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Hello Audience. I'm Timothy Weal and this is Knowledge is Power.
Language.
We all speak at least one. Yet there are over 6,000 of them currently on earth. But why
are they all so different?
The first language is debatable, but it definitely originated somewhere between 2000-3000
BCE. Most think it's Sumerian, which originated in Modern day southern Iraq. Just a big conglomerate
of symbols and shapes, very pictographic. The
oldest language still spoken today? Egyptian, also known as Coptics
which is well known to the modern world due to many Hollywood interpretations of it.
Modern English as we know it is traced closest to the Tudor days of England and Wales. The
times of William Shakespeare. The earliest piece of English text was by Sir
Thomas Malory entitled "Le Morte d'Arthur", translated to the death of Arthur. It was
a story about the now classic King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table.
"I shall bere your noble fame, for ye spake a grete worde and fulfilled it worshipfully."
Now that's able to be understood by most native English speakers. But the words "thou, thee,
thy and thine" actually originated in Greek and Hebrew. Most of the English language
originates from a very large and varied amount of language ranging from Icelandic to
German, but it's mostly derived from Latin which is derived from ancient Italic languages.
We kinda borrowed all the things .
That stuck around only changing slightly until 1755 with the publication of Samuel Johnson's
dictionary and in 1828 in North America with Webster's Dictionary. Johnson's
was very influential in establishing a standard form of spelling as well as it being the pre-
eminent English dictionary. It's even more extraordinary with the fact that he did it
all single handedly in just nine years, though
he claimed he could've done it in three.
Scientifically our brain is required to associate sounds, smells, and images with words.
Steven Pinker has a great lecture on language which I've linked to down in the doobly-doo.
One of my favorite lines from it is that the word, “duck” doesn’t look like a duck
or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can
use it to get you to think the thought of a duck
because all of us at some point in our lives have memorized that brute force association
between that sound and that meaning.
Another note he makes is that, before the Heimlich maneuver, there were several thousand
deaths per year due to choking as a result of obstructing out vocal chords. Which means
that at some point in history humans decided speaking
had a survival advantage where speaking was more important in comparison to the risk of
choking.
So what secondary language do you speak or would you like to learn and why? Let me know
in the comments. Sharing helps the channel grow,
subscribe if you enjoyed it. I'm Timothy Weal. Stay Frosty.