Languages.., where have they originated /.

[shortcrust]

So are you saying that the soldier lied? The (Indo European) origins of many of the languages in Europe isn't particularly contentious by most academic linguists analysis is it?

 

Welsh and the languages spoken in Afghanistan do indeed have a shared Indo-European origin. I'm not disputing that, but do you think that means they're mutually intelligible? 3 billion people speak languages with Indo-European origins!

 

English and German are practically twins brothers, whereas Welsh and Persian and/or Pashto are distant cousins many times removed. No one would claim that English and German are mutually intelligible, so the notion that Welsh and Persian or Pashto might be is just plain daft. They're separated by thousands of years! Things move on pretty quickly. We would struggle to understand English as spoken even a few centuries ago.

 

I'm not saying the soldier lied. My guess is that he doesn't exist.

[Waltheof]

The question as to where languages originated is a separate issue from asking about the relationships between individual languages, with the focus being mostly on the Indo-European ones in the posts so far. There are thousands of languages (Papua New Guinea alone has about 800 different ones!) and no human community is know without a language. The answer--irrecoverable--must lie deep in prehistory, and we can only speculate that wherever human groups went to they either took some early language with them, or that some languages arose independently, or a mixture of both.

 

Given that the whole concept of the Indo-European group arose (apart from some scattered observations) only after the observation by Sir William Jones in 1786 that there were similarities between the fossilised language Sanskrit and the classical languages Greek and Latin, a picture filled out by subsequent scholars, it is not implausible that some lexical items in Indian or nearby speech communities might be seen to be cognate with items in some European languages...though I do doubt that any syntactic level of communication would be possible between parties such as claimed by the soldier (fictitious or not).

[Rowan22]

Welsh and the languages spoken in Afghanistan do indeed have a shared Indo-European origin. I'm not disputing that, but do you think that means they're mutually intelligible? 3 billion people speak languages with Indo-European origins!

 

English and German are practically twins brothers, whereas Welsh and Persian and/or Pashto are distant cousins many times removed. No one would claim that English and German are mutually intelligible, so the notion that Welsh and Persian or Pashto might be is just plain daft. They're separated by thousands of years! Things move on pretty quickly. We would struggle to understand English as spoken even a few centuries ago.

 

I'm not saying the soldier lied. My guess is that he doesn't exist.

 

If you mean by that he is apocryphal I can't say. But since the title of the thread is “where did languages come from” and since there seems no definitive answers other than speculative ones, speculation in this case is not unjustified is it?

[callippo]

not sure how true it is but Welsh speakers are supposed to be able to get on a boat in Camarthenshire get off in Brittany, ask for some eggs in a shop and they'll just serve them.

 

Welsh speakers aren't unusual at all but Scottish speakers are. Only time I've ever heard Scottish spoken was not in Scotland but between two guys on a cross-channel Ostende-Ramsgate ferry who, while they could both speak good English, were doing it to impress this Dutch girl.

[Lucifer]

This is about the Scottish language, heard or spoken, what is all this other crap about.?