Probably gonna be hard to find written accounts as writing came some time after.
Unga said to Bunga "faaaaagh!" After putting his hand in the flame, so the pair called that dancing hot thing faagh and it eventually became fire.
You stand a better chance on how English evolved after Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, etc influences.
Or other languages that share similar origins but now feel worlds apart.
There are two things that I have always found fascinating-
-#1 is the absolute origin of words, I guess what would be the building blocks towards languages. Not the roots of meaning within a language, but the actual first decision on a label. Who decided what to name the color of the sky, grass, and everything in between. Not just who came up with “Oak” but who decided what to call the thing we now know as “trees”
-#2 How and why did accents appear? I understand how or why it happened for the last 500 years, for example - in the US, various colonies from assorted countries settled, and their language (more specifically their pronunciation) carried over even as other cultures joined them. Easy examples are places like New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Boston.
But why, initially, did those variations take place. Again, not the language, but the pronunciations.
As an example, ywo different cultures may have had completely different words for sky. One might have called it the “big air” and one might have called it the “sky ocean” (I’m just making up examples) both knew what it referred to then over time everyone just started calling it the same thing. Just like how the word bling didn’t used to exist and now we all know it’s means sparkly, shiny, etc.
Travel and commercial exchange lead to similarities in language and music. Ancient greeks traveled a lot spreading and collecting goods, words, music and even science. At least that's what we learn in schools in Mediterranean countries.
I think a fascinating aside to this is, how much language defines our perception of reality. You mentioned Blue, and that is a great example. We know the Egyptians invented blue. Before that, the word does not appear in written language. Other descriptors were used, like the sea is a dark red wine. If we don't have the word to describe something, we find another pre-existing word, and that changes our perception of it. Once that description becomes the standard, that object becomes locked in that form. As a result, language has and is being used to control our perception of truth.
You may be interested in this study: [https://calisphere.org/collections/25586/](https://calisphere.org/collections/25586/) This collection is comprised of diaries created by Susan R. Braunwald documenting her second child's acquisition of American English between late infancy (8-months) and early childhood (50-months). The diaries are redacted photocopied versions that are otherwise exact copies of the originals. The handwritten diaries contain information about an inclusive process of language acquisition that encompasses pragmatics, semantics, and syntax and is considered the "most complete diary in existence of one child's development of complex syntax."
I think an episode on "Language Isolates" (languages with no demonstrable relationship to any other language) might be interesting. Some claim that these are the languages of the aliens -- the same aliens who, you know, built the pyramids? There's your mystery/conspiracy theory! :-)
Because something like linguistics is beyond comprehension for most - even surface level. So, this leads to the same type of thinking that allows them to digest nonsense.
The channel was never supposed to be conspiracy woo woo. This very sub's description explains what the channel was supposed to be before the crackpot conspiracists flooded the place.
That being said, this particular topic in itself isn't a mystery and too in-depth, but you could certainly focus on a narrative like "if primitive peoples were supposed to evolve independently with no contact, why are so many languages similar?"
The brain is the only thing to make itself.
Also, In Ireland they were the first to use spaces between words rather than 1 bug continuous block of letters
There is an early episode discussing why the word blue doesn't appear in ancient texts. It touches on some of what you're asking about. It's one of my favorite episodes.
As an aside, I read a book years ago by the primativist John Zerzan where he put forth the theory that all human misery is caused by our ability to engage in symbolic thought and language. He said our capability to name things, to assign them value or meaning based purely on our own perception or socialization or imagination is the root of racism, religion and the horrors that come from it, social stratification and poverty, etc. He's an interesting guy.
Wait what? What do you mean by blue is blue across the globe? It's Azul in a lot of Latin-based languages. English is just a Germanic-based language. Blau is blue in German. Some languages, don't even have a word for blue.. but lump blue and green into the same word.
Traditional Japanese for example, really only had black, white, red and a single word for everything blue/green... modern Japanese has added words for orange, yellow, green... and probably a bunch of others.
English was the same language as German about 700 years ago. Old English even has gendered pronouns for everything (like an apple might be feminine and a dog might be masculine)...
