary languages to these fellows
with confidence. They’ll be followed by Middle and Middle High versions, each at varying stages
at various times, which may look the same to you as the Old ones but are not, so don’t even
think about it.

Standardization (1500 – 1900 CE)

World conquerors have always known that the best way to assimilate a people into your empire
is to squash their local religions, customs and languages and force them to speak what you
speak. Alexander the Great knew it, Julius Caesar knew it, and Genghis Khan knew it but
couldn’t be bothered, and so just killed everyone he met. However, it wasn’t until about this time
that world-conquering became a less successful pursuit and the standardizing of languages
actually stuck, mostly because bureaucracy is irritating enough without competing languages on
all the forms. Some, like the Italians and Spanish, created a standard based on literary classics,
while most others, such as the French, English, Tibetans, and Chinese just used the dialect
from their capital city, or whatever dialect they considered to be “polite.” This period includes the
standardization of Sign Language, which had existed in myriad forms throughout history, but
only now became normalized, by the French.

The Age of the Artificial (1900 – present)

As if in response to the rapid extinction of languages and dialects after standardization, people
have recently started making up their own languages. An intrepid young man named L. L.
Zamenhof developed Esperanto as an idealized lingua franca for the world; J. R. R. Tolkien
created Quenya, a fully-realized invented Elvish tongue around which he built his Middle-Earth
of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; and Marc Okrand’s Klingon language, created for the
fictional Star Trek alien race of the same name, is actually spoken fluently by many people. I
suppose I could include computer programming languages such as C++ or Java here, but I’m
not sure they count—they’re more mathematical than linguistic. In any case, the most recently
created language is Na’vi, created for James Cameron’s film Avatar in 2009 by linguistic
professor Paul Frommer.

Language, a system of conventional spoken, manual, or written symbols by means of

which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express
themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play,
imaginative expression, and emotional release