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  2. List of common false etymologies of English words - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_false...

    Innocent: often wrongly believed to have the original meaning of "not knowing", as if it came from Latin noscere (to know); in fact it comes from nocere (to harm), and the primary sense is "harmless". Isle and island: The word "isle" is not short for "island", nor is the word "island" an extension of "isle"; the words are unrelated.

  3. Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_monogenesis_and...

    According to this hypothesis, languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another. [16] Modern investigation about creole languages demonstrated that with an appropriate linguistic input or pidgin, children develop a language with stable and defined grammar in one generation. [17] Creole languages descend from pidgins.

  4. Linguistic reconstruction - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_reconstruction

    One of the criteria is that the grouped languages usually exemplify shared innovation. This means that the languages must show common changes made throughout history. In addition, most grouped languages have shared retention. This is similar to the first criterion, but instead of changes, they are features that have stayed the same in both ...

  5. Mythical origins of language - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_origins_of_language

    The narrator of the story adds that this explains the many different centres of population, the many tribes and the many languages, "Before the flood, there was but one centre; for all the people lived together in one country, and spoke one language." [3] They did not know where the other people lived, and probably thought themselves the only ...

  6. Linguistic homeland - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_homeland

    A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related. Depending on the age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty (in the case of historical or near-historical migrations) or it may be very uncertain (in the case of ...

  7. Language identification - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_identification

    The most likely language is the one with the model that is most similar to the model from the text needing to be identified. This approach can be problematic when the input text is in a language for which there is no model. In that case, the method may return another, "most similar" language as its result.

  8. Evolution of languages - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_languages

    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 ...

  9. Origin of language - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language

    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 ...