Linguistic Universals ect.?

Question

*note* that I am not a believer in evolution, but that I am trying to understand its reasoning.

Everyone knows that (as far as most people are concerned) every language possesses creativity, consonants, and vowels. These are called universals.

Now think about the homo sapian or ape man. At one point thousands upon thousands of years ago they all spoke the same ape language since they were all of the same species and possessed the same biological factors unique to "homo sapians". At what point did the DIFFERENT languages start to occur? Why are there so many? Shouldn't we all be speaking the same language since the homo sapians all spoke monkey language?

Given that they did evolve some way to have "different" languages, that is rather absurd and unnecessary and inconvenient.

I guess my question is: Why aren't humans speaking the same language since we are all the same "animals". I mean, a cat can understand a cat even if they had never met another cat before.

Answer 1

Maybe it is The Tower o Babel, seriously,, southrners don't speak the same as nortrhtheners idioms exixt

Answer 2

In a way we can all understand each other - but language in the human sense is far different than animal communication systems.  We can use body language and facial expressions and noises to understand one another on an animal level, but our complex language system uses vocal sounds to represent objects in our environment and even ideas and feelings.

Thus, as we spread out and were cut off from one another these sound symbols began to change and more were created as new things were identified.  How could all humans speak the same language if the Inuit needed many words to describe the different types of snow and had never seen a palm tree while the ancient Maya needed names for the scores of different vegetation and had never seen snow?  How could these vocal symbols be automatically embedded into the minds of all other humans?

Answer 3

I'm Irish, we speak English but if you traveled around the country you would find different sayings and accents. If you go to the UK you will find different variations of English wherever you go.

You could say that all languages are the same language because the Universals are the same, all that changes is the dialect.

Answer 4

This is a pretty interesting question, since evolution is often used as a metaphor for the way languages change and differentiate.

Linguistic anthropologists agree that human language developed only once, so yes, at one point, all humans did speak the same language.

As the human population grew, people began living in different groups and moving out from their starting point, living in separate communities, etc.

At this point, some groups became isolated from one another or simply did not cross paths. Over time, the languages of each group went through small changes.

Every language does this- that's why Chaucer's English is different from Shakespeare's English and both are different from the English that is spoken today.

An example of this might be when English colonists came to America. Over time, the way Americans and the English speak have both diverged from the language of the 1600s, in different ways. So, we pronounce words differently and use different words in some situations (lift vs. elevator, pavement vs. sidewalk, etc.).

Now, before modern communication networks, it was much harder for the different human groups to keep in contact, so their languages were able to diverge more quickly. Over time, the different styles of speaking became different dialects, and the dialects diverged into different languages.

This is why there are families of related languages- they share a "common ancestor" so to speak. All languages came from that same root, and the different branches of the language "family tree" show which languages are close to one another- for example, Spanish, French and Italian all are part of the Romance language group, which evolved from Latin.

I hope this explanation helped.