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They have theories for this stuff, you don't need our opinions.

Wikipedia.

See also: evolutionary linguistics, comparative linguistics.

This is actually a really good question 3nodding

First of all I want to clear up that from this point forward, unless I specifically state so: assume that I'm talking about humans. Animals have very different speech patterns from humans and I'm not going to talk about them or any other form of life (eg plants but as far as I know, plants don't talk at all).

Everybody (humans AND animals) needs some kind of form of communication. My assumption is that stone age people did not have a type of speech all that advanced even compared to animals, with basic grunts and noises being used to express very simple ideas (for example one type of grunt that might have meant "I'm hungry"). As humans advanced, however, it was no longer sufficient to only be able to express hunger, anger, happiness, and cold.

An interesting thing that my grade 6 French teacher told me is that the oldest words in any language are Sun and Moon. This is probably because it was amongst the first things that people noticed (people must have noticed grass and water and other things too, but I image that things like grass and water were less mysterious because they do not appear to change places like the sun and moon do).

My guess is that as society developed, the need to communicate increased. Even earning a living became more complex because people were no longer just trapping animals with their hands to eat, but actually doing farming or some type of other work. So, with the need to communicate increasing, I'm guessing that people started assigning "sounds" to certain objects, to make it easier to explain something to somebody else. For example the blue flowy thing that people saw in streams came to be known as "water" in English, and the tall brown things with green at the top became "trees" and so on.

Early sentences were probably random packs of words thrown together. Did you know that grammar was created artificially by writers? Writers were seen as well-educated, and so those who were literate but not necessarily writers themselves would read works written by authors and try to find patterns in their sentences, and eventually those patterns became official in said language.

The problem with this, of course, is that until quite recently most people were illiterate, and even those who could read a bit didn't necessarily do so a lot. I think this is why low class people are often thought of as being worse educated, even to this day. Taking the Middle Ages as an example - the high-class had a speech pattern similar to what you see in Shakespeares books. Ever seen Pirates of the Carribean? Most lower-class people didn't sound much more intelligent than the pirates in that movie. Today the difference between rich and poor people's way of talking is obviously much smaller due to better communication systems (TV, internet, etc), more schooling, and the fact that even the poor can usually afford books, but there still exists a difference.

I also think that a lot of ideas were eventually thought of as time passed and as people began to get new ideas about things. That is why some languages have words that other languages may not have:

-in many langauges there are no words for "a" and "the" (Japanese, Russian, Latin, etc)

-some languages (Russian and Hebrew) have no conjugation for the To Be verb in the present tense. If I wanted to say "I'm Jewish" in Hebrew, I would say Ani yehudeah - literally "I Jewish" because there's no am, is, or are in Hebrew

-some langauges (Russian, Hebrew, Finnish) have no "to have" verb. In Russian if you want to say I have a cat for example, you would literally be saying "At me there is cat" (in Hebrew and Finnish it would be "To me there is cat")

-Japanese is the only language I know with special particle words that indicate another word's function in the sentence

-etc

These two are especially good. 3nodding I like those ideas, that the need for better communication developed an actual language.

I once heard that the word "mother" (and all the other Indo-European equivalents, presumably) developed from the "mah" sound that babies tend to make...

Sorry I can't contribute more. I'll take a look at that Wiki though.

It's the same with Welsh, apparently - the Welsh version would translate as "there is a cat with me"/"a cat is with me". (Or, if you're keeping the exact word order, "is cat with me".)

I'm not too sure on the 'mah' theory about mother either. Only because, in a pre-historic setting, the family unit was much larger than mother, father, sister, brother, etc. People lived in small groups, and their would've been no predefined role as mother or father, because the entire group would look after the child.

I really like the Sun and Moon concept, and I think they are such old words, because no matter where you live, anywhere, the Sun and Moon will always be there, and they will always be the same. Things such as water, earth, grass and tress, things of the environment, can differ from place to place.

I think that's all I have to add on the topic.

There is also the relationship between concepts and their symbols in language.

For example: In American Sign Language, to mime an embrace means "love" (as in crossing your hands in front of your chest, similarly to the position of the arms on an ancient egyptian sarcophagus)


It's similar to when words sound like the concept it is describing:

Bark
Yelp
Meow
Crunch
Crash
Thud
Scratch

And so forth...

That's the concept I was thinking of! It might be universal...

In Arabic:
qarsh = crunch
miwa' = meow
sharar = spark

my favorite:
naa'im = soft
KHaSHin = rough (and that's a heavy Kh sound...)