The Origin of Language

 

It is virtually impossible to know which language developed first, but that doesn’t mean linguists haven’t taken a good whack at it. The main problem is that scientists think language probably developed around 100,000-200,000 years ago. That’s around when modern humans, Homo sapiens, developed with the same skull structure—with the implication of the same brain functionality—and a similar vocal structure to humans today.

 

Of course, it’s likely that groups of human-like animals had different types of languages well before then. Where sentient beings gathered together, some form of language would have been a necessity to communicate, even if it was just a few grunts like those popularly uttered by cavemen in movies.

Discounting these, the origin of modern language is still largely unknown. The first language could have been similar to one spoken today, or languages could have changed so much that they bear no resemblance to the first known language, and may not have even been spoken at all, rather relying on gestures or even whistles, such as with Silbo Gomera, the whistling language. Unfortunately, language predates the written word, and without historical texts to look back on, linguists can only guess at what the first language.

There are a few criteria that people use to decide on “the first known language.” One way people determine the first known language is by looking at the first written language, which happens to be Egyptian or Sumerian. There are both Egyptian and Sumerian texts dating back to around 3200 BC. There were, of course, many other languages spoken at that time all over the world—it’s just that these two communities seem to have developed a written language first, or at least wrote their languages on material that was able to persevere through the wear-and-tear of time. These texts are the first real evidence of language, and the only thing that linguists can prove with any certainty.

As for spoken language, there are many, many theories that have been developed over the years. For the purposes of this article, we’ll look at the argument over polygenism and monogenism—that is, figuring out if many languages developed independently in different parts of the world at the same time, or if all languages stem from one proto-language a la the Tower of Babel. (If you’re not familiar, the story goes that everyone in the world initially spoke the same language. When they resolved to build a tower to Heaven, God decided to scatter humans across the world and give people different languages to speak so that they couldn’t communicate with one another.) If you believe in monogenism, then there actually was a true “first language.” But if you believe in polygenism, there were many different “first languages” that developed around the same time.

Both theories rely on a lot of speculation. With monogenism, linguists have been tracing the roots of modern languages but can only go as far back as written languages before things get murky. There have also been studies based on genetics; there is a correlation between genetic diversification and the diversification of languages that were spoken over time. That would mean that when the human population was small, there could have been just one language. (And, indeed there is a known instances that the human population diminished so much that all of us can trace our ancestry through one woman who lived about 150,000-200,000 years ago, known as Mitochondrial Eve). The various studies come to different conclusions about how reliable this method of determining the first language is, making it somewhat controversial.

Monogenism largely fell out of favour in the 19^th and 20^th centuries when polygenism—the thought that all races developed independently of each other—was developed. Linguistically speaking, polygenesis depends on the idea that all languages developed independently of each other based on the environment that humans found themselves in. Monogenism argues that this is unlikely, especially since many languages can be traced back to “mother” languages.

What linguists can tell is that most of the 5000 languages spoken today on Earth can be grouped into branches. So, Spanish and Italian are grouped together with French and Romanian and are called “Romance languages.” English, together with German and Dutch, are “Germanic languages.” Both Romance and Germanic come together with Celtic, Greek, and Indian languages (among others) under the banner “Indo-European Languages.” As far as history is concerned right now, Indo-European is the oldest known family of languages, going back as far as Anatolian around the 20th-19th century BC. Some argue that the Afroasiatic family of languages may be older, but the earliest estimates there only go to about the 16th century BC.

There are, of course, many other branches of language. Japonic, Amerindian, Paleo-Siberian—the list goes on. Languages can usually be traced to their various branches, but the problem is finding out if they share one common ancestor, or “trunk” so to speak, which would give us the first language (if you accept monogenism, that is!).

Whether languages came from one language—called “proto-Human”—or many languages, it’s quite likely that our languages today simply changed and developed over time as the need for names and words for different things arose. Languages change and grow all the time, and that’s something that all linguists can agree on. For instance, in the last few years words like “senioritis,” “flash mob,” and “woot” have appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time.

With new words emerging all the time, it’s not hard to see how language has changed from Chaucer’s Middle English to textspeak in such a short amount of time. Now expand that to many millennia and it’s no wonder  linguists haven’t yet come to a consensus on what the first language might have been.

 

The Origin of the English Names of Colors

 

Dating back centuries, the names of our everyday colors have origins in the earliest known languages. According to linguists:

There was a time when there were no color-names as such . . .  and that not very remote in many cases, when the present color-words were terms that could be used in describing quite different qualities [including] gay, lively, smart, dashy, loud, gaudy . . . dull, dead, dreary . . . tarnished, stained, spotted, dirty, smeared . . . faint, faded [and feeble].

As different societies developed names for colors, across the globe, isolated cultures went about naming the colors, but weirdly, they all generally did it in the same order. Called the hierarchy of color names, the order was generally (with a few exceptions): black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue with others like brown, purple and pink coming at various times afterward.

