Even today, there is some dispute about the geographical origins of these people; but it is widely assumed that their homeland lay to the north of the Black Sea, in what is now southern Russia.
Sometime around 3, BC, they must have begun dispersing in waves of migration—north and west into continental Europe, and east and south into Persia and India. The terminology and system of classification may vary somewhat from one authority to the next, but there is general agreement on all the essential features. For our present purposes, it is not important to know the details of this complex system, provided we grasp the basic principles and understand the relative positions of Greek, Latin, and English within the vast language family.
Suffice it to say that English is at least distantly related to all these languages. These four branches or subfamilies developed, over many centuries, from four prehistoric proto-languages, which themselves had evolved from the common Indo-European tongue. There has often been contact among the subfamilies, and none of them has been immune to external influence. Still, this does not change the fact that English is a Germanic language, whereas Latin and French are Italic.
At that time, the inhabitants of that land spoke a Celtic language called Gaulish. That quickly changed when the Romans brought their native Latin to that region. Over the years, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, the language slowly evolved: from Old French into Middle French and finally into the French language we know today.
It is spoken, after all, in a total of 84 countries around the globe, including France, Canada, Belgium, western Switzerland, Monaco, and a host of others.
It is also the official language of 29 countries. Thanks to the conquering Romans, Latin was spoken widely throughout a vast region for hundreds of years. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the same time that other Romance languages began to form all over Europe, the Italian language also began to take shape — initially as different regional dialects.
These distinct dialects continued to be spoken up and down the Italian peninsula until the unification of Italy in In fact it is probably the other way round, Latin evolved from a language developed in Pakistan, on the banks of the Indus River. All societies of people develop languages. If they are in contact with other cultures, they borrow from each other, but if they are isolated, as some Amazon tribes have been until recently, they invent their own unique language.
I hope you study languages, and in English, look at a dictionary when a word interests you, and see where it came from. Latin is the ancestor of a small group of Indo-European languages - the Romantic group, of which Spanish is the major member.
The Germanic group, of which English is part, is descended from Gothic. The Slavic, Turkic, Indo-Iranian, and Semitic groups are also examples of language families which are not descended from Latin.
All are part of the Indo-European group, which are thought to have descended from a common language which pre-existed Latin, Hebrew, Gothic and Sanskrit. East Asian languages are quite separate, as are a handful of European langugages. The Finno-Ugric group Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian is unconnected to the Indo-European family and Georgian and Basque are thought to be unconnected to any other languages. Personally, Bengali seems to have some shared characteristics, but that might be shared Anglicisation.
The study suggests that between 50, and 70, years ago humans spoke in a single dialect that proved the catalyst for human civilisation. The report by Dr Quentin Atkinson from The University of Auckland in New Zealand is based on phonemes - distinct sounds such as vowels and consonants that make up language.
He analysed the number of phonemes found in world languages, and hypothesized that languages with the most phonemes were the oldest. Also, the dialects furthest away from the 'mother tongue' were found to be less complicated. The study found that some of Africa's languages which feature clicks have over a phonemes, while Hawaiian - spoken on the furthest point on the migration route out of Africa, only has In short, the further away from Africa you get, the fewer phonemes are found.
Effectively then, Dr. Atkinson argues that the sub-Saharan region of Africa is the cradle of all human language. This fits with what scientists call the 'Out of Africa' theory - that early humans evolved only in this region, then migrated to the rest of the world around 70, 50, years ago, the period mentioned in the study. Atkinson told the Wall Street Journal. During this time there were sudden, dramatic advances in human behavior, with our ancestors creating cave art and making sophisticated hunting tools out of bone.
The Romans, however, were interested in spreading Roman culture and Latin. As Latin spread to various Western and Eastern European locations, it was imposed upon those who spoke other languages. Suddenly Latin was all over this vast region. New versions of Latin were developing in different directions across the empire. Once that process was started, the Latin varieties evolved so differently from each other they became new languages.
Great evidence reveals their relation; if you learn one, learning one of the others is fairly easy. Learn more about how the meaning of a word changes over time. The word for grass in Latin was herba. That same word exists in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, but over the centuries a sound change has created a different rendition of the word in each language. As a result, we have a variety of forms. For example, Latin had herba , which began with an h —but in all five of these languages the h is gone.
Spanish has the word hierba ; the h sound is long gone. H is fragile and has a way of disappearing in languages. The same thing happened to our word. Italian, of the five Romance languages, is closest to Latin.
Learn more about how sounds evolve.
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