The development of languages.

The development of  

                   languages.

How many languages?

You may be surprised, but it is a very difficult task for linguists to give the correct answer to the question, “How many languages are there in the world?” Before they can start counting, they have to decide what we should take as a language? Should dialects be added to the general number? What is the difference between a language and a dialect? How many people must speak the language? Is it obligatory for a language to be written? And this list of questions can be very long… 

If you do not want to go into detail, just trust in professionals’ opinions, which state the following: There are from 6800 to 6900 distinct languages in the modern world.

As you see, even scientists are not able to give a more or less exact number.
In fact, it happens because from time to time different languages disappear, because peoples speaking them die out or assimilate with other peoples. Thus, their languages become extinct.

How did languages appear.

But what is the history of languages? How did they appear?

There is a theory that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago.

But how did the first language come from? It is also question with no answer - only there are some theories about origin of the languages.

The Bow-Wow Theory
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic--marked by echoic words such meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang.
Relatively few words are echoic, and these words vary from one language to another. For instance, a dog's bark is heard as au au in Brazil, ham ham in Albania, andwang, wang in China. In addition, many onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural sounds.

The Ding-Dong Theory
Some people have pointed out that there is a rather mysterious correspondence between sounds and meanings.  Small, sharp, high things tend to have words with high front vowels in many languages, while big, round, low things tend to have round back vowels!  Compare “itsy” “bitsy” “teeny” with “moon” “sun”, for example.  This is often referred to as sound symbolism.

The Pooh-Pooh Theory
This theory holds that speech began with interjections--spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").
No language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out, "the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises which are used in this way bear little relationship to the vowels and consonants found in phonology."

The Yo-He-Ho Theory
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor.
Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.

The eureka! theory. 

 And finally, perhaps language was consciously invented.  Perhaps some ancestor had the idea of assigning arbitrary sounds to mean certain things.  Clearly, once the idea was had, it would catch on like wild-fire!

But it is also quite an unreal idea.

Finally, there is a story about the Tower of Babel, the reason why did  God decide to separate languges.

Up until this point in the Bible, the whole world had one language - one common speech for all people. The people of the earth became skilled in construction and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach to heaven. By building the tower they wanted to make a name for themselves and also prevent their city from being scattered.

God came to see their city and the tower they were building. He perceived their intentions, and in His infinite wisdom, He knew this "stairway to heaven" would only lead the people away from God. He noted the powerful force within their unity of purpose. As a result, God confused their language, causing them to speak different languages so they would not understand each other. By doing this, God thwarted their plans. He also scattered the people of the city all over the face of the earth.

The Most Popular Language in the World 

Do you know what language is the most widely spoken one? If you think it is English, you are badly mistaken. Look at the table below. 

Language

Number of native speakers

Mandarin Chinese

about 880 million

Spanish

about 325 million

English

about 315-380 million

Arabic

about 205-425 million

Hindu

about 185 million

Portuguese

about 180 million

Bengali

about 175 million

Russian

about 145 million

Japanese

about 130 million

German

about 95 million

 The hardest and the easiest to learn

Many of those who study foreign languages wonder which language is the most difficult one in the world. Linguists say that there is no precise answer to this question because everything depends on which language you speak. Neurophysiologists believe, though, that the Chinese or the Arabic could be described as world's most difficult languages. The brain of native Chinese or Arab speakers may find it difficult to perceive those languages.

Specialists of linguistics say that complications in learning a foreign language depend on the language carried by the person who studies a foreign language. For example, the Russian language, which is generally considered to be one of the hardest in the world, will not be very hard to learn for Ukrainians or the Czechs. However, a Turkish or a Japanese student may never be able to study Russian - they may find it incredibly hard to learn.

From the point of view of affinity, the Basque language - Euskara - can be considered one of the hardest languages in the world to learn. This language is not connected with any other language group, not matter live or dead.