Recent research in this area has demonstrated that this hierarchy matches humans reaction to different frequencies in the visible spectrum; that is, the stronger our reaction to that color’s frequency, the earlier it was named in the culture; or as Vittorio Loreto et al. put it:

The color spectrum clearly exists at a physical level of wavelengths, humans tend to react most saliently to certain parts of this spectrum often selecting exemplars for them, and finally comes the process of linguistic color naming, which adheres to universal patterns resulting in a neat hierarchy…

So, like other cultures, English words for the colors generally followed that same pattern, with black and white coming first, and purple, orange and pink coming last.

The Parents of Modern English

Although a number of the languages discussed in this article are self-explanatory, these three benefit from a brief description:

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) – Known as the common ancestor of all of the Indo-European (Europe, India, Iran and Anatolia) languages, it was spoken up to, perhaps, the 3^rd or 4^th millennium BC.

Proto-Germanic – A child of the PIE, Proto-Germanic (2000 BC-500 BC) was an ancestor of the Saxon, English, German (duh), Norse, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Gothic and Vandalic languages.

Old English – This early form of English, also sometimes called Anglo-Saxon, was used in England and Scotland from about 400 AD-1100 AD.

In addition, many of the words from these and other early languages are only assumed to have existed. In the study of the origin of words (etymology) these “presumed words” are generally marked with an asterisk (*). For convenience, they are referred to as “written” although it is doubtful that they ever were.

Black

Black derives from words invariably meaning the color black, as well as dark, ink and “to burn.”

Originally meaning, burning, blazing, glowing and shining, in PIE it was *bhleg. This was changed to *blakkaz in Proto-Germanic, to blaken in Dutch and blaec, in Old English. This last word, blaec, also meant ink, as did blak (Old Saxon) and black (Swedish).

The color was called blach in Old High German and written blaec in Old English. One final meaning, dark (also blaec in Old English) derived from the Old Norse blakkr.

White

White began its life in PIE as *kwintos and meant simply white or bright. This had changed to *khwitz in Proto-Germanic, and later languages transformed it into hvitr (Old Norse), hwit (Old Saxon) and wit (Dutch). By the time Old English developed, the word was kwit.

Red

In PIE, red was *reudh and meant red and ruddy. In Proto-Germanic, red was *rauthaz, and in its derivative languages raudr (Old Norse), rod (Old Saxon) and rØd (Danish). In Old English, it was written read.

Green

Meaning grow in PIE, it was *ghre. Subsequent languages wrote it grene (Old Frisian), graenn (Old Norse) and grown (Dutch). In Old English, it was grene and meant the color green as well as young and immature.

Yellow

Thousands of years ago, yellow was considered to be closely related to green, and in PIE it was *ghel and meant both yellow and green. In Proto-Germanic, the word was *gelwaz. Subsequent incarnations of German had the word as gulr (Old Norse), gel (Middle High German) and gelo (Old High German). As late as Old English, yellow was written geolu and geolwe

Blue

Blue was also often confused with yellow back in the day. The PIE word was *bhle-was and meant “light-colored, blue, blond yellow” and had its root as bhel which meant to shine. In Proto-Germanic, the word was *blaewaz, and in Old English, it was blaw.

English also gets some of its words from French, and blue is one of them. In Old French (one of the vulgar Latin dialects whose height was between the 9^th and 13^th centuries AD) blue was written bleu and blew and meant a variety of things including the color blue.

Brown

Derived from the Old Germanic for either or both a dark color and a shining darkness (brunoz and bruna), brown is a recent addition to our language. In Old English it was brun or brune, and its earliest known writing was in about 1000 AD.

Purple

This word also skipped the PIE and seems to have sprung up in the 9^th century AD, in Old English as purpul. Burrowed from the Latin word purpura, purple originally meant alternately, “purple color, purple-dyed cloak, purple dye . . . a shellfish from which purple was made . . . [and] splendid attire generally.”

Orange

This color’s name derives from the Sanskrit word for the fruit naranga. (Yes, the color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around). This transformed into the Arabic and Persian naranj, and by the time of Old French to pomme d’orenge. It was originally recorded in English as the name of the color in 1512.  Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red.”

Pink

One of the most recent colors to gain a name, pink was first recorded as describing the “pale rose color” in 1733. In the 16^th century, pink was the common named to describe a plant whose petals had a variety of colors (Dianthus), and it originally may have come from a Dutch word of the same spelling that meant small.

 Did you know this before or is it the first time you hear about it ??

The Differences Between British and American English

The Differences Between 

British and 

American English

 

Most people are well aware of some of the more obvious differences between British and American English. For instance, American English omits the “u” in colour, neighbour, honour, etc. Most people also know that a lot of words mean different things: a boot is the trunk of your car, a jumper is a sweater, and thongs are flip-flops. But there are some subtle differences between the two dialects that you might not have noticed at first glance.

 

This is by no means a comprehensive list of every grammatical quirk between the two versions of English, just a selection of differences that I thought were fun or interesting based on my experiences as an American living abroad where British English is the dominant language. I think I should also point out that with British TV shows on American screens and vice versa, not to mention the interaction we’re able to enjoy on forums across the internet, it’s possible some British or American English has slipped into your vocabulary, so some differences are starting to disappear.
First, speakers of British and American English have different preposition preferences. These little words are so small you might not have noticed the differences when talking to your British/American friends. Each example is grammatically correct, but one or the other might sound a little strange to you depending on where you’re from:

British English: I will come home at the weekend.
American English: I will see her on the weekend.

