User:Masonbobberboy/sandbox

We speak over 7,000 different languages as humans, all of them distinctly different. All of those languages came from one original mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European. Why do we have so many languages when we know they all came from one original mother tongue? The biblical account of this is “He ensured that mankind spoke different languages so that they would never be able to work together to dishonor God”. God destroyed the tower of Babel and made people speak different languages. There are many possible reasons why we speak different languages and some of those reasons are, our split from different tribes, the fall of empires, climate and geography could be one of the main reasons we speak so many languages. One theory is that we speak these languages because we broke off into groups and slowly formed our own languages. People could possibly have not liked what was happening in their tribe, so they broke off and created a new tribe, then creating a new language slowly. “This is because most of human language is not programmed into our genetics”. As tribes discovered new items, they then created names for the things, such as trees, ice, and mountain. As new situations arose such as death and sickness, new words were needed. “If languages did not evolve this way we would never have been able to build cities”. People needed words to express themselves, so they could have created new words, there was no need for a new language because everyone lived together and spoke the same language. Originally they spoke the same tongue, but then they split tribes eventually forming different kingdoms. As those different kingdoms grew apart and expanded, they needed more languages and new words for these new thing that they found. “Human language is not programmed in our genetics”. Because humans had no original need for language it was not programmed into our genetics and was something we needed to know only when we advanced as species more. As our original tribe grew we and expanded we would need new words. When tribes attacked each other and a tribe defeated the other, they would have to integrate there languages, causing new languages to be formed. Which brings us to theory number two: could the fall of great empires have created new languages? With the rise of Rome came the rise of Latin as a distinct language within Europe. With the fall of Rome came the collapse of Western Europe. Trade had disappeared and possibly the main language of the Roman Empire, Latin. But Latin became the root of many languages today “A Romanian and a French person are speaking the same language even though it was once the same”. Latin is the base root of so many languages because when western europe collapsed, all these new languages were created using Latin as a basis. Then during the dark ages European language advanced in there little villages and spanned of of the old Latin language. “Languages change so quickly that by the time any to peoples join together their original dialects have diverged”. That is why we have cognitives, which are words that sound the same but are different, and are spoken in different languages. In a another continent when the Aztec and Inca Empires were under attack by the Spaniards, the Spanish used translators to find information that helped them win the war against the Aztecs. After the Spanish won, they tried to force the Aztecs and the Incas to learn Spanish to show their power. This would demonstrate power over the defeated tribes. The languages of Europe is greatly affected by the fall of the Roman Empire and during the dark ages. As the Europeans would expand and conquer they would spread their languages to different continents. The final theory is how geography and climate could have affected language. Geography seems to have some sort of effect on language such as in New Guinea where people speak over 900 languages. Meanwhile in Russia, which is 20 times bigger they speak just 105 indigenous languages. That means if all languages were spread randomly, Russia would have 20 times more languages than in New Guinea. Yet in the small island nation of Vanuatu they speak more than a hundred indigenous languages. “Undoubtedly a wide variety social and environmental factors and processes have contributed to the patterns in language and diversity we see around the globe”. In Australia a study model was done to see how many languages were spoken. The model had to do with rainfall because the rainfall widely varies in Australia, which will affect tribes because they want live somewhere with a lot of water. Another study was done that says that vowel and phonics sounds change based on climate because dryness can affect your lungs and so different people have different sounds because of that. If these studies are to be believed then the languages we speak are based around climate more than you think. Geography also plays a major role in the language process. People have more vowels in lower elevation because, the air carries the words more. In a higher elevation the consonants are harder sounding because the words do not carry as far. Why we speak different languages could be affected by several things such as tribes splitting, empires falling and climate/geography. Splitting into different groups could have affected language, maybe great empires and their languages falling could explain why we all speak different languages, or maybe geography and climate is the reason. So why do we have different languages? No one is really sure, but we do know they came from one mother tongue. Either that or God destroyed a tower. So could all of that have affected why we speak different languages?