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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 mcgrew on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:23PM (1 child)
Really? I had a class in college named Verbal Logic. You're right that it's one of the most difficult languages to learn as a second language, but all languages have logical problems with speech. Paradoxes, for instance, aren't real but actually errors in logic.
Verbal Logic was mentioned in Asimov's Foundation. When studied, the prince's (or whoever, haven't read it in years) speech turned out to say absolutely nothing at all.
As to why there are different languages, that's a REALLY unintelligent question. Language evolves; all of them. Even after American English evolving for only two centuries I find it hard to understand anyone from Massachusetts, Only a few hundred years ago the words "Thee" and "thou" were used. "Leveled" was spelled "levelled" in the first of the 20th century. And when was the last time you heard "shall" in conversation?
When you have the Chinese separated from Germany for thousands of years, the languages evolve differently because until recently it took a REALLY long time to get across any country. I think in a hundred years or two all languages will evolve into a single one.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 18 2017, @05:28PM
Not to disagree with your point, but rather to reinforce it with divergences that happen with evolution:
"Thou" and related forms are still are used in some rare dialects, particularly some Amish communities in the U.S.
Doubling of letters with suffixes is a very unstable phenomenon in English, with Brits retaining a lot more doubled letters these days than Americans.
Uh, yesterday -- when I said it. It still is used colloquially in certain contexts, though often in a somewhat stylized utterance. It often only appears in questions like "Shall we?" when about to embark on something, etc. It's a bit unfair to target "shall" because most of the first-person occurrences are subsumed into contracted forms "we'll," "I'll," etc., so it's actually unclear whether "shall" or "will" is intended. That's probably one major element that led to its gradual decline in usage; on the rare occasions that most people expand those contracted forms in speech, they now prefer "will" most of the time. (A better metric for this is the demise of the contraction "shan't" = "shall not" which is decidedly archaic now.) Aside from occasional use in questions (generally first-person plural), it still is standard when discussing formal rules or regulations, as in bylaws that state "The Treasurer SHALL do X..."