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All Languages Evolved from only OneAn ancient mother language |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
8th of April 2008, 14:10 GMT
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The study of the origin of the languages is one of the most complicated disciplines. Since ancient times, people have attempted to explain it via legends like the Tower of Babel and similar stories from the Central American, African and Indian mythologies.
Researchers have tried to count how many languages are spoke on Earth: the number varied from 2,000 to 6,000, as incomplete linguistic studies for many areas make difficult
the distinction between languages, dialects or idioms. But the high diversity of current languages hides a double unity: one of structure and one of origin.
Regardless of their level of development, all languages accomplish the same functions and express the same logical thinking processes. They have a sonorous material which, linked to the anatomy of the speech apparatus (the position of the hyoid bone), is the same in all modern humans and different from fossil human species.
In all languages, there is a variable number of words designating notions and a number of variable grammatical procedures for expressing the relationship between notions (which translates into reports and relations from the human specific reality).
There have been many attempts to reduce the diversity of the modern languages to one or several basic languages, but so far none could re-build that hypothetical primary or Adamic language. Merrit Ruhlen pointed, in a book published in 1994, to the existence of 27-30 word roots spread under forms modified by the linguistic evolution, but that can still be identified and reduced to units, in many languages and families of languages worldwide.
All that words are part of the fundamental vocabulary of the languages (designating parts of the human body and basic processes) and they could only come from an unique mother language. Real "living fossils", those word radicals showed that the mother language existed in a remote past, in the dawn of Homo sapiens' existence.
One example is the word for "water": aq'wa or 'ak'a in proto-Indo European (from which most languages of Europe to India descended), ak' "water" in proto-Afro-Asian language (from which Arab and most languages of Middle East, North/West/Northeastern Africa evolved), 'ox'a "to drink" in proto-Lezghin (from which many languages of the Caucasus evolved, including Chechen), akwa "put out of the water" in central proto-Algonquian (from which many languages of the North American Natives evolved - like Cree, Ojibwa, Algonquian, Shawnee, Mohegan, Blackfoot or Cheyenne), k"a or k"wa in Khoisan (Bushmen languages), or gugu/kuku in proto-Australian (the language from which the Aborigine languages evolved). Tens of forms can be revealed to sustain this, both from Japanese or Ainu languages, and from many Amerindian, African and Asian languages also.
The only thing that researchers must do is to hurry up, as 90% of the current languages are believed to goextinct in the next 100 years.
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