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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 ...
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
The following are lists of words in the English language that are known as "loanwords" or "borrowings," which are derived from other languages. For Old English -derived words, see List of English words of Old English origin .
The form or meaning of the word might show variations between dialects, which may yield clues about its earlier history. The comparative method. By a systematic comparison of related languages, etymologists may often be able to detect which words derive from their common ancestor language and which were instead later borrowed from another language.
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 ...
In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).
The English language has borrowed many words from other cultures or languages. For examples, see Lists of English words by country or language of origin and Anglicisation. Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English.
Doublets are pairs of words in the same language which are derived from a single etymon, which may have similar but distinct meanings and uses. Often, one is a loanword and the other is the native form, or they have developed in different dialects and then found themselves together in a modern standard language.