Gorrell - Say what?: the weird and mysterious journey of the English language

W here did language start in the first place? It must have been long before there were humans. Imagine primitive ape-creatures huddled together in a cave; theyd have to communicate somehow. Theyd want some way to say, Give that back, its mine! or Move over, youre standing on my foot! And the more they lived together, the more theyd need to say. Whered you find those blueberries? Chase that rabbit over here and Ill grab it. As they evolved into humans, and learned farming and other skills, their language would become more complicated: Ill trade you half my honey next week for one of those catfish today.

While early humans were developing languages, they were also migrating from place to place. Sometimes they were driven by changes in the weather, or by natural disasters like floods and forest fires. Sometimes they were moving away from hostile neighbors, or following the animals they hunted. For many reasons, groups of people were leaving one home territory and looking for another.

By comparing certain languages and tracing their roots, finding similar words that seem to come from the same ancient, mysterious source, scholars have concluded that in the far distant past maybe six or eight thousand years ago some people were speaking a language that has now been lost. They had no writing (that weve found) so we have no records, and we know very little about who they were, or where and how they lived. They seem to have had words for snow and wolf but not for ocean, so their homeland was probably cold and far from the sea likely somewhere in Central Europe. But thats about all we can say. That, and one other thing: for some reason, small bands of these people migrated in different directions. They carried their language across Europe and Asia and even up into Scandinavia.

Once their communities became separated, their ways of speaking slowly began to differ, creating a whole family of languages that we describe as Indo-European. One version, Celtic Indo-European, is the source of modern Welsh, and of the Gaelic spoken in Ireland and Scotland. Farther south, Greek Indo-European developed into ancient and then modern Greek. The Indo-Iranian form is the foundation of most languages of India, Pakistan, and Iran. Italic Indo-European gave rise to Latin, which gave rise to Italian, French, and Spanish. The Slavic version is the basis of Russian, Bulgarian, and Polish. Germanic Indo-European is the root of Dutch, most Scandinavian languages, German and Yiddish and English. And these are only a few examples. Altogether, the roots of the languages spoken by about half the people in todays world reach back to the Indo-European tongue of those unknown people so long ago.