Questions tagged [origin-of-language]
How and when human languages came into being.
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Why are similar words for father/mother across different languages considered false cognates?
It is very easy to find online claims of similar words for mama/papa in different languages being false cognates (e.g. this Wikipedia page), along with hypotheses why those similarities arose (e.g. ...
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How and when do polygenesis advocates think new primary language families arose?
I've been reading about linguistics and have read that most linguists are harshly critical of proposals of genetic relationships between primary language families, and that the predominant theory of ...
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Which animal is closest to having language and why?
Apart from humans, which animal do linguists currently think has a communication system that is closest to being considered real language?
"Language" meaning whatever linguists currently ...
user31190
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How can unrelated language families exist after the evolution of language?
What I mean is this: Archeologically and genetically speaking, most indigenous peoples of North and South America (namely, all but the ones descending from those who brought the Na-Dené and Eskimo-...
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Did Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Indo-European languages have the same origin?
Did Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Indo-European languages have the same origin? Did human develop a common language before migrated from Africa, and were most if not all the modern languages ...
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Are there many "lexical universals" like mama/papa - based on similar re-creation?
Reading the article "Where do mama/papa words come from?" by Larry Trask, linked in this answer (itself based on Roman Jakobson's 1959 article ‘Why “mama” and “papa”?’) we see that a ...
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Has the current opinion of linguists about the earliest language been influence by ethology?
I read that it is believed that humans have been using language for only about 100k to 200k years. But recent work with various animals such as parrots and domestic dogs and cats has shown at the very ...
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Is agnosticism the current orthodoxy regarding linguistic macrofamilies?
I'm asking this very much much as a interested layman. As I understand things, the academic linguistics community, by and large, views macrofamily hypotheses - Nostratic, Altaic, etc - rather poorly.
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Why does Latin, Turkish, and Albanian share common words?
Latin and Albanian are Indo-European languages so it makes sense that those two languages share many words with each-other.
But why is it that Turkish — a non-Indo-European language — shares words ...
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Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?
Hindus believe that "Sanskrit is the mother of all Languages".
It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu, as Latin enriched some ...
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Onomatopoeia origin of language?
Are there any "modern scholars" that support the onomatopoeia origin of language hypothesis?
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What is the origins of this language from the Circassian family? [closed]
I was watching this video of a woman speaking Circassian on Youtube :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiexAvps44Q
i'm not a linguist but to me, it sounded like Sumerian or a very old semitic ...
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Was language invented only once or several times?
We have over 5000 language on Earth as of now, some extant and others not. These all came from what we now call proto languages, but do scientists believe that all proto languages came from one "mono-...
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Could you point out some theories on how the names for numbers developed?
At this point I don't want to explain my personal crackpot theories on how names for numbers emerged and I assume that anything remotely connected with the origin of language is highly speculative and ...
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What exactly does the ding-dong theory of the origin of language state, according to Max Müller?
Max Müller is mentioned as one of the pioneers of the study of the origins of language, as he created a typology for the earlier origin of language theories based on the channel they draw the ...
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