BE: He studied history at university.
AE: She studied biology in college.

In terms of past-time adverbs such as yet, just, or already, Brits usually use the present perfect verb tense and Americans use the past simple verb tense. Again, both forms are correct, and you can get the same meaning across either way:

BE: Have you phoned her yet?
AE: Did you call her yet?

BE: Have you already been to the library?
AE: Did you already go to the bank?

British English speakers will also use the word “got” more than American English speakers. Where Brits will say “have got,” Americans will typically say “have.” Like this:

BE: I’ve got to go now.
AE: I have to go now.
BE: I’ve got five siblings.
AE: I have five siblings.

Even when asking a question, the “do” form of “have” is much more common in American English, while British English typically uses “got” for specific situations:
BE: Have you got a sister?
AE: Do you have a sister?
BE: Have you got time to write this down?
AE: Do you have time to write this down?

Interestingly, when Americans do use “got,” the “have” and “do” forms are often mixed up between the question and answer, while in British English they are more consistent. Take this example from the BBC:
BE: We’ve got a new car! – You have?
AE: We’ve got a new car! – You do?

There are a lot of differences in regular and irregular verbs in British and American English. That means that we tack on various endings on some verbs in one dialect that we don’t in others. A couple of the verbs that are irregular in British English are burn, learn, and smell. These words are all regular in American English. For example:
BE: She burnt the toast.
AE: She burned the toast.
BE: The garden smelt of roses.
AE: The garden smelled of roses.

There are also a couple of verbs that are irregular in American English that are regular in British English, including dive, fit, and wet.
BE: She dived into the lake.
AE: She dove into the lake.
BE: He wetted the paintbrush.
AE: He wet the paintbrush.

The use of the verbs “have” and “take” are also a little different. In British English, they prefer “have,” while in American English, they prefer “take.” For instance:
BE: I’m going to have a nap.
AE: I’m going to take a nap.
BE: She is having a bath.
AE: She is taking a bath.

In addition to cutting out letters, sometimes Americans cut out entire words—at least when their sentences are compared to British sentences. In this case, I’m talking about “can” and “could.” When using perception verbs like see, hear, and smell, British English often calls for “can” and “could,” while American English ignores them entirely, like this:
BE: I could hear Jane talking in the other room.
AE: I heard Jane making breakfast in the kitchen.
BE: She can see a rainbow in the sky.
AE: She sees a rainbow in the sky.

Then there are those words that are left with an “s” or not depending on which dialect you speak. One such word is the shortened form of mathematics, which is “maths” in British English and “math” in American English. The reasoning for this one is that “mathematics” is plural, so the shortened “maths” in British English should be too. In American English, it’s shortened, but cutting off the “s” as well. Another example of this is toward vs. towards, which is one of the most common mix-ups:
BE: She walked towards the light.
AE: He moved toward the door.

There are even a few differences in punctuation between British and American English. First, it is more common to use the single quotation mark in British English, whereas in American English it is more common to use the double quotation mark. Second, in American English, people include punctuation inside quotation marks, while in British English the punctuation goes outside of the quotation marks (unless it’s part of the quote.) For instance:
BE: ‘She went to the park’, said John.
AE: “She went to the park,” said John.

BE: John said, ‘She went to the park.’ (this is part of the quote so it stays inside the quotation marks)
AE: John said, “She went to the park.”

Then, of course, there are the multitude of words that are used differently in each dialect, along with a few different phrases. One I found particularly interesting while polling a few of my friends was the phrase for asking if someone would like you to take them in your car to a different location:
British/Australian English: Would you like a lift?
American English: Would you like a ride?
Some Parts of Canada: Would you like a drive?

Beyond grammatical quirks, here are some words and their corresponding meanings depending on which side of the pond you’re on:

British English	American English
Nappy	Diaper
Trolley	Shopping cart
Torch	Flashlight
Boot	Trunk
Thongs	Flip-flops
Pants	Underwear
Trousers	Pants
Rubber	Eraser
Biscuit	Cookie
Lift	Elevator
Bumbag	Fanny pack
Car park	Parking lot
Candyfloss (Fairyfloss in Australia)	Cotton candy
Chemist	Drugstore
Cot	Crib
Drink-driving	Drunk driving
Fish finger	Fish stick
Fringe	Bangs
Holiday	Vacation
Lorry	Truck
Pavement	Sidewalk
Postcode	Zip code
Pram	Stroller
Queue	Line
Touch wood	Knock on wood
Z (zed)	Z (zee)

Do you know of other difference? 

Please share them in the comments below!

 

Guess what the result will be if you loose your pen

Student:"Sir, I lost my pen" 

 Teacher replied:

 

Do you agree ???

The use of CAN

Hello

This is what do we use CAN for  :

Modals and their Rules of Use

This chart shows the rules of use of all the modals

enjoy

Freqency Adverbs

Hello dear colleagues
this is the rule for the Frequency Adverbs