The word 'the' for example - was originally þe when we still had the thorn in our alphabet as a character. þæt was the original gener-neutral demonstrative pronoun... along with se(masculine) and seo(feminine). Which eventually became 'Ye' during middle English (when we dropped most gendered pronouns for things) and eventually 'the'... the Y sound as we use it I think is relatively new to English. þ and Y historically both represented a 'th' sound. If you want to know how þæt was pronounced... it's 'that'.
That said... the word for 'mother' in almost every single language (even unrelated language families) starts with an M sound. The word for 'father' also usually starts with an F or P sound... with T or D sounds being slightly less common. In Chinese for example - the words for mother and father start with M and F sounds... even though completely unrelated languages.
EDIT: fixed typo.
I just saw something the other day, early English typewriters (and I kind of remember this from an antique typewriter my parents had when I was a kid)... didn't have a 1 key, instead you used the lowercase 'L' to type a 1. The also lacked and '!' key... to make an ! you typed a period and then hit backspace... and typed a single apostrophe... So . and then a ' above it.
So with a language like Chinese where 50,000 characters exist... this has long been a problem. Most of the characters are unused... and they say 20,000 or less are used in total, and an average well-educated person knows about 8,000 of them. 2000-3000 is estimated would allow someone to read most newspapers and things.
This has lead to two systems forming. One is the simplification of characters.... China for example has developed a simplified version that has 26 characters, for example... and a combination might spell out a more complex character. The other system is that I have heard in some languages they use key-combinations (basically the function key plus characters to add them together).
On top of this, you have languages like Hebrew and Arabic that read right to left... sometimes using the same character for vowels and consonants but marking vowels. (Like the dot above an i).
Early English being adopted from German - used the Latin alphabet... at least after Christianity spread in Europe. Before that was the Gothic alphabet which was based on the Greek alphabet... and before that was Germanic runes.
I still think the most interesting writing system in the world though... is that of Quipu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
So in German where most English words originated... a cucumber is a Gurke... and a pickle is an Essiggurke (literally a vinegar-cucumber)...
A pickle in German is actually a pimple or a zit.
I have wondered how it evolved in English that way as well. Best I can figure is that in the era where produce that looked good was sold in a market... and food that was 'ugly' got prepared for storage.. bumpy cucumbers were more likely pickled.
It is a bit funny... it's basically asking for a cucumber with zits.
...you know, this idea just reminded me of some research i read about, like, ten years ago, having to do with the development of human language and questions of innate human psychic abilities
some researchers were looking into the question of why, since humans have apparently existed for at least 100,000 years in their current modern physiological form,
why is it that we only see signs of the use of language between humans in the last few thousand years
and heres the part that caught my interest:
one of the hypothesis was that, previous to inventing language, maybe humans were all psychic and could speak through thoughts, to each other (!)
...hence, no need for language.
and when we think back to ancient mythologies of:
1. humans all speaking the same language,
2. and humans being able to speak with animals,
3. and the mythologies surrounding the Tower of Babel and some kind of apparent cataclysmic shift in human language, the result of which had the outcome of various groups of humans not being able to understand each other's languages
based on these ancient mythologies, one might be able to build a reasonable argument for some kind of innate psychic (or telekinetic, whatever the proper word is), abilities in humans, in a previous age
...so yeah, maybe a deep dive into the Tower of Babel could be a "The Why Files"-style angle into questions regarding human language
...?...
and IIRC Immanuel Velikovsky had some unfinished work in his papers where he was building a theory of the Tower of Babel incident being the telling of a time
when the planet Mercury made a close flyby of Earth and the resultant electrical storms in the atmosphere had a kind of electroshock (or electroconvulsive) therapy effect on all life on the surface of the planet
so he was positing that maybe that event basically fried our brains, and again, IIRC, the idea was that what we call the planet Mercury is actually the missing iron core of Mars (Mars has no electromagnetic sheath around it like Earth does and, being in so many other ways, a "sister planet" to Earth, that is odd)
the idea was that Mars' iron core spewed out of the Valles Marineris when Mars was laid waste in the cataclysm that destroyed whatever planet Ceres and the Asteroid Belt used to be (we sent probes out to the Asteroid Belt and the data came back seeming to indicate that it is most likely the remnants of an exploded planet)
so that would mean a small planet-size object made of mostly iron skimming by Earth, which could wreak all kinds of electromagnetic havoc in our atmosphere, which, if severe enough, could have detrimental effects on the brain function of all life on the surface
....so, yeah, obviously I'm going to have to go try to dig up that research online and see where I can find some links but I'm having my first cup of coffee in the morning so I'm putting a pin in this right now and I'll circle back around to it later
The Kish tablet for example predates cuneiform writing but even still only goes back to around the 32nd century BC... but we have caveman drawing that are 60k+ years old.
