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When did man start speaking...

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  • 18-05-2011 11:44pm
    #1
    sNarah
    Registered Users Posts: 4,570 ✭✭✭


    So, this week in Dutch class, my primary student read a story in the textbook that (shortly) goes as following...

    Once there was a wizard, living in the world when no human could speak. all humans just made animals noises. This wizard had a bag, filled with letters... for years and years, he put one and another and another together, but nothing suited. Until, one day, he spelled out S - U - N and thought, yes!, sun, that must that wonderful thing in the sky. And then he started naming all sorts of other things, and people came to visit him, asking him for words.

    Okay - It IS pretty random :o (it fits in the theme we're doing about books and reading and so on), but my little student was very fascinated by this story and starting asking all sorts of questions about the origin of languages... such as...

    - What was the first word ever invented
    - What language was it in
    - Who decided a table should be called "a table" (her question!)
    - When did we start speaking

    to which I had no answers at all!

    Now, I could google it or read up on origin essays, but I'm curious to see what fellow language aficionados have in mind on this topic... random idea's, truthful theories, made up stories, the lot!


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    #2
    Aard
    Registered Users Posts: 4,905 ✭✭✭Aard


    sNarah wrote: »
    - What was the first word ever invented
    - What language was it in
    - Who decided a table should be called "a table" (her question!)
    - When did we start speaking

    Kids' questions are the worst! Technical in the extreme, but they don't have the language skills to understand the answer!

    1. Nobody will ever know the "first word". Most likely something to do with hunting though. Or trees or rivers or something.

    2. Whichever language it was, it certainly doesn't exist any more. Well, maybe it does except it's undergone so many changes as to render it unrecognisable. It's generally accepted that it would have been in Africa. I remember reading something about the San in southern Africa being most close genetically/linguistically to the "first people".

    3. "Table" comes from the Latin word "tabula", so I guess you could say the Romans decided that one :P But languages, as evidenced above, change constantly, so it's likely that in a few hundred years' time that the word for table will have changed again.

    4. About 100,000 years ago. Before that, it was mostly grunts and pointing.


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