origin of languages
Something that originated in Africa and spread throughout the world. Something so complex that originated from something so simple. something that we use every day without even giving thought to it.
Good day teachers judges and students we have all heard of this before and we use it everyday. We spend 50-80% of our day doing this. Today you will learn more about languages and more specifically how we started to communicate, How languages evolved, and why language is so important.
How people started to communicate
At the dawn of time how did humans communicate? Did they have languages, did they use hand motions? How did they communicate and did they?
2.8 million years ago humans didn't communicate, they fought with each other and were extremely violent. Eventually they became humane and started to communicate with eachother in simple ways.
At first they communicated with hand motions like pointing and waving and eventually started making noises with their mouths. There is evidence that there was language in some of the earliest human species like Homo Heidelbergensis who lived 600 000 years ago and Homo Habilis who lived 2.3 million years ago. But these languages were extremely simple and this proof is not very strong.
Scientists think the first actual semi-complex languages came to be in Africa about 100 000 years ago.
It really is amazing to think how extremely old humans with very little intelligence came up with languages that branched out to even more languages that get more sophisticated along the way.
How languages evolved
When languages were first developed they were not sophisticated. They were very simple but over time through the migration of Africa languages grew larger and separated more and more.
70 000 years ago or 30 000 years after the first semi-complex language was created, our ancestors who lived in Africa moved from Africa all over the world. In this process the first language was tweaked over and over generation after generation and eventually this language was changed into different languages for each continent and eventually country.
Thousands of years after the migration of Africa is when we started to record languages like Egyptian and Sumerian which are 4000 years old and still used today! These languages were written down as symbols instead of letters like in ancient Egypt they would write down in symbols.
mainly in the 1100's is when languages started following sophisticated rules when many other things started to become sophisticated like mathematics. English the language we all use was created 1066 but got sophisticated and complex in the 1100's when it started following rules like apostrophes, commas and using a capital letter at the beginning of sentences.
Why language is important
Language is something that is impossible to live without. How would anybody know what to do if nobody could read talk or write, how would we survive as a society would there be laws and rules like there is now or would it just be all around chaos.
Using languages is a way of life through languages we can talk about thoughts, dreams, desires what we're doing what we want to be but could you imagine a life without languages? It would just be a dull world no fun no life no love no friends no family just yourself and your thoughts.
Through languages we communicate through communicating we can understand through understanding we can solve and through solving we can live. languages give us the power to have power over all the other animals on earth. We have rules and civilization unlike other animals and we can rise up and take over earth which is what we did but without languages this would've been impossible to do.
Studies show on average men speak 7000 words a day while women speak 20 000 words each day. This means men form about 800 sentences a day. Words form everything including our way of life. It would be nearly impossible for people to have a civilized under control world without speech and communication.
Sometimes we could not like what words and speech do to this like giving us work and stress like doing a presentation in front of your class like a speech per-say but words make all of our worlds a better place.