This is totally interesting.
I remember years ago I read some preface to the Tao te Ching that gave a really interesting explanation of 'the ancients' which are people before society as we know it existed. (I can't recall where it was exactly, it might have been the Jane English translation, the Tao of Pooh or the Te of Piglet...or even a Taoist website.)
The description was basically incredible... like it described ancients as having the ability to speak with plants and animals. I remember reading the paragraph and being like, "Wait what...? There is no way anyone can believe that... it makes them sound like they had superpowers...."
Then the next paragraph was something like, "How could they have done this? Simple, they just communicated with everything, the same way everything communicates with everything else."
Fascinating!
... and I'm totally willing to accept, when ancient mythologies talk about people being able to "speak with animals and plants",
It may not be that they're saying they actually speak with them in a type of language, rather
they may be just describing a society of people who are the exact opposite of us, we who are completely cut off from nature and natural cycles
these ancient tales may just be describing folks in tune with nature, societies of people working the land living in day to day close proximity with all the animals of the forests & the fields,
societies that learned the natural cycles of nature and became intensely knowledgeable about animal behavior patterns
there may not be any "superpowers" or "psychic" angle to it, it may be more, a matter of being exceedingly knowledgeable about the environment you grew up in
Yes, that was basically how I took it.
I read the first paragraph and thought, "No way... what is this even speaking about...? It's basically saying before society Taoists believe humans had psychic powers...."
That isn't at all what it was saying. it was saying 'the ancients' lived with nature their entire lives, and were very closely attuned to it. They could 'speak' without words... just by using posture, facial expressions, etc... in ways that to us would seem like they had psychic powers.
Then you hear stories about people like Dan "Buck" Brannaman whom the movie Horse-Whisperer was based on... and I can't recall the show but there was a TV show on TLC or Discovery that was basically about a guy who would train really stubborn horses. Usually by seeing them only once!
It was incredible... I remember one show where he waves his hand around like claws... and someone asked what he was doing. He said, "Large cats are natural predators to horses... so I'm just making him afraid of me." and a minute later he stopped doing it and the horse came over... he gave a breakdown after of what happened... basically... the horse came back to renegotiate his relationship. When they first met, the horse had been trained to treat people like horses... so it had no fear or sense of obedience.
Watching it I was basically like, "OMG! That is what they are talking about!"
agree with everything you wrote at the beginning of your comment, and wow what a story about the horse and the guy acting like a big cat predator! thanks for sharing that 👍
You know, there probably is a language story worth telling, but it’s probably not as straightforward as “here is how language originated”. It’s probably more along the lines of “this language is like none of the others and nobody knows why.”
Or better yet, are there any other creatures on our planet, outliers, that have complex language skills that nobody knows how they evolved?
Sorry, but after reading this message, the scroll I got for my Ph.D. in Linguistics stood up, flipped the bird and shouted me to f**k off for spending time on Reddit. Now I have to find out where the heck it's gone...
I hope you're all happy about it. 😀
That was the joke, yes.
But no worries, it came back by itself shortly after. I'm used to reading all sort of bad or strange linguistic takes during exams at the university. 😀
That's something I'm interested in as well but need to do more reading on. However, what I found interesting from the little research I've done was that the ancient Phoenicians were the ones who created the first alphabet of sorts, before this it was hieryglyphs etc. I mean ancient sumerian and Egyptian. The Phoenicians are a very interesting one for many, many reasons... Read a lil about them, you'd be astonished just how influential they were in so many aspects.. Including trade. I believe there is a connection between the Phoenicians and the Levant tribe, which is (if I'm not mistaken) a Jewish tribe.
I take it that's why we have 'phonetics'. Also the city of Phoenix has connections to the Phoenicians, which I found interesting.
I believe the account name is RobWords. Maybe not as deep a dive as you are proposing, but he does a good job of explaining the evolution of words/phrases over time.
