The Theory of Nothing

Why are there so many different languages?

Why are there so many different languages?

A/N : This is written on Feb 28, 2015  -  I am saddened by the passing of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock on Star Trek. He was not only an accomplished actor, he made the half Vulcan-half Human character Spock an enduring icon of the Star Trek world. The Spock character is my hero because he emphasized the epitome of the scientific method of using logic and reason to understand the mysteries of the universe, yet at the same time he demonstrated his love for not only Captain Kirk but all of the crew of the Enterprise. May he live long and prosper in the minds of all those who enjoyed Star Trek.

Language is the principle method humans use to communicate. It certainly goes back to the inception of the Homo sapiens species, but it’s difficult to tell how it got started and why there are so many languages--between five and seven thousand.

Some believe that speech originated in a pre-human ancestor and evolved into a more formal state when humans evolved. The problem is that there is no historical record of how language began. Early language was probably symbolic and involved hand gestures and signals as well as vocalizations much like chimps and monkeys do now. Many language inception theories involve the actions of a mother towards her children. This could have led to mothers using vocalizations to represent various commands and instructions, and it led to a so-called mother tongue that eventually evolved into a language.

Once languages developed, they became localized to a specific tribe or group of humans. This led to the language differences, and this was exacerbated when humans migrated out of Africa over 75, 000 years ago. This confusion in tongues idea led to the Bible story about the Tower of Babel, in which the Lord punished the people who tried to build a tower that led up to heaven. This story claimed that everyone on the Earth spoke the same language but were cursed with speaking different tongues when God confounded their speech and eventually scattered them throughout the face of the Earth. There are stories like this in other ancient cultures. Although it is a story, the idea that different languages developed after humans scattered is a viable theory.

The study of languages is called linguistics, but many of its precepts are just as confused as the languages it studies. It’s easy to understand how a language changes over time. Just look at all of the new words and altered meanings of existing words in the English language. I’m sure that this has happened in other languages. Despite this, it doesn’t explain how language split into different tongues. The one thing we do know is that there is no proof that languages developed from a single tongue, and this is made evident by the fact that many languages don’t have common elements.

Some languages like English are made up of several earlier languages, such as Anglo Saxon, French and Latin. Thus, English is a more recent tongue. Some languages, even though different, use the same symbols, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The so-called Romantic languages, German, Spanish, Italian, French and English use the same alphabet, while the Eastern Slavic languages like Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian use the Cyrillic alphabet. There are many other alphabets used to write languages.

I suppose that one could say that the reason there are so many different languages is because there are so many different ethnic peoples, but this doesn’t explain why it happened.

People who can speak different languages impress me. Most Americans are lucky if they can speak English, yet many non-Americans know two or more languages. Maybe this is the result of being forced to migrate to different countries or the fact that different races had ruled their country. I realize that there are immigrants in America who know languages other than their native tongue. My problem is that my ancestors came here a very long time ago and their native tongue is long erased from my memory.

What really impresses me is the fact that a Japanese high school student must memorize and be able to write 3000 Kanji, the characters that make up the Japanese language. I could never do that.

Thanks for reading.