With about 2,700 languages in the world, it amazes me that there can be so many ways to say the same thing. The number of sounds that represent agreement is an example…yes, oui, da, si, ayo, hai, i-o, ego, ari, nda, jo tokkiisa, gea…
If you believe the Biblical story of the tower of Babel, people all spoke one language in the past. This changed when they starting building a tower to see God, which he did not like. He told them to stop and they ignored Him. So, God had had to punish them for not listening. He cursed them by making them all speak different languages. They all went elsewhere and took their new langauges with them. Good for Sunday school, but not quite enough.
Having a degree in anthropology, of course I assume that language started with grunting and body language over who had to start the fire. As our brains grew, so did our thoughts – thoughts that we wanted to share. While a cave man simply pointed and grunted ‘snow’, the Inuit have developed words to identify its many forms – hiryla, wa-ter, tlayinq, quinaya, slimtla, kriplyana, puntla, and the list goes on.
How vocabulary developed is not hard to imagine. This sound equals water, that sound equals sun. As we developed more and more new things – like a wheel or TV – we need new sounds, thus words. It was not so difficult to to build a huge repertoire of words.
Contriving a way to link these words - grammar – now that was the clever part.