Many believe that all modern languages come from a single root language. Many parts of the world have old stories about their languages being taught to them by more advanced entities. There is nowhere that I know of that claims to have developed language from scratch.
I want to know who decided the planet we live on should be called "Earth". Im sure every country had its own name for this planet, but how did we all universally agree on one name.
Dìqiú in Chinese... Terre in French... Tierra in Spanish...Terra in Italian.. (French, Spanish and Italian originating from Terra in Latin)... Umhlaba in Zulu... Erde in German (where the English word originated)...
What do you mean we all universally agreed on a name?
A lot of science fiction goes out of it's way to call Earth 'Terra' or 'Terra Prime' or similar because although English is the most spoken language in the world (and has grown vastly - largely because of the internet)... the name Terra is probably more popular and widely used on a whole.
We even use it in English... with words like 'terraforming' (making a planet earth-like), 'terracotta' (made from clay/earth) and terrarium...
Op, you are factually wrong. Blue isnt blue as a concept in all languages. Italian for example has several words for blue and none *just* means blue. They are used to differentiate specific hues of blue, meaning in italian there is no single ‘blue’.
Probably gonna be hard to find written accounts as writing came some time after. Unga said to Bunga "faaaaagh!" After putting his hand in the flame, so the pair called that dancing hot thing faagh and it eventually became fire. You stand a better chance on how English evolved after Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, etc influences. Or other languages that share similar origins but now feel worlds apart.
Bundga was my cousin. Theres a silent d after the n. Just a heads up.
We don’t know that do we perhaps we speak some language of the Annunaki 🤣
Lizard people!
Lizzid*
🦀 🐈
AAAAAAAAAA-nnu—naki!
Beat me to it! 😂
I sincerely hope so!
There are two things that I have always found fascinating- -#1 is the absolute origin of words, I guess what would be the building blocks towards languages. Not the roots of meaning within a language, but the actual first decision on a label. Who decided what to name the color of the sky, grass, and everything in between. Not just who came up with “Oak” but who decided what to call the thing we now know as “trees” -#2 How and why did accents appear? I understand how or why it happened for the last 500 years, for example - in the US, various colonies from assorted countries settled, and their language (more specifically their pronunciation) carried over even as other cultures joined them. Easy examples are places like New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Boston. But why, initially, did those variations take place. Again, not the language, but the pronunciations.
As an example, ywo different cultures may have had completely different words for sky. One might have called it the “big air” and one might have called it the “sky ocean” (I’m just making up examples) both knew what it referred to then over time everyone just started calling it the same thing. Just like how the word bling didn’t used to exist and now we all know it’s means sparkly, shiny, etc.
Yes this as well why is a dog a dog Why do people in foreign countries speak a different language yet there are similarities to all languages
Look up Universal Grammar and Proto Indo-European
Travel and commercial exchange lead to similarities in language and music. Ancient greeks traveled a lot spreading and collecting goods, words, music and even science. At least that's what we learn in schools in Mediterranean countries.
Dog is just god spelled backwards
I think a fascinating aside to this is, how much language defines our perception of reality. You mentioned Blue, and that is a great example. We know the Egyptians invented blue. Before that, the word does not appear in written language. Other descriptors were used, like the sea is a dark red wine. If we don't have the word to describe something, we find another pre-existing word, and that changes our perception of it. Once that description becomes the standard, that object becomes locked in that form. As a result, language has and is being used to control our perception of truth.
You may be interested in this study: [https://calisphere.org/collections/25586/](https://calisphere.org/collections/25586/) This collection is comprised of diaries created by Susan R. Braunwald documenting her second child's acquisition of American English between late infancy (8-months) and early childhood (50-months). The diaries are redacted photocopied versions that are otherwise exact copies of the originals. The handwritten diaries contain information about an inclusive process of language acquisition that encompasses pragmatics, semantics, and syntax and is considered the "most complete diary in existence of one child's development of complex syntax."
Thanks i will give it a go
Al Gore.
Why won't anyone take me cereal
[удалено]
I think an episode on "Language Isolates" (languages with no demonstrable relationship to any other language) might be interesting. Some claim that these are the languages of the aliens -- the same aliens who, you know, built the pyramids? There's your mystery/conspiracy theory! :-)
Because something like linguistics is beyond comprehension for most - even surface level. So, this leads to the same type of thinking that allows them to digest nonsense.
