ABAlphaBeta has so much cool historical lingusitics content

  • supersaiyan [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Is it possible their is one original spoken language that all language are based on if we can trace everything far back enough?

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It is possible but there's no way to trace that far back. Human language has existed in its current form for, bare minimum, 100 thousand years. Maybe much longer. The oldest we can construct right now is maybe 15kya. Even if we optimistically assume that can be stretched about 5-10 thousand years, which is a reach, that brings us nowhere close. This is a topic that gets a lot of discussion but the academic consensus is that we simply have no way to know.