Language Origins

Question: When and how was the first human language created? What were the earliest known words in that language?
https://www.quora.com/When-and-how-was-the-first-human-language-created-What-were-the-earliest-known-words-in-that-language/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-1

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

19.X.2024

There would be three ways to go about the question.

1. An alien civilisation observed apes develop into humans, and observed the moment when they started talking. Go to an UFO-logist to get the details.
2. God created Man in His image, and He created Adam’s and Eve’s language, as a participation of His own Word. Go to Genesis 1 and 2 for the details (unlike the UFO-logist, the text will be fairly constant and well-known).
3. It happened slowly through evolution and was probably finished by 100 000 years ago, and no one today has any kind of concrete idea how this could have happened.

Against the latter observation, some will say “well French developed from Latin, so why couldn’t Ape develop to Human language the same way? Gradually, you know ….”

Well, the thing is, the way in which Latin developed into French totally presuppose that Human language was already Human language. Precisely “gradually” is a misunderstood word. Murum certainly developed “gradually” into mur. But that’s a question of three changes, none of which was itself “gradual” in the sense of imperceptible.

1. Murum is actually four sounds, the final one being a nasal U, written like UM, and the first change is loss of nasalisation, Murum becomes muru.
2. Muru in turn in Gallo-Romance becomes mur (with a back u, like u is pronounced in Catalan). It is possible that between these, there was a muro, as in Italian and Spanish.
3. Mur becomes mur (back to front, from German U to German Ü). It is also possible that this could at least on the popular level have been happening in Roman times, due to influence from Gaulish. But even if so, it is probable it only surfaced on élite level some time around the time when the final syllable was lost.

Done. Each change is small, but it is perceptible, and it is concerned with one of the already very distinct three levels of human speech, namely with the level of phoneme, the ingredients of phonemes change in a morpheme that stays the same. It’s a bit like tracing the pit bull to the ancient molossus. It’s not like tracing molossus or dogs in general to dinosaurs even. It’s more like tracing sexual reproduction to chemical reactions, when one cannot even trace the life of a single cell to the Miller Urey experiment. It’s impossible. And it’s certainly not parallel, like dog breeding does not prove Miller Urey experiments are what life came from.