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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 ...
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 ...
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.
The monogenetic theory points to a single origin of all of the world's languages and it is the most accepted theory. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It states that all current languages have formed through language change from a single tongue that gradually differentiated into unintelligible languages.
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.
The spread of Islam in the 7th century brought about the rapid establishment of Arabic as a major literary language in much of the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Arabic and Persian quickly began to overshadow Greek's role as a language of scholarship. Arabic script was adopted as the primary script of the Persian language and the Old Turkic ...
The essay was mentioned in Rousseau's 1762 book, Emile, or On Education. In this text, Rousseau lays out a narrative of the beginnings of language, using a similar literary form as the Second Discourse. Rousseau writes that language (as well as the human race) developed in southern warm climates and then migrated northwards to colder climates.
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language is a 2002 non-fiction book by American linguist John McWhorter.The book provides an overview of the then-recent research in the field of linguistics, focusing primarily on how languages have evolved and will continue to evolve over time.