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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, [1] involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. [2]Language use was first systematically documented in Mesopotamia, with extant lexical lists of the 3rd to the 2nd Millennia BCE, offering glossaries on Sumerian cuneiform usage and meaning, and phonetical vocabularies of foreign languages.
This article cites its sources but its page reference ranges are too broad or incorrect. Please help in adding a more precise page range. (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) Survey of eight prominent scripts (left to right, top to bottom): Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Maya script, Devanagari, Latin alphabet, Arabic alphabet, Braille Part of ...
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa , as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
Some languages, such as Chinese, write words borrowed from English mostly as calques, while others, such as Japanese, readily take in English loanwords written in sound-indicating script. [259] Dubbed films and television programmes are an especially fruitful source of English influence on languages in Europe. [259]
The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. [1]
Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of native speakers across all inhabited continents, [73] the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of speakers according to Ethnologue , 10 are Indo-European: English , Hindustani , Spanish , Bengali , French , Russian ...