The Guinness Book of World Records gives another example - the Chippewa. This is a dialect of Ojibwe - an Indian tribe in Canada and the USA. There is also the Haida - an Indian tribal language in the north-west of North America. The Tabasaran - a native language for an ethnic group in Dagestan is also extremely difficult, along with the Eskimo and Chinese languages.

The Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages are considered the world's most difficult languages from the point of view of written language. In Japan, for example, children study for 12 years. A half of this time is devoted to only two subjects: the Japanese language and mathematics. To leave school, Japanese students have to pass the exams that test their knowledge of 1,850 hieroglyphs. To read a newspaper article, a Japanese person needs to know at least 3,000 hieroglyphs.

Scientists from the US-based Defense Language Institute made the ranking of world's most difficult languages for studying. The group of the easiest languages (for native English speakers) included: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish.

The second group consisted of the following languages: Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), German, (Modern) Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian, Malay.

The following languages are more difficult: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Czech, Finnish, (Modern) Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, Pilipino (Tagalog), Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese.

And finally, the most difficult languages in the world (for English-speakers, though) are: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Interestingly, the Hebrew and the Arabic languages, which belong to the Semite language group, were ranked on different levels of difficulty. This peculiarity is the same for native speakers of both languages. A research conducted by the scientists from the University of Haifa showed that it was harder for Arabs than for Jews and British (or Americans) to read Arabic texts. The reason for that is as simple as it is remarkable: the human brain processes the written characters of those languages differently.

It is commonly known that the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the human brain are different. The right part of the brain is responsible for solving abstract tasks and template information processing. The left part specializes in distinguishing speech and texts. The right cerebral hemisphere is responsible for intuition and is capable of understanding metaphors. The left part deals with the realization of only the literal meaning of words.

Israeli scientists analyzed the activity of the brain when reading and distinguishing words among the native speakers of English, Arabic and Hebrew languages. Volunteers took part in two experiments. During the first one, they were shown words and meaningless combinations of letters in their native language. The respondents had to decide whether the words had any meaning, while the researchers were registering the precision and  time at which the answers were given.

During the second experiment, the volunteers were shown words on the left and the right parts of the screen simultaneously. The brain thus had to analyze the symbols either with the right or with the left hemisphere.

The results proved to be very interesting. The English-speaking and Hebrew-speaking volunteers could read the words easily with one of the hemispheres regardless of the other. The results shown by the Arabic-speaking respondents were different. When reading the Arabic, the right cerebral hemisphere can not function without using the resources of the left hemisphere. Reading the symbols of the Arabic written language activates cognitive systems of the brain, the scientists concluded. Therefore, if you want to develop your mind, you can take the studies of the Arabic language as a good option.

Similar peculiarities were discovered during the experiments with the Chinese and the English languages. The researchers observed the brain activity of the carriers of the Chinese and the English languages at the time when they were listening to their native speech. English speakers had only the left part of their brain activated. As for the Chinese, both of their cerebral hemispheres were working.

Many dialects of the Chinese language have four main tones, and the brain needs to be fully activated to process such information. Strangely enough, the Chinese grammar is one of the easiest in the world. Chinese words do not change grammatically at all.

Those native English speakers who study their language professionally, say that English is not as simple as it may seem to be. The English language became international incidentally, British scholars say. English grammar is hard to learn and understand indeed. It has been established that English is easy to learn for young students from the countries of Roman languages - France and Italy.

Artificial languages

The most famous artificial language is Esperanto. It was created in the late 1870s by Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist of mixed cultural heritage from Bialystok. Zamenhof believed if he could solve the communication problem, people would have greater understanding for each other and would be able to live together in peace. He spoke Russian, Yiddish and German fluently and later studied a number of other languages, including French, English, Latin and Greek. These were the languages he was to base his project for creating a new neutral international language.

As a teenager, he developed the first version of this language called 'Lingwe uniwersala'. When he went off to study medicine in Moscow, he gave all his notes to his father to look after. His father didn't understand the purpose of his son's project and was scared what the Russian police would do if they found them, so he burnt them.

