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People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.
And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.
Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.
[...] Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-human-beings-speak-so-many-languages-75434
Would you people care to speculate as to why there are so many languages ?
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:50AM (1 child)
The written record is kind of a primitive technology compared to what we're figuring out about communication now. But throughout history and throughout civilizations - you need to eventually communicate commerce. The constant in our varied race is that we always end up getting together, settling down, farming and beginning commerce. The need to pass knowledge develops by itself unconditionally.
However humans didn't default to civilization so not every group will adapt at once and may split. So we've basically been creating the same concept - written record - over and over again for the same reason inventions are discovered on accident. It's just that there was no record of prior art for these early languages. Because liek how would that work - you can't go file a patent when you can't language.
If we could figure out how not to lose this knowledge (which seems more likely now than ever) we can eventually optimize into something unified. But universal language has been a pipe dream because of this since like the 60s, and probably since some of that weird proto-scifi that makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
But yeah, greater diversity in tropical regions would seem to support this. It would make sense for more concurrent invention to happen in what are considered cradles of life (assuming it's correct to refer to such places this way and it's not just Africa).
Also we assume some laughable shit about distance. Being on an island 100km over from the other guys might as well be the other side of the world 2000 years ago. If it wasn't for super-recent inventions it'd be hard to not think of it that way today.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @08:29AM
But they DO grow off a Hobby Lobby! Written language parallels the development of accounting.