Tower of Babel vs Linguistics - the quest for the first language
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- čas přidán 1. 12. 2016
- Did one original language shatter into many? The Tower of Babel, the evolution of languages and the quest for Proto-World.
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~ For you readers ~
The Tower of Babel is one of humankind's early attempts to explain the variety of languages spoken across the earth. Thousands of years later, philologists and linguists studied the natural evolution of language. So then, what's the true story of language history?
In this video, we'll look at the traditional interpretation of the Tower of Babel story: the Adamic language once split into 72 languages to confuse people. Then we'll consider how historical linguistics compared cognates, established language families and traced related languages back to a common proto-language.
Right where historical linguistics hits mysteries and dead ends, you'll meet the "long rangers". These linguistic mavericks dared to go further back in time. Finally, briefly see why mainstream linguistics dismisses long-range findings as pseudoscientific.
~ CREDITS ~
Art, narration and animation by Josh from NativLang.
Some of the music, too.
Sources for my claims and credits for imgs, sfx, music:
docs.google.com/document/d/1u...
Ancient Egyptians tried a jab at finding the original language.
They theorized that the original language is something everyone is born with inside our baby brains, but over time as you listen to grown-ups talking we start to forget the vocabulary of the original language and start to learn theirs.
So they took twins new born baby's and Isolated them from all society and human contact with only two guards to look over them, deliver food and make sure they don't die, all while making sure they never uttered a word in their presence, nothing else.
Eventually one of the babies pointed at a piece of bread and uttered "Paigus" which was an actual word in a language found in the southern parts of Egypt and that word meant bread, "the greatest coincidence in history" anyone with a sound mind would say, but not the Egyptions, to them, this was a breakthrough!
Needless to say, such types of experiments are now classified as "Ethically Prohibited"
iirc the story was that the kids had been left with only a mute shepherd, probably there are various versions as accounts from that time aren't THAT reliable. Anyways, the book i have read went over this and claimed that what the egyptians mistook for the word "bread" was just the child imitating the sounds sheep made. The only sound they had heard so far.
Which i think is interesting because, even if the egyptians didn^t realize it, they just proved that language and the tendency to learn to understand and communicate with it is hardwired into our brains even when no effort to teach it is made. Which is in line with what modern neurology supports, that we have specific brain structures meant for language.
@@navaryn2938 Is all. and I mean ALL of the origin of words is from imitating the nature sound? and then build up new words on the original words?
Source?
@@borkwoof696
My memory.
It is from a video by a Medical Doctor called Muhammad Ghanayim.
@@borkwoof696 Herodotus' Histories. Herodotus was known for his fanciful, elaborative and often unreliable exposition, especially regarding areas of the world it is probable to assume he did not visit, most prominently Egypt, his description of which takes up an entire book within the work. Herein he records either a folk-tale or what can be assumed to constitute a loose anecdote, presumably of Egyptian provenance, detailing a rather contemporaneous account of a practice wherein two infants were isolated in an effort to determine whether the Egyptian or the Phrygian language was the elder of the two. The infants were provided for nutritionally, but were not spoken to at all. In the end, Phrygian came out on top, with one of the infants uttering a noise that was interpreted as being of that tongue.
English with a south side Chicago accent is the original language
your ass is the origin of all bullshits
on BD
Cristero Warrior idiot
Yeah- I first heard it over by the gangway near the Jewels. Me 'n ' Johnny was under the pump at 47th near Community the second time I heard it.
Aaayyyeeee
The most proto language started with:
- I want food
- I want shelter
- I want sex
Which then led to:
- Your cooking sucks
- This house is drafty
- Yes, this is your child
🤣🤣
I want hood!!
and the next you know we are talking about the taxes
The tower of Babel story is probably talking about the Sumerians, they lived in Mesopotamia, spoke a single language and build tall towers in the center of their cities made out of mud brick and used tar for mortar, exactly as the bible describes. Eventually people from the surrounding tribes moved into sumer speaking different languages, over time the official language was changed from sumerian to Babylonian. I'm guessing this is what the tower of Babel story is referring to.
Probably. Many stories from Genesis are based on real stories. Another example is the Great Flood, which is most likely referring to massive coastal flooding after the ice age.
Edit: The story of Noah in particular is probably from large river floods, rather than coastal flooding
Indeed
Matt L
Be careful. There are many who take those stories as the full truth. Some of them might react defensively.
Babel refers to the city of Babylon itself, in my opinion.
@@sirbillius Good way to find who is worth talking to and who is an ideologue.
4:44
So the Proto-Afro-Asiatic word for "to suck" was MLG...intriguing.
Kasane1337
in this case mlg means minor league gaming
@@cl4655 lmao. I thought I read "Major League gaming" so I was about to tell you it was just a joke until I saw "minor".
Because someone jumped off the Tower of Babel and had to MLG water bucket...
I just realized that it’s quite similar to the Latin word: ”MVLCEAT” (”milking”) 🤔.
No such thing
If you look at the Tower of Babel story, you wouldn't really expect there to be one language that all languages came out of. Instead, you would expect to find several families of languages separated geographically.
Indeed. You would expect the handful of languages that came out of the instantaneous split to separate and go throughout the world, keeping to themselves.
Reuben French Well that's kinda what it is. One language splits up and becomes a family. Latin split up into the romance languages, that's just how they all change.
Yoshev Haaretz That's not what Reuben is proposing. He's saying that if the Tower of Babel story is true, that you'd have several language families (which can't be traced all the way back to the Adamic language) spread out geographically.
Thomas Riley Oh you mean little isolated groups that just changed alone!!! like, if some tribe went off to like, Australia and never disbanded you couldn't well connect it to anything else. I see, thank you!
I thought this as well. It wouldn't be just one language splitting into other languages. It would be entirely new languages unrelated to the original.
As a Gael I love that you included that story of the proto-Irishman picking up the best bits of other languages. Gaelic mythology is full of stories of how Irish people were about in the ancient past - there’s a story of how the Irish were on their own exodus when they ran into Moses and the Hebrews in the Sinai
Really? Do the stories tell of them exploring the world?
I once heard of Columbus and others, using Irishmen as translators. They could speak at least three languages. If not more. So this ties into everything I’ve learned quite nicely!
This reminds me of that two part TV miniseries The Dovekeepers. It’s about the siege of the fortress of Masada in Israel, and there was one guy who was with the Jews in the fortress that spoke with an Irish accent. So potentially that could be a correlation! 🤷🏻♂️
🤺☦🇷🇺Adamic was the language from which Hebrew was derived, and which the other west Semitic languages were it's 1st corrupted versions of (and the next more corrupted versions are the Hamitic and Japhetic spoken by all mankind). I am fluent in the ancient Hebrew language.
@@EasternOrthodox101 You're fluent in lying. Why would you comment such a obviously disproven thing on a video about language reconstruction 🤦
I mean, if we go by absolute technicality, someone did speak the first words. There probably was a "first language", whether a few years or a few minutes before the next.
Idk language must have originated slowly, depending on what you define as a language, even dolphins or chimpances would have a language
I don’t think that’s the case, that someone would have had to have spoken the first word, because it assumes that a first word existed at all. Language would have probably developed gradually, so it would be impossible to distinguish a “first word” in the gradient from screams and calls to full-on language.
@@traktortarik8224 If we look at how strategies of communication work in primates, and the fact that infants are hard wired to learn how to communicate, we can infer that the first language of what we today would consider spoken words, would've arisen with whatever population group in our distant past had the physical and mental adaptations to form words. as such it can't have been from Australopithecus, as they likely couldn't form words, like how chimps can't speak, they just can't, but somewhere, somewhen, our ancestors started to speak
@Questa Semplice Animazione we have a bottleneck though, so it’s not entirely impossible so the debate should be when language evolved
@Questa Semplice Animazione we had a bottleneck where we reduced to a few thousand individuals, meaning if they had a spoken language it probably was the same or at least the same language area
As a Biologist I think figuring out when hominides evolved something like speech would help figuring out if there is indeed one proto-world language or if languages emerged multiple times independent from one another. Vice versa, proving if a proto-world language is a real thing or not could help with studying hominide evolution. Overall this seems to be quite the unique and interesing topic. Would be nice if you could make a new video about this topic as soon as there is new stuff about it
🤺☦🇷🇺Homonides??🤦🤣🤣🤣
Adamic was the language from which Hebrew was derived, and which the other west Semitic languages were it's 1st corrupted versions of (and the next more corrupted versions are the Hamitic and Japhetic spoken by all mankind). I am fluent in the ancient Hebrew language.
@@EasternOrthodox101bot
We have a vague idea of where our ancestors were throughout time and when they split apart from each other, we just need to figure out when we started talking
Seems unlikely that the proto world for water would be something like "aqua" not only across all of Eurasia, but also the Americas.
It's been a LONG time since I read it, but I think The Power of Babel poked fun at that reconstruction. A world full of speech, and of all places Italy kept the proto-word intact!
In the North East of Spain the main IE languages were Roman and Celtic, and their order words in toponyms is noun + adjetive, Romance language have this order too. But we have also a really strange hydronyms and toponyms in that area (like Araguás), with a different order, first a IE root normally an adjetive followed by the name aqua.
I don't think this language is supposed to be something that people apparently spoke. We just have reconstruction.
Indo European is probably pretty close, but it's also constantly being refined and added to as linguistic techniques become more advanced. Beyond that, it's much more vague.
I think these mass comparison reconstructions tell us something though. After all, people speak now in certain ways, and it must've been passed down from something else somehow.
The converse argument is that language arose multiple times independently. Which is probably true insofar as new words with new sounds were created, but probably not in the elements of our language that simply arise from the way our brain works (and how it changed over time), which we have almost entirely in common with all other people.
NativLang It'd be great to see a video on the Eskimo-Aleut languages since they are spoken in both Siberia and North America
Meghan Hirsh atl is water in Nauhatl which is a Mexican language. or agua in Spanish.
So, S-O-V order, pre-noun adjectives, and postpositions? Clearly the original human language was... Japanese! 😏
Wow... Anime had it right all along.
Anime was real before the Tower of Babel
And Turkic languages. And also, Mongolian, Korean and Tungusic. These features aren't special to Japanese, you know
@@OdessiasOddeseys english isn't SOV
Actually all of it applies to Hindi as well... And even many of the words mentioned
Here's the reason why Proto-World is a near impossible task:
1. *SUPERFAMILIES*
First, we have to combine language families into bigger families, and then we need to combine those families, and then we need to combine the families of the combined families to get to Proto-World. We don't even know if some words are *mistaken* cognates, which means that they're coincidental and are actually not related. I have found a ton of very similar words with the same meaning who come from different words in Indo-European.
2. *COMPARATIVE METHOD*
Not only do we have to worry about accidental cognates and the overwhelming amount of language families we need to find cognates with: we don't even know if those are exact! Indo-European is just an amazing guess at a language, and it is one of the most researched language families! We need to combine it with other ones and such and such, and it gets to the point where Proto-Human is just a guess based on guesses based on more guesses which are based on facts.
3. *LOCATIONS*
So, we have a terrible comparative method, but that's OK, we can try grouping languages based on geographical location, right? That shouldn't be too faulty... yes, it is.
We barely have an idea of where the people who spoke Eurasiatic were, or Dene-Caucasian were, or any number of other things! Therefore we can't use location to our advantage unless we have researched and have a pretty good idea as to where they originated. Of course, once we have done that, we still need to figure out more stuff!
4. *THE JOB*
So, I've talked about several terrible problems that prevent the job from being done, but I've never actually talked about how HARD the regular job is without obstructions! If none of those problems existed, we would STILL have a hard time just from the sole way the job is done. We have been working on Indo-European for so long it's a shame we haven't gotten farther with the language!
But, if there is a will: there is a way.
~ Jameez TheRandomGuy
Read Merrit Ruhlen, I think he brings strong proof that demonstrate that all langauges come from a Proto-Language
1. Ruhlen brings tons of words that are cognates, and I think that if a word shares sounds and meaning with another word, they may be related, becuase it is less probable that two words that share sounds and meaning are mistaken cognates.
2. Ruhlen said that a lot of indoeuropeanists criticised this method, but it is the same method used for the indentification of the Indo-European family.
3. Yes.
4. Yes, but we should try to do this, if we don't do anything, we won't discover the origin of language.
In the end, I think that Greenberg and Ruhlen's work isn't 100% correct, but it could be a good start
And further problems are raised if you try to supplement the linguistic data with DNA and archeological evidence.
Well I don't know if "guess" is correct here since proto languages are constructed based on evidence. That it was a single language at one point may be a guess, but it's no guess and rather evidence about sound correspondences. So perhaps you could end up with a system where everyone has correspondence with one another without asserting necessarily that the language was spoken at any one point (as seems to be the case with middle Chinese where languages gradually broke off so perhaps it wasn't ever spoken as a unified language)
With the new and super powerful A.I.'s that are appearing in the market, I think linguists can do all these tasks in order to discover the Proto World.
How about a video about Basque/Euskara? I hear it's a weird language, being a language isolate in Europe. Cheers.
Alpharius basque is not a proto indo-european language, basque is a bit strange becuase it appears not to releated to any other languages.
Alpharius Basque is the language of God.
I support this. How Euskara remained an isolated languaje throughout the years, when it probably originated and how.
According to the "superfamily" theory, Basque belongs to the Sino-Caucasian superfamily of languages together with Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan etc.) and Dene-Caucasian (Yeneisian, Na-Dene etc.). But that's highly unlikely.
Do Korwan and Japanese fall into the same language branch?
Considering how long different communities from that long ago would frequently be isolated from each other (post Agriculture), I kinda feel like a single "first language" probably couldn't be found with any modern methods, since it probably would have been spoken long, long before Agriculture. Even that throws a wrench into it, since (correct me if I'm wrong) several nomadic communities would interact so much that I'd think they'd be sharing linguistic elements left and right.
LunDruid Exactly, but following that line of thinking, if humans came from a general region, then it's not far fetched to think that multiple tribes in close proximity and interaction developed some form of proto language, which eventually evolved into multiple other languages as time went on.
@@uknwtheusername I'm right with you on that. While I don't have any doubt that the world languages are in some way related to each other, I don't think it is possible to reconstruct languages that far back.
It's no coincidence that the reconstructions and relationships between languages breaks off a couple thousand years before the earliest writings in these languages. We rely on these writings as records for these languages. Without any data on languages of a time period, how are we supposed to predict how they would have changed?
Yeah even if it was possible to find some few traces of an "original" language we could never prove that they were actually reliable reconstructions.
@@uknwtheusername Humans likely evolved over a course of 1 million years from the Homo Erectus who stayed in Africa breeding with the Homo Neanderthalensis in Eurasia coming down during one of the Ice Ages.
That and the fact that not every language has a written language. So those types would have eventually been lost or undiscovered.
Given the groups of seemingly unrelated language families, the Tower of Babel sounds like a plausible story. (Whether one branch of people continued to speak the very first language [which would evolve into its own family] is impossible to answer.)
Sumerian was originally a unique language before being influenced by akkadian and aramaic, so it is a contender for being the descendent of proto-world while others were freshly derived, like a thicket where one orchard had deeper roots but didn't have as long of a trunk and protruding branches (as it died sooner than the others). ...heh, kind oo puts a spin on "Garden of Eden".
...One Million BC -
Ugg: (pointing to self) 'Ugg'.
Zogg: 'Zogg'
Ugg: 'Zogg?'
Zogg: 'Zogg!'
Ugg: 'Zogg? - Hmm - A pleasure to meet you old fellow'.
Wot da zog iz dis 'umie on aboot?
ki ba a e mi ka a'a em a
'u na nou guat tiu sain
Gneurshk
Zogg: *NANI!?*
I'm not sure where else to show my appreciation so I thought I'd share it in the comments:
Your channel has changed my life! I grew up bilingual (English and Brazilian-Portuguese) and I study Spanish at school (applying to study Spanish and ab into Italian at Uni), and grammar has been something I've always dreaded and, to be honest, despised. However I came across your video about the letter ñ and I was pretty intrigued to say the least. I watched so many of your videos and I've also now read your book 'The Grammar of Romance'. I'm so in love with this side to languages thats never really been my forte and I'm even hoping to take a few linguistics modules at university. I know I'm rambling but I don't know how to say thank you enough. I have an interview at Cambridge University next week and because of your videos I feel more prepared than I could've imagined. Once again, thank you!
Giulia G. Merolli - seriously? Changed your life? Very dramatic...
Thank you. I'm only happy to share such an inspiring subject with you and help you change your mind about language ;) Have an amazing interview - it already sounds like you will!
Giulia G. Merolli glad to know I'm not the only one who shares that sentiment. Thanks, NativLang!
Otimo :D
I don't mean to pry, but can we get an update and how your uni studies are going, and where you decided to matriculate? I'd love to know! It is a great channel.
Thanks for the video. It's pretty striking how Indo-European those proto-words look. *akwa and *kuna for instance. But that's probably a red flag that it's not necessarily a good theory.
My favourite "theory" of which language was spoken in paradise is a satirical 17th century suggestion that Adam spoke Danish, God spoke Swedish, and the serpent obviously spoke French in order to seduce Eve.
Well, one would expect some similarity between a proto language and later families.
Paeremannen
Yes *akwa and *kuna does fit into Indo-European; but it is not a good fit for many other language families, for instance, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, where water was *tujH and woman was *njaɣ; which sounds nothing similar to the "Proto words" as suggested in the video.
+neeneko Yeah, but not with only ONE of them.
YummYakitori in the guarani language of Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil the word for woman is (kunha/cuña)
In Swedish ''Kona'' is a word for a promiscuous woman..
"I like to think the first word was 'ouch!'" -- Isaac Asimov from his short story "The Last Word."
This was definitely interesting! You brought a lot of questions into my mind!
Can you do video on Native Australian languages?
Ęÿūį Æßñ its Austronesian he just said you you dipshit
@@TheChristianity77777 Not a single ethnic group in Australia speaks an Austronesian language, you dipshit.
No
I think this is misunderstanding the biblical narrative. The original language would have been lost and whatever was spoken afterwards are the 'original' languages of man. No languages following Babel could proceed it. This depends on your belief of the Bible of course.
Kevin Slater Exactly. After they were cast down from the tower, they could not understand each other. But then we must remember the anti-diluvian and post-diluvian eras, descending only from Noah and the saved animals from the big flood.
But that is not the flaw of the video maker himself, instead it's a flaw of the researchers he talked about.
I agree, I feel like the original language wasn't spoken after God divided their tongues. Seeing as the purpose was to avoid humankind from becoming as powerful as God, I wonder if translation and interpretation are somewhat rebel professions:P
@Александр Tell me about them...I am ignorant to the subject matter
@@katherinetutschek4757 I'm not that familiar with the bible - how did they get back their language(s)? And having more than a billion English speakers through education we could get to the level back again where everyone speaks one language (even though it's not the original language of course)
I'm fairly sure this is a reference to Sumerian and Akkadian, two entirely different (linguistically unrelated) languages that were both written with the same cuneiform symbols. The two people lived right on top of each other, but could not understand each other at all. We even have early cuneiform stories such as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta where the writer laments that the peoples of the region can't all speak one language, and can't therefore understand each other, and asks their god to make them all speak a single language. Some scholars have said that may be an extra-biblical hint at the origin of the Tower of Babel story.
But for the sake of postulation, making the assumption that the Tower of Babel story is literally true: if God changed everybody's languages, it would not be like languages diversifying over time from a common ancestor. If the text in Genesis were taken literally, then the event would have been a spontaneous and sudden transformation of languages to make them mutually entirely unintelligible. Suddenly people could not understand a word that was coming out of their neighbors' mouths. This is not some gradual diversification with a reconstructable pre-Babel linguistic parent to find. But more akin to what happens when a person has a stroke I suppose, or encounters somebody who speaks a foreign language now; with no commonality between what was spoken before and what was spoken after. Every person - or every family group - entirely unable to understand what every other family group was saying.
This, the Genesis tale says, is the reason people began to spread out over the earth, because they saw no point in being all together in a city when they could not understand each other. So they began to migrate across the earth in mutually intelligible groups. Then you would end up with something like we actually see in the modern day. A selection of entirely different language families, that then grew and diversified further over the centuries into the language trees we have today. Interesting.
🤺☦🇷🇺You are close, and Genesis is not a "tale", so take that blasphemy back! The Sumerians and Akkadians and others were 2 early Cushitic tribes, which Nimrod brought with him to Mesopotamia and to spread to east Asia. The Akkadians and Sumerians, as all peoples, spoke the same Adamic language, but after the deluge were split and confused. God punishment was mostly on the Sumerians who lead the creation of the tower, and so their language was the most confused of them all, therefore is "isolate". While the Akkadians and Semetic languages were the least corrupted.
Adamic was the language from which Hebrew was derived, and which the other west Semitic languages were it's 1st corrupted versions of (and the next more corrupted versions are the Hamitic and Japhetic spoken by all mankind). I am fluent in the ancient Hebrew language.
@@EasternOrthodox101 Genesis IS only a "tale
@@PiotrPavel You are a blasphemer. If you don't repent you will end up in the everlasting fire of Sheol
I can't imagine what compiling all these data tables would have been like before the widespread use of computers. How much work that must have been!
🤺☦🇷🇺Adamic was the language from which Hebrew was derived, and which the other west Semitic languages were it's 1st corrupted versions of (and the next more corrupted versions are the Hamitic and Japhetic spoken by all mankind). I am fluent in the ancient Hebrew language.
The whole point was for them to not be able to communicate, therefore not all languages are related
joel chan if he had just thrown it into a blender and it still sounded somewhat the same than it wouldn't have worked.
The story implies completely newly created language.
The_Borg
You’re trying to make it sound absurd, but it seems to me to make you a less reliable source of information. Besides that, why wouldn’t it? It doesn’t take much scrambling at all before sounds become unintelligible to other speakers
Babel is made up so there's no reason to mention it in linguistics anyway.
@@littlefishbigmountain
The story is supposed to explain the diversity of languages, hence the idea is that God created distinct languages in an instance as a sort of psychic weapon against mankind.
Taxtro
Given that He gave them language (as well as the ability to be able to understand and produce language) in the first place, creating more is no weapon. He wasn’t attacking humans by confusing their speech. Quite the opposite, in fact. He made it so they each peacefully went their own way instead of continuing their goal of building the world’s tallest tower to reach into the heavens
And given what we know about the Earth today, such a project was doomed from the start as you can’t go where God is by ascending into the sky. So apart from stopping them from building a giant monument to humanity’s self-sufficiency, He also peacefully brought the project to a stopping point that would have undoubtedly resulted in disaster and a huge loss of human life when either it came falling down, they reached the deadly levels of cold and lack of oxygen, or both. From the start, there was no succeeding with the Tower of Babel
To me this is the most intriguing question out there in regards to language. Is there one start off point, or are there many?
many, lots of migration through places like Turkey. Over 10, 000 years or more.
Well, there was lots of migration, but what we do not currently know is if a proto-language existed before migration started, or did the first languages emerge sometime after humanity had spread to several corners of the earth.
neeneko Well, there were a couple of migrations out of africa, so the langusages spoken by people probably changed a lot between each migration. plus, there would surely have been some tribaism, many people would have been cut off from others or been isolated in their own tribe etc. in africa (and other areas), so the language spoken and spread to india and persia and the levant could have all been different in the first place, even if people spread in one migration through there, there would be different languages in each area. and then many people spread to certain (usually harsher) areas only once the areas they had previously lived in became overpopulated, leading to more of the preious scenario occurring many times over, all over the world.
personally, i think that even the extremely early humans would have had many languages,since people were often much more spread out and separated in tribes, and language is one of those things which are learned, and not innate (words, i know we are innately predisposed to learn language) language probably evolved as human bodies evolved to speak, and thus would not have had a "first" language, but there would have been similar, early sounds which diverged as speech became more complex. it's like pottery, there probably wasn't a first pottery, but many early potteries were quite simple but distinct, and they diverged from there.
***** No linguist has believed an adamic language to have existed since 200 years ago, and no studier of language has believed that hebrew was the first language since the enlightenment. It's all based on the torah, which was once used to explain the differences between different peoples, however it obviously isn't the best source given that we can tell a world-wide flood never happened, the ark could not have existed in the way described, and it is biologically impossible for Adam and Eve to be everyone's ancestors. Why would you believe this particular part of the bible when very few others with linguistic experience have done for centuries?
Xir's Royal Majesty Oliver Cromwell hydroplate theory
"Tie your own hands, but you can't hold back a maverick!" Hahaha! You're my hero, man! Well said. Outstanding videos! The quality of the animations matches the efforts you put into the outstanding research. From an amateur linguist to a professional, thank you for your work!
I believe that there were several proto languages that formed around the same time.
0:41 - The bible's mention of world is often "the known world at the time"
Err... You actually mean "always" and not "often" XD
It's not like they knew a thing about americas, asia or the poles XD
@Абдульзефир yes, the West and parts of the East, nomads get around you know
As nice as a single, original language sounds, I feel simultaneous discovery *FAR* more likely. The big question is when language began rather than where (and therefore what it was).
@@jellyfishi_ LOL
found this channel, loving it.
It's funny how they didn't make the obvious counter-hypothesis: languages only appear to diminish in number as we go back because we're mostly talking about a pre-literate era where languages didn't just die, they vanished without a trace. Languages continue to kill each other to this day, even kin from common language families, so as you go backwards in time you would probably see an insane diversification of languages, not convergence.
Yes probably their were more languages out there in the past, that makes sense.
This Greenberg guy pops up all the time when looking at languages. I mean, theoretically there must have been a single language at one point, unless we developed language AFTER migrating around the world. which doesnt seem possible.
Why does it not seem possible?
And even if it is possible, you won't arrive at Proto-World by linguistic means (which I know isn't what you've claimed).
Greenberg did great thing for linguistics, but his reconstruction work is not good.
Well to be fair, most animals that our now widespread migrated around the world without a language like ours, so it's not impossible :P
It doesn't seem so difficult, to me. Languages could have been developed naturally in different places from basic forms of oral communication. Maybe 50 kms of distance could be enough to create different communities with different languages.
Even granting +Fummy's premise, I don't think that it necessitates one single original language. For instance, look at the peoples of Indonesia. Different tribes need only a few miles between them to be speaking an entirely different language (sometimes even an entirely unrelated language). It makes sense to me to posit hominids developing languages in isolated groups like that -- unless we want to assume that there was just one clever group of hominids, & nobody else had the idea that verbal communication helped in group cooperation.
There's also the question of "When does grunting & pointing become a language?" Personally, I don't think that there is a single point where we can indicate the development of a language, in the same way that there is no single point where we can indicate the development of a new species. Every mother that points & grunts gives birth to a child that points & grunts, & tiny changes are made across time until it eventually becomes clear that a proper language exists. If this is how one looks at language development, I think it becomes very challenging to defend the idea of a "single" original language (especially given that Homo sapiens alone has been around for at least 100,000+ years, & I have my suspicions that Homo erectus might have had enough mental acuity to speak as well).
I think it slowly developed form ape like sounds over millions of years there may have been languages spoken by nehandertals or homo erectus or even earlier humans they would have been very different from the proto world language that he belives in but still almost as complex as a modern language i dont think there was a real proto language but most modern languages probably are related very loosely.
I'm watching this video with subtitles right now. I'm learning English, and there are so many new words for me on these videos
This researches which i have been looking for.
Great doing
Go ahead.
I am loving your channel. The videos are so damn interesting. I started watching your videos two months back and they are great.
as a native hebrew speaker, your hebrew is really good!
Shpilbass Yeah, but his accent is terrible lol.
His spanish is great too.
He pronunced "Shin'ar" well, but I am not so sure about the Hebrew pharse at 0:27
Jonah Safern כן אבל יחסית לאמריקאי העברית שלו טובה
Shpilbass חחח כן
we’ll probably never reconstruct the first language, but it’s still an interesting effort (and a resource for writers)
Sometimes I hope the afterlife is like some sort of spectator mode where I can go anywhere throughout history. Finding and learning old languages that we don't even know exist would be amazing. And finding the actual first language spoken by people.
I was hoping you would talk about the Tower of Babel! Great video man.
CZcams suggested this video to me and I have happily subscribed!
What did we do to deserve so many videos in a row?! ❤
Don't presuppose that whatever transpired at Babel means all languages will relate after the confusion occurred. The text never says all languages derived from one but rather all languages ended up confused so groups could not understand each other.
It doesn't matter, since it didn't happen.
but how do we know it didn't happen?
... historical evidence and common sense ...
Also, it's not supposed to be taken literally.
This is true there are only a handful of languages scientist can prove all modern languages came from so yes there was a Proto language but at the same time there wasn’t because it was in a sense destroyed.
Nice video man
One interesting Medieval interpretation of the Babel story (referenced in Dante) is that each class of workers had their own language, and thus could not communicate with each other. This meant that the king was stuck speaking one language by himself since he had no equal.
I'd love a video about Irish or even the Celtic languages!!!
The languages created in the tower of babel story could very easily have just been the proto-languages of all the families that exist today. And the original language would have been proto-world
Always interesting and entertaining.
Here ppl are arguing about whether to classify Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages into a single family and this guy comes in and proposes a *World language family*
The first language was actually Esperanto
@@someonerandom704 actually it was taki Pona, duh
Quick question: when reconstructed, unattested words are presented, like at 3:58, how do you interpret the words? I thought it might be IPA, but there are no brackets, and there are symbols that aren't in the IPA like asterisks, capital v's, lone slashes, and "sh" superscripts.
It's definitely an interesting Idea and I think it makes alot of sense since we all share a common ancestor.
But how do you sort out some kind of parallel evolution, where two languages develop the same traits independently. I don't think it's really possible to reconstruct this original language. Who knows if any words of this language still remain.
It's also a matter of time scales. Our particular species has been around and spreading into geographically isolated pockets for tens of thousands of years, and we were capable of language *before* that. New languages can develop in *hundreds* of years. So we could very easily have major language groups that are effectively hundreds of times closer related to one another than they are to anything else, to the point that those big relationships at the top just aren't relevant anymore. Language just doesn't retain as much as biology does on the broadest scales and can completely rewrite itself in ways that biology really doesn't.
I suspect that language actually evolved long before Homo Sapience turned up on the scene. So it can be hard to find a root language. But when Homo Sapience started to migrate out of Africa those original groups likely shared a very smiler tongue. But they would also meet other pockets of humans like the Neanderthals which likely spoke a completely different tongue. And some of this languages likely intermingled with the early languages of Homo Sapience. Just like Homo Sapience appear to have interbreed with Neanderthals.
Finding a true root language is likely very hard as language just like life do not really follow a perfect tree structure. If anything language has a easer time to merge branches then life ever has. And hypothetically someone could just invent a language from nothing... Though to do so without preconceptions would be hard. Something I can see happing today but that is more due to the vast knowledge we have to go by. In a era where you only knew of a handful of closely related language you would likely invent one that was very smiler to those.
Cythil Why do you think that homosapiens interbred with Neanderthals?
KoinePineapple
There are Neanderthal gens in modern human populations outside of Africa. AT least that is what the most resent research seem to suggest.
@@andyjay729 why aren't neanterdals fully humans? STOP NEANDERTHAL RACISM (speciism? idk)
Wonderful video, love it!
Hey, just dropping a comment to let you know that your Hebrew pronunciation is really good! It was a pleasant surprise.
It kinda makes sense that if there was a proto language, then it would look like the one described. Short words, one step above mere sounds. And word order? "Woman clear water through walks" makes sense. Think about describing that scene to someone who doesn't speak the same language as you.
On the other hand, "it fits nicely" and "it's correct" aren't the same thing.
Cristi Neagu da diferenz il be aten in distan futur. Tuda aor relity i oda
oda rosan levenar a bental!!!!!!!!!!! ANSELOVAN!!!!
In sentences like that, then yes- word order doesn't matter. But consider "John kicks Peter". In that sentence, an understanding of word order is vital in a language without prefixes/suffixes etc that denote subject or object.
If Proto-World existed, it probably wasn't a language in the traditional sense. Think about how language probably evolved. Our early ancestors very likely wouldn't have been able to form complex words or sentences - human language likely started out similar to animal communication, with certain sounds having a very basic meaning like "watch out", but without grammar or the ability to express more complicated ideas.
This sort of primitive communication could have been universal among our early ancestors, passed on through genetics like it is with most other animals. Language probably evolved out of this, with the sounds becoming ever more complex and structured over time.
This is likely the closest thing there was to a Proto-World.
THE BINS OF FRINGE LINGUISTICS! DARKEST OF ALL POSSIBLE PURGATORIES! Man, I love your stuff and just signed up as a Patreon patron. LANGUAGE FREAKS, DO LIKEWISE!
I love the way you read the Hebrew in the beginning. It was a really formal way of speaking it and it sounded really nice
Oh, what a fascinating topic!
I feel like these people are forgetting that multiple “original” languages developed all at different times without a single connection to one another
Would it not be possible that language was used before modern humans had migrated throughout and out of Africa?
Can you provide evidence of this assertion?
@@jamesclipper4567 I did not make an assertion, it was a question. And wouldn't the alternative be several mute human societies throughout the earth up and sprout language independently. I find that to make little sense. Either way, far to ancient to prove or disprove.
@@nicholasparker2086 I mean it most definitely happened. I just believe there wasn’t a single “original” language
if all modern humans have the same common ancestor, then naturally, the conclusion would be that all humans once spoke the language, right? we still can't really disprove the myth of the tower of babel
As Neanderthals had speech/language long before Homo Sapiens evolved I think it's unlikely there was a sole language.
I always read Neanderthals as Netherlands and get confused for a few seconds/minutes.
+Julio Ruiz hahaha same
+Julio Ruiz me too actually I pronounced it like NEANDERthal like Netherland.
+Gaurav Ghosh it has nothing to do with The Netherlands at all, and it's not pronounced in that way.
Nea-An-Dur-Taahl vs Ne-thur-lands.
Though.. on second thought, you'd probably know that already (also that it's a different region, a valley in Germany - just in case you didn't know). Sorry if I came off as a wise ass too.
I’m studying translation studies and we were told about this tell tale. I dig deeper into the matter and found a experiment, which result was ASTOUNDING: the very first word we ever talked or said was “bekos” meaning hunger, needs and attention. You should do a video on that! This is the most complex CZcams channel ever BTW and that’s why I like it!
I don't think that is true, because nobody knows what the first word ever spoken was.
Your videos are always enjoyable and informative, than you
This channel is flipping amazing!!
Warning! Long and linguistically technical post ahead.
Proto indoeuropean and protosemitic are languages reconstructed according to a scientific method called "comparative-reconstructive method". To see if a group of languages are genealogically related one compares the form of the language (utterances) according to phonetic laws. One example of a phonetic law would be Grimm's law: in the evolution from indoeuropean, the germanic branch shifted the /p t k/ phonemes to /f th h/ respectively. The other branches did not, for this reason in latin we have 'pater', meaning father, while in gotic we have 'fadar'. We should avoid comparing loan words or words that are casually similar. This is more common than one may think, but considering that we can make words with around 40 sounds, in all the languages in the world there are bound to be a lot of casual similiarities, which does not mean that the languages that have them are related.
The second most important thing to do when applying the method is to see if throughout the centuries the languages get more similar (good indicator of relatedness) or not.
And then, one compares the oldest available varieties of a language in order to possibly reconstruct a proto language: it makes more sense to compare latin and medieval persian than french and modern persian/farsi.
Now, because it is a scientific method, it also has limitations.
1. The writing system of the language/s examined has to be alphabetic or syllabic. Ideographic writing systems give no clue about the sounds with which the words were pronounced. Considering the reconstruction is based on the sounds, it is useless. This is also the reason why the method cannot be applied to Korean and Japanese. The first written documents in the language are in chinese characters and fairly recent too (6th century AD for Japanese and 10th AD for Korean). The oldest written document in the world is from the 3rd millennium BC in logographic script.
2. Languages change quickly so, the reconstruction cannot go back in time more than a cuple of millenia (3000-6000 years) from the oldest written documents. Both proto indoeuropean and protosemitic date back to the 4th millennium BC.
It is possible that further back in time some languages that are now considered unrelated actually were related, but time brought change that erased the traces that could allow us now to see that.
Also, reconstructed languages are not real, speakable languages. What is being reconstructed are few whole words, a lot of verb stems, some morphemes and that's it. You cannot write stories in indoeuopean, like someone did, cough*Schleicher*cough.