When Zamenhof came back from Moscow and found out what his father had done, he was forced to recreate his language from scratch. It took him ten years to perfect his language, which he then taught to his brothers and friends.

In 1887, his project was published in a book entitled 'Lingvo Internacia' under the pseudonym 'Dr. Esperanto', meaning 'the one that hopes', which later became the name of the language. The number of Esperanto speakers grew rapidly and within a short space of time there were Esperanto clubs and societies right across the world. The first World Congress of Esperanto or Universala Kongreso took place in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905.

World Congresses were held every year until the outbreak of World War I. Zamenhof died in 1917 while Europe was still in the midst of the bloodiest conflict it had ever seen - far from his dream of seeing all nations living in peace. After the war, it was possible for Esperantists to organise international congresses again and there was also a proposal for the newly formed League of Nations to adopt Esperanto as an official language. All but one of the delegates voted in favour - the proposal was finally vetoed by the delegate from France, who argued that French was already the international language.

As fascism spread across Europe in the 1930s, Esperanto was used in the struggle for freedom. It was used in Spain during the Civil War, to encourage international volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic. The language was banned and Esperantists were persecuted by many of the totalitarian regimes. Franco believed its speakers were all communists, Stalin called it the language of spies, and Hitler saw Esperanto as part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. It is specifically mentioned in Mein Kampf and Esperantists were among those killed in the Holocaust. Members of the Zamenhof family were targeted in particular. Zamenhof's daughter Lydia was killed in Treblinka concentration camp in 1942.

Junularo Esperantista Brita was founded in 1959 and throughout the 60s and 70s Esperanto went from strength to strength worldwide. It often received government support in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, being taught in schools or used in radio broadcasts. In 1987, Esperantists celebrated the centenary of the language which renewed interest in it and now in the digital age Esperanto is seeing a yet another revival via the internet.

Alternative ways of communication

Languages are quite important part of our life, but we have other ways of communication, for example Morse code.

Beginning in 1836, Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed an electric telegraph, which sent pulses of electrical current to control an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the telegraph wire. The technology available at the time made it impossible to print characters in a readable form, so the inventors had to devise an alternate means of communication. In 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone began operating electric telegraphs in England that also had electromagnets in the receivers; however, their systems used needle pointers that rotated to indicate the alphabetic characters being sent.

In contrast, Morse's and Vail's initial telegraph, which first went into operation in 1844, made indentations on a paper tape when an electrical current was transmitted. Morse's original telegraph receiver used a mechanical clockwork to move a paper tape. When an electrical current was received, an electromagnet engaged an armature that pushed a stylus onto the moving paper tape, making an indentation on the tape. When the current was interrupted, the electromagnet retracted the stylus, and that portion of the moving tape remained unmarked.

The Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into text messages. In his earliest code, Morse had planned to only transmit numerals, and use a dictionary to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by Alfred Vail to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used in the English language were assigned the shortest sequences.

In the original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved into and out of position to mark the tape. Operators soon learned to translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes, making it unnecessary to use the paper tape. When Morse code was adapted to radio, the dots and dashes were sent as short and long pulses. It was later found that people become more proficient at receiving Morse code when it is taught as a language that is heard, instead of one read from a page.[1] To reflect the sound of Morse code, practitioners began to vocalise a dot as "dit", and a dash as "dah".

Morse code was an integral part of international aviation. Commercial and military pilots were required to be familiar with it, both for use with early communications systems and identification of navigational beacons which transmitted continuous three letter ID's in Morse code. As late as the 1990s, aeronautical charts listed the three letter ID of each airport in Morse and sectional charts still show the Morse signals for Vortac and NDB used for in flight navigation.

Morse code was also used as an international standard for maritime communication until 1999, when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System. When the French navy ceased using Morse code in 1997, the final message transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence."