Antropology question please please help

Question

if there were over 5000 distinct human languages prior to world war II do youi think that monogenesis or polygenesis is more likely

Answer 1

Polygenesis if you study the syntax and grammar of more than a few relatively unrelated languages, but this is not anything proven.

Language and thought structure and concepts seem to go hand-in-hand.  If there was a single Proto-worldwide language, all people would have similar thought patterns and they do not.

It is easy to follow the relationships between similar languages, for example those developing out of Proto-IndoEuropean, but there are too many languages which do not have any similarities with this family of languages.

Monogenesis has been accepted primarily because of personal beliefs and not because of any collected data.  The concept of speaking as a form of communication could have had a single source without impelling all speakers to use the same or even similar language.

But language is tied to culture and there is no definitive data to support that at any time in the past, all humans shared a common culture.

There is no direct link to extremely ancient languages, especially those which were never written.  Because of this humanity will never know if language came from a single source or multiple sources.