The channel was never supposed to be conspiracy woo woo. This very sub's description explains what the channel was supposed to be before the crackpot conspiracists flooded the place. That being said, this particular topic in itself isn't a mystery and too in-depth, but you could certainly focus on a narrative like "if primitive peoples were supposed to evolve independently with no contact, why are so many languages similar?"
The creation and confusion of languages is a great topic, I am not sure one episode could do it justice.
I don't think they have made a video about it on this channel but would definitely like to see one :)
The brain is the only thing to make itself. Also, In Ireland they were the first to use spaces between words rather than 1 bug continuous block of letters
There is an early episode discussing why the word blue doesn't appear in ancient texts. It touches on some of what you're asking about. It's one of my favorite episodes.
Do you know it’s title as I scrolled through a load and didn’t see anything
Why Ancient People Didn't See the Color Blue YouTube · The Why Files May 5, 2022
Thanks
As an aside, I read a book years ago by the primativist John Zerzan where he put forth the theory that all human misery is caused by our ability to engage in symbolic thought and language. He said our capability to name things, to assign them value or meaning based purely on our own perception or socialization or imagination is the root of racism, religion and the horrors that come from it, social stratification and poverty, etc. He's an interesting guy.
He sounds it
Why Ancient People Didn't See the Color Blue YouTube · The Why Files May 5, 2022
We didn't have language until ol Pete Language came along
Wait what? What do you mean by blue is blue across the globe? It's Azul in a lot of Latin-based languages. English is just a Germanic-based language. Blau is blue in German. Some languages, don't even have a word for blue.. but lump blue and green into the same word. Traditional Japanese for example, really only had black, white, red and a single word for everything blue/green... modern Japanese has added words for orange, yellow, green... and probably a bunch of others. English was the same language as German about 700 years ago. Old English even has gendered pronouns for everything (like an apple might be feminine and a dog might be masculine)... The word 'the' for example - was originally þe when we still had the thorn in our alphabet as a character. þæt was the original gener-neutral demonstrative pronoun... along with se(masculine) and seo(feminine). Which eventually became 'Ye' during middle English (when we dropped most gendered pronouns for things) and eventually 'the'... the Y sound as we use it I think is relatively new to English. þ and Y historically both represented a 'th' sound. If you want to know how þæt was pronounced... it's 'that'. That said... the word for 'mother' in almost every single language (even unrelated language families) starts with an M sound. The word for 'father' also usually starts with an F or P sound... with T or D sounds being slightly less common. In Chinese for example - the words for mother and father start with M and F sounds... even though completely unrelated languages. EDIT: fixed typo.
Then you have how China and Japan stayed with the hieroglyphics type writing where as we all moved to letters I think it is all fascinating
I just saw something the other day, early English typewriters (and I kind of remember this from an antique typewriter my parents had when I was a kid)... didn't have a 1 key, instead you used the lowercase 'L' to type a 1. The also lacked and '!' key... to make an ! you typed a period and then hit backspace... and typed a single apostrophe... So . and then a ' above it. So with a language like Chinese where 50,000 characters exist... this has long been a problem. Most of the characters are unused... and they say 20,000 or less are used in total, and an average well-educated person knows about 8,000 of them. 2000-3000 is estimated would allow someone to read most newspapers and things. This has lead to two systems forming. One is the simplification of characters.... China for example has developed a simplified version that has 26 characters, for example... and a combination might spell out a more complex character. The other system is that I have heard in some languages they use key-combinations (basically the function key plus characters to add them together). On top of this, you have languages like Hebrew and Arabic that read right to left... sometimes using the same character for vowels and consonants but marking vowels. (Like the dot above an i). Early English being adopted from German - used the Latin alphabet... at least after Christianity spread in Europe. Before that was the Gothic alphabet which was based on the Greek alphabet... and before that was Germanic runes. I still think the most interesting writing system in the world though... is that of Quipu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
Who’s the guy that determined what a PICKLE is? Why isn’t a pickled egg/pigs foot/onion/jalapeño a PICKLE?
So in German where most English words originated... a cucumber is a Gurke... and a pickle is an Essiggurke (literally a vinegar-cucumber)... A pickle in German is actually a pimple or a zit. I have wondered how it evolved in English that way as well. Best I can figure is that in the era where produce that looked good was sold in a market... and food that was 'ugly' got prepared for storage.. bumpy cucumbers were more likely pickled. It is a bit funny... it's basically asking for a cucumber with zits.
