People underneathstand evolution in all kinds of different methods. We’ve all heard a variety of folks explanations of that all-important phenomenon, from “survival of the fittest” to “people come from monkeys,” that run the spectrum from broadly correct to unhealthyly mangled. One much less typically heard however extra elegant strategy to put it’s that each one species, living or extinct, share a common ancestor. That is true of evolution as Darwin knew it, and it may properly be true of other types of “evolution” outfacet the biological realm as properly. Take languages, which we all know full properly have modified and break up into different varieties over time: do they, too, all share a single ancestor?
In the RobWords video above, language Youtuber Rob Watts begins along with his native English and traces its roots again so far as possible. He ascends up the family tree previous Low West German, previous Professionalto-Germanic — “a language that was theoretically spoken by a single group of people who would eventually go on to turn out to be the Swedes, the Germans, the Dutch, the English, and extra” — again to an ancestor of not simply English and the Germanic languages, however virtually all of the European languages, in addition to of Asian languages like Hindi, Pashtu, Kurdish, Farsi, and Bengali. Its title? Proto-Indo-European.
Watts quotes the eighteenth-century philologist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the traditional Asian language of Sanskrit has a structure “extra perfect than the Greek, extra copious than the Latin, and extra exquisitely refined than both, but bearing to each of them a stronger affinity, each within the roots of verbs and within the types of grammar, than may possibly have been professionalduced by accident.” As with such conspicuously shared traits noticed in disparate species of plant or animal, no professional “may examinationine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common supply, which, perhaps, not exists.”
The evidence is eachthe place, in the event you pay attention to the type of unexpected cognates and very-nearly-cognates Watts factors out spanning geographically and temporally various languages. Take the English hundred, the Latin centum, the Historic Greek hekaton, the Russian sto, and the Sanskrit Shatam; or the extra deeply buried resemblances of English coronary heart, the Latin cordis, the Russian serdce, and the sanskrit hrd. In some cases, linguists have actually used these commonalities to reverse-engineer Professionalto-Indo-European phrases, although at all times with the caveat that the entire thing “is a reconstructed language; it’s our greatest guess of what a common ancestral language may have been like.” Was there a nonetheless previouser language from which the non-Professionalto-Indo-European-descended languages additionally descended? That’s a question to push the linguistic imagination to its very limits.
Related content:
Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky
How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation
The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter
The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.