What Greenberg did is very unscientific. Starting from his grouping of 600(!) American languages into one family, the Amerindian one. He also classified 1500 African languages into only 4 families using a very questionable methodology and few souces and material. This is a similar approach to the one he used for the proto world madness. First of all, he did not respect the comparative method, he did not look for regluar phonological parallels, but merely compared the words as they were. He did not try to weed out possible loan words or casual lookalikes. He did not take into account the facts/options that invalidated his reconstructed form (if out of 60 languages 40 did not help his case, he would discard them, only keeping what he needed, which is very unscientific in my opinion). A lot of what he did was semantic stretching: he compared similar words that had vaguely the same meaning. To reconstruct the protoform for '1' he compared the (similar) words in various languages for: 1, finger, pointing, hand, middle finger, index, arm, point, thing, only, single, once, paw, foot. He chose whichever suited his case best.
And now, a little plot twist for who is still reading this far into this (bless you soul): Greenberg did not actually come up with this madness. He invented the mass comparison method but, because he was a professor, he could not support such an unscientific theory, though he believed in language monogenesis. A group called mass comparatists developed the proto world idea. Needless to say, they were not taken seriously by the acedemic world.
Love you videos! Would you be willing to make one for the slavic languages ?
I REALLY ENJOY AND LOVE YOUR VIDEOS!! 😶😊🙂
If the languages were divinely changed all of a sudden so that humanity was broken up into different groups that could no longer understand one another, it would not make much sense to find a slow evolution of languages breaking apart from one original language at all. Rather wouldn't you expect to find distinct language groups that do not seem to necessarily evolve from one another?
They were probably split, and then THOSE languages evolved over time. Look at the English language. 100 years ago you wouldn’t find some expressions that we use today. And in a similar way, there are expressions that were common many years ago that most of the general public don’t understand today.
There are plenty of definitions and slang terms that are in the UK but aren’t present in the US. Like, fish and chips. In the US, chips are thin crisps, not potato wedges. And in a similar way, they say “biscuits” in the UK while the US says “cookies”.
It's not that simple. Some people believe that the bible is allegorical while you may believe it to be literal. This video went with the first assumption.
@@rockyspanos3709 Regardless I'm just saying it seems like there's little evidence to throw out the Babel account from multiple language groups. That would seem to fit.
@@Julia-nl3gq well it makes sense to me too. So maybe we're misunderstanding eachother.
It's an intriguing question. Maybe some day we'll find out.
+Lucas Sebastião de Almeida Castro Same with Jesus returning
GD Xacre, Lucas: All right guys let's break this up.
anythingnew Primitive Cantonese? You mean... Han Chinese? :P
anythingnew
Uuuuuuuuum, but even if that were the case... why is it any more Cantonese than it is Mandarin? Or Tibetan? Or any of the other Sino-Tibetan languages? I mean Cantonese is a very pretty language, but why?
And what the heck do you mean by aquatic sounding? Do you mean it sounded like Tagalog or Hawaiian or something, or do you literally mean they sounded like bubbles and streams? (hey, that sounds like an awesome conlang idea for some kind of nature spirits or something like that!)
I'd love to see some talented linguists get their hands on North Sentinelese. That language likely split very very far back in time.
As a biologist, I enjoyed this video a lot, it reminds me of some basic principles we use to infer the evolutionary history. Although at times it can get confusing when there are so many extinct lineages. Can you recommend me a book to start on this subject?
I'd love to see a video about con-langs. I know it's kinda antithetical to the name of the channel, but I think there's some really interesting conversations to be had about them.
The Tower of Babel is not about one language separating into many. It is about God creating languages and causing people to speak differently than they did before. These new languages were not genetically related to the original language. You could say that the many various language families, or at least many of them, were created at the Tower of Babel.
It should probably be read as a story, though. Because that's what it is.
Bill Mitchell But later comes the flood and them only the descendants of Noah, so that's another beginning.
We’re discussing hypotheses, not fact.
Tower of Babel is after the flood.
Dude, I'm supposed to be writing my thesis on sports and integration at the moment. I'm already late with with the submission :P Anyway, I don't have any background in linguistics, but I do in history and I have to say watching your videos from a historical perspective is pretty awesome. I loved Thoth's Pill. :D Have you do any videos on the English language and how that evolved over the years? Becuase, Old English is just well cool :D I'm Irish and hope to go back and learn the language someday. Heard a stat yesterday that if you spend over 1500 hours studying a language that you should be a master at the language. As in you should know everything there is to know about that language. (Not sure how true this is). In Ireland, we study Irish from the age of 4/5 to 18. We apparently spend more than 2100 hours studying Irish in class. Less than 5% of the Irish speak it fluently, probably less than 3% actually I'd imagine. And, those who do speak it as a second language never bother to use it outside of school. It would be a shame to loose such a beautiful language. As in, I lived in Sweden for two years and I can now speak more Swedish than I can Irish, and I studied it for 14 years. I'm not the exception, I'm the rule. That's mental. Thanks for the video's guys. Really interesting stuff. :D
Finally! A video with a lot of Hebrew in it! :))
If language evolved before a significant population bottleneck it is very likely that there was a time when there was only one language spoken. That would be because any other languages would stop being spoken if the speakers died off with only a small population which could mix - both genetically and linguistically - surviving.
Furthermore there exists a biological basis to language and it is very unlikely that such an adaptation arose several times independently.
However if that explanation holds it's extremely unlikely that any reconstruction will ever be possible since it depends on language changing relatively rapidly; which it is known to do.
That's assuming a population bottleneck would result in only one surviving population. Before writing, large-scale communication methods, and sound recording, even two groups of people living in neighboring valleys could end up speaking different dialects or even different languages. Even though there were probably some big events that reduced the human population significantly, there was never one where only one group of humans survived (unless you're a Biblical literalist, anyway).
Yes, it is essential for this possibility that the surviving population mixes quickly (linguistically at least).
But since culture spreads at a second approximation in a diffusion-like manner such mixing in a small population is not unlikely.
To add to Jessica's points, even if only one group of humans survived, they could have been a multilingual alliance. Monolingualism isn't the norm in "primitive" societies, after all.
And of course we'll never be able to tell either way, so yeah.