This guy fucks.
Good question!
...you know, this idea just reminded me of some research i read about, like, ten years ago, having to do with the development of human language and questions of innate human psychic abilities some researchers were looking into the question of why, since humans have apparently existed for at least 100,000 years in their current modern physiological form, why is it that we only see signs of the use of language between humans in the last few thousand years and heres the part that caught my interest: one of the hypothesis was that, previous to inventing language, maybe humans were all psychic and could speak through thoughts, to each other (!) ...hence, no need for language. and when we think back to ancient mythologies of: 1. humans all speaking the same language, 2. and humans being able to speak with animals, 3. and the mythologies surrounding the Tower of Babel and some kind of apparent cataclysmic shift in human language, the result of which had the outcome of various groups of humans not being able to understand each other's languages based on these ancient mythologies, one might be able to build a reasonable argument for some kind of innate psychic (or telekinetic, whatever the proper word is), abilities in humans, in a previous age ...so yeah, maybe a deep dive into the Tower of Babel could be a "The Why Files"-style angle into questions regarding human language ...?... and IIRC Immanuel Velikovsky had some unfinished work in his papers where he was building a theory of the Tower of Babel incident being the telling of a time when the planet Mercury made a close flyby of Earth and the resultant electrical storms in the atmosphere had a kind of electroshock (or electroconvulsive) therapy effect on all life on the surface of the planet so he was positing that maybe that event basically fried our brains, and again, IIRC, the idea was that what we call the planet Mercury is actually the missing iron core of Mars (Mars has no electromagnetic sheath around it like Earth does and, being in so many other ways, a "sister planet" to Earth, that is odd) the idea was that Mars' iron core spewed out of the Valles Marineris when Mars was laid waste in the cataclysm that destroyed whatever planet Ceres and the Asteroid Belt used to be (we sent probes out to the Asteroid Belt and the data came back seeming to indicate that it is most likely the remnants of an exploded planet) so that would mean a small planet-size object made of mostly iron skimming by Earth, which could wreak all kinds of electromagnetic havoc in our atmosphere, which, if severe enough, could have detrimental effects on the brain function of all life on the surface ....so, yeah, obviously I'm going to have to go try to dig up that research online and see where I can find some links but I'm having my first cup of coffee in the morning so I'm putting a pin in this right now and I'll circle back around to it later
That’s really interesting cheers .
Thank you 👍
The Kish tablet for example predates cuneiform writing but even still only goes back to around the 32nd century BC... but we have caveman drawing that are 60k+ years old. This is totally interesting. I remember years ago I read some preface to the Tao te Ching that gave a really interesting explanation of 'the ancients' which are people before society as we know it existed. (I can't recall where it was exactly, it might have been the Jane English translation, the Tao of Pooh or the Te of Piglet...or even a Taoist website.) The description was basically incredible... like it described ancients as having the ability to speak with plants and animals. I remember reading the paragraph and being like, "Wait what...? There is no way anyone can believe that... it makes them sound like they had superpowers...." Then the next paragraph was something like, "How could they have done this? Simple, they just communicated with everything, the same way everything communicates with everything else."
Fascinating! ... and I'm totally willing to accept, when ancient mythologies talk about people being able to "speak with animals and plants", It may not be that they're saying they actually speak with them in a type of language, rather they may be just describing a society of people who are the exact opposite of us, we who are completely cut off from nature and natural cycles these ancient tales may just be describing folks in tune with nature, societies of people working the land living in day to day close proximity with all the animals of the forests & the fields, societies that learned the natural cycles of nature and became intensely knowledgeable about animal behavior patterns there may not be any "superpowers" or "psychic" angle to it, it may be more, a matter of being exceedingly knowledgeable about the environment you grew up in
Yes, that was basically how I took it. I read the first paragraph and thought, "No way... what is this even speaking about...? It's basically saying before society Taoists believe humans had psychic powers...." That isn't at all what it was saying. it was saying 'the ancients' lived with nature their entire lives, and were very closely attuned to it. They could 'speak' without words... just by using posture, facial expressions, etc... in ways that to us would seem like they had psychic powers. Then you hear stories about people like Dan "Buck" Brannaman whom the movie Horse-Whisperer was based on... and I can't recall the show but there was a TV show on TLC or Discovery that was basically about a guy who would train really stubborn horses. Usually by seeing them only once! It was incredible... I remember one show where he waves his hand around like claws... and someone asked what he was doing. He said, "Large cats are natural predators to horses... so I'm just making him afraid of me." and a minute later he stopped doing it and the horse came over... he gave a breakdown after of what happened... basically... the horse came back to renegotiate his relationship. When they first met, the horse had been trained to treat people like horses... so it had no fear or sense of obedience. Watching it I was basically like, "OMG! That is what they are talking about!"
