On the origin and dispersion of language
Created | Updated Jul 16, 2002
First of all, I am by no means knowledgable about this. Any scholarship I may be able to claim lies entirely within the physical sciences. I am however very interested. I hope that this forum might be a means by which people who know more about the subject than I do can share their knowledge. That said, here's the topic.
People speak languages. I think it is pretty well established (and if it isn't, I believe it anyway) that people are predisposed to speak genetically. As Lewis Thomas said (I think), "people make words the way bees make honey". So, when did it start? I suppose that the first humans who migrated out of Africa were already speaking 1 or more languages, but maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe language erupted in human society during the Ice Age (1 of them). What I know is that once written language was developed, archeologists can more clearly track the evolution and migration of language and correlate it to the migration of people.
Even without written language we can trace, linguistically, the very late migration of the Athabascan people from Mongolia to Alaska and the subsequent settlement of the Navajos and Apaches in Arizona, speaking all a similar language. So we can deduce that there must have been some Mongolians speaking a similar language. Do they still? If so, did that Mongolian language derive from some earlier Mongolian that was carried in an earlier migration and became Aztec?
Some of this must be known by somebody. I would very much like to know where to find a synopsis of this field without having to go back to school and start all over (I'm rather too old for that now, in any case).
People speak languages. I think it is pretty well established (and if it isn't, I believe it anyway) that people are predisposed to speak genetically. As Lewis Thomas said (I think), "people make words the way bees make honey". So, when did it start? I suppose that the first humans who migrated out of Africa were already speaking 1 or more languages, but maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe language erupted in human society during the Ice Age (1 of them). What I know is that once written language was developed, archeologists can more clearly track the evolution and migration of language and correlate it to the migration of people.
Even without written language we can trace, linguistically, the very late migration of the Athabascan people from Mongolia to Alaska and the subsequent settlement of the Navajos and Apaches in Arizona, speaking all a similar language. So we can deduce that there must have been some Mongolians speaking a similar language. Do they still? If so, did that Mongolian language derive from some earlier Mongolian that was carried in an earlier migration and became Aztec?
Some of this must be known by somebody. I would very much like to know where to find a synopsis of this field without having to go back to school and start all over (I'm rather too old for that now, in any case).