Actually you can still have many languages surviving after a bottleneck and still only one surviving later on - very much in the same way that if look at sufficiently distant generations it will be the case, *necessarily*, that any individual will be either an ancestor of all humans currently alive *or* of none of them. So there is a way for languages to be removed from living populations independently of any bottleneck by 'dynamics'.
Jason93609
Sure, I'm just pointing out that even if we could somehow demonstrate a population bottleneck consisting of one coherent group of humans, that still wouldn't necessarily mean that there was only one language left at that point.
Really interesting topic. Thank you for exploring this.
There is evidence that Neanderthals had language, previous to homo-sapiens. So, human (hominid) language has literally had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve (or more). It's a fascinating topic.
So interesting to note how many languages branch from that "one" source language~ :)
I would LOVE to hear more about Merrit Ruhlen's Theories
The ones claiming Swedish was among the languages of Babylon were actually the Swedes themselves. During the 17th century, Sweden was growing to become an empire over the Baltic Sea, and some of the nobility worked to invoke an all-Swedish system, and claimed that it was among the original languages. They even wanted to reintroduce the runes. It was, of course, not based on any research, and Swedish had by that time been highly influenced by Latin, German, Dutch and French.
3:35 All 6 variations can be used in Hungarian, and it will be correct! ;)
Depends when language appeared. With every reconstruction information will leak through and get lost, so after a certain point we simply won't know, there's nothing else to work on
such a language might have existed, very possible, but so much has passed that it's undetectable
כל הכבוד על ההגייה בעברית!
Good job with the Hebrew pronunciations!
"Kuna" actually still exists as the word for "woman"; in Old Tupi (a Brazilian indigenous language) it was exacly this, with a soft ñ twist. It's a very intriguing language, the Irish "Cailin" ("girl") exists as the almost identical "Kaolin" ("pretty girl") in Tupi; worth pointing out that both exist as common names for girls
In Swahili Kuna means "their is".
The Babel story never claimed that all languages were descended from one single language, only that one moment there was one language, and the next there were many.
Joseph Campbell
I'm sorry what? You say the story doesn't claim that all languages come from one single original human language, yet then say that the story says that there was one language and then many. Unless you mean to say that there could have been more languages before that, I think the story is self-evident that it claims God decided to punish by making organized work impossible via splitting people by making everyone understand and speak a completely other language than everyone else.
There were multiple languages afterward and one before according to the story, but it doesn't suggest genetic relationships. It doesn't necessarily imply that all languages are related. I would think an all powerful god would be more than capable of making new languages unrelated to any previous language.
Joseph Campbell
Maybe, but clearly that's not what happened. However, so as we know there are completely unrelated languages and some have no known sibling languages either currently spoken or historically spoken. But, the story is just that a story and all that can be said is that the universe likes diversity and will create it where there was none previously. That is not to say that the universe is a thinking being is just that as things evolve through time they gain complexity and diverge like life has done so did human languages. We have yet to figure out if all currently spoken languages are related or language sprung independently from each and every human group that existed when it did, in a similar way as writing did in the Fertile Crescent, China, and Mesoamerica.
sion8 I agree with you, I was just stating that the story never claims that all languages are genetically related.
Lucas Sebastião de Almeida Castro
The guy says that a god as powerful as the Abrahamic god should have been able to create languages that were all completely unrelated, but in real life many languages are related, that's what I meant when I said "clearly that's no what happened."
In chuvash we have a verb conjugation - at/et used for the 3rd person conjugation in the present, the same sending in Kyrgyz as well. When we look at Hebrew we find the -et ending In the verb present tense as well for the singular verb tenses, which would actually match up to the Turkic languages. Furthermore I’ve studied Mari language it’s Finnic, the grammar actually is similar with words and even grammar cases, verbs etc. Furthermore, we all know the small similarities between it and Japanese as well. But it doesn’t stop there! In Spanish -as - es endings are for “you” hablaras - you will speak. Hablas - you speak vives - you live in chuvash ec means you and it’s so weird how it happens to match up to Spanish in this weird way so of course everything is connected y’all
Could you do a video on how to create a language on our own or share if you did already make your own language?
Hello there!
Have you heard about "Edenics"? I wonder what's your take on that :)
I have and speak 2 semitic languages and several European languages and grasp many similarities. I met with the founder in Jerusalem.
It's dumb
You literally missed one MAJOR considerable thing: phonological enormity. All languages "Hawaiian-ize," as I call it, or sink in phonetic variety. There are 3-4 major areas of phonetic super-diversity: South Africa, the Caucuses, North America and, arguably, southern Asia. The further you break into the available areas where migrations could expand from these groups, you find that diversity is LOST. The one which eludes my understanding is the one for "Amerind." But it has been agreed by a growing group that likely all homosapien tongues came out of Africa before migration began. It does appear interesting to me that the story of Babel does occur, supposedly in an area which houses one of the largest phonetically diverse families, the NorthWest Caucasian group. We even believe that their proton-language developed almost 200 distinct phonemes. It's just, why? When we were children, we learned cavemen spoke "Ooga-booga!" It appears the ancient past was far more complex, at least in this regard, than we thought.
Inventory size is a nifty angle for exploring this topic. Thank you for expanding on what I missed!
I admire your passion for language. I am also very interested in language origin. Do accents intrigue u as well? Subscribed
I love the vids
I feel these videos aren't deep enough. It's just like a sub-heading/description of the topic, but not the topic itself. I need more detail!
I think they'd be less popular if they were 60-minutes analyses.
In other words, that is intentional.
Take that Ken Ham! Evolution takes the day again!
I think that the beginning was that every sound and every letter has several meanings that revolve around it, then they start adding letters to each other to make new meanings.
Then the difference is formed by the difference of terms agreed upon between a group of people in my language. It is clear that the letters have several meanings revolving around it
Do linguists utilize machine/statistical learning for language classification/mapping?
3:59 here, we say who in Niger-Congo, “NANI!??”
@The Article ?
I like how it dodges the obvious question.
Guys, before jumping to find the One True Original Language, you gotto verify your source. That idea just came from a book some dude wrote waaaaaay back, you know.
Quite interesting. PCO. Please carry on.
0:33 I was zoned out and thought he said " build a city with a McDonald's "
I like Gude'a's winking.
Is your outro song available for download? Real nice stuff
By the way, your Hebrew pronunciation is impeccable