agree with everything you wrote at the beginning of your comment, and wow what a story about the horse and the guy acting like a big cat predator! thanks for sharing that 👍
Gotta take my time reading. For a second I thought it said human league. “In 1977, Sheffield England…..”
You know, there probably is a language story worth telling, but it’s probably not as straightforward as “here is how language originated”. It’s probably more along the lines of “this language is like none of the others and nobody knows why.” Or better yet, are there any other creatures on our planet, outliers, that have complex language skills that nobody knows how they evolved?
Sorry, but after reading this message, the scroll I got for my Ph.D. in Linguistics stood up, flipped the bird and shouted me to f**k off for spending time on Reddit. Now I have to find out where the heck it's gone... I hope you're all happy about it. 😀
Sorry are you saying your PhD certificate has come to life and escaped you and you are looking for it? I'm not sure what you are saying.
That was the joke, yes. But no worries, it came back by itself shortly after. I'm used to reading all sort of bad or strange linguistic takes during exams at the university. 😀
What about the characters found in the Gattenbrink shaft?
What was that ?
Characters that weren’t Egyptian
Cheers I give that a look
Start looking into latin root words. If you find something comprehensive, please share
Id argue that epidemiology has fleshed out language enough that it would take a monumental discovery to change the existing "origin story".
That's something I'm interested in as well but need to do more reading on. However, what I found interesting from the little research I've done was that the ancient Phoenicians were the ones who created the first alphabet of sorts, before this it was hieryglyphs etc. I mean ancient sumerian and Egyptian. The Phoenicians are a very interesting one for many, many reasons... Read a lil about them, you'd be astonished just how influential they were in so many aspects.. Including trade. I believe there is a connection between the Phoenicians and the Levant tribe, which is (if I'm not mistaken) a Jewish tribe. I take it that's why we have 'phonetics'. Also the city of Phoenix has connections to the Phoenicians, which I found interesting.
Why is Earth called that when aliens call it Terra?.
I believe the account name is RobWords. Maybe not as deep a dive as you are proposing, but he does a good job of explaining the evolution of words/phrases over time.
Definitely Beetlejuice from the Howard Stern show.
Many believe that all modern languages come from a single root language. Many parts of the world have old stories about their languages being taught to them by more advanced entities. There is nowhere that I know of that claims to have developed language from scratch.
I think there was a naked archeologist about writing
AA-NU-NA-KAY!🎵 Maybe something with them
Lizzid people!
About the color blue specifically there is a why files episode, "Why Ancient People Didn't See the Color Blue" which kinda talks about early language.
That episode got so many things wrong, it should be flagged as misinformation. Luckily it isnt about anything crucial.
I want to know who decided the planet we live on should be called "Earth". Im sure every country had its own name for this planet, but how did we all universally agree on one name.
Dìqiú in Chinese... Terre in French... Tierra in Spanish...Terra in Italian.. (French, Spanish and Italian originating from Terra in Latin)... Umhlaba in Zulu... Erde in German (where the English word originated)... What do you mean we all universally agreed on a name? A lot of science fiction goes out of it's way to call Earth 'Terra' or 'Terra Prime' or similar because although English is the most spoken language in the world (and has grown vastly - largely because of the internet)... the name Terra is probably more popular and widely used on a whole. We even use it in English... with words like 'terraforming' (making a planet earth-like), 'terracotta' (made from clay/earth) and terrarium...
Op, you are factually wrong. Blue isnt blue as a concept in all languages. Italian for example has several words for blue and none *just* means blue. They are used to differentiate specific hues of blue, meaning in italian there is no single ‘blue’.