Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

The Origins of Language by Boeree



 The Origins of Language

Dr. C. George Boeree


It is an intriguing question, to which we may never have a complete answer:  How did we get from animal vocalization (barks, howls, calls...) to human language?

Animals often make use of signs, which point to what they represent, but they don't use symbols, which are arbitrary and conventional.  Examples of signs include sniffles as a sign of an on-coming cold, clouds as a sign of rain, or a scent as a sign of territory.  Symbols include things like the words we use.  Dog, Hund, chien, cane, perro -- these are symbols that refer to the creature so named, yet each one contains nothing in it that in anyway indicates that creature.

In addition, language is a system of symbols, with several levels of organization, at least phonetics (the sounds), syntax (the grammar), and semantics (the meanings).

So when did language begin?  At the very beginnings of the genus Homo, perhaps 4 or 5 million years ago?  Before that? Or with the advent of modern man, Cro-magnon, some 125,000 years ago?  Did the neanderthal speak?  We don't know.

There are many theories about the origins of language.  Many of these have traditional amusing names (invented by Max Müller and George Romanes a century ago), and I will create a couple more where needed.

1. The mama theory.  Language began with the easiest syllables attached to the most significant objects.

2.  The ta-ta theory.  Sir Richard Paget, influenced by Darwin, believed that body movement preceded language.  Language began as an unconscious vocal imitation of these movements -- like the way a child's mouth will move when they use scissors, or my tongue sticks out when I try to play the guitar.  This evolved into the popular idea that language may have derived from gestures.

3.  The bow-wow theory.  Language began as imitations of natural sounds -- moo, choo-choo, crash, clang, buzz, bang, meow...  This is more technically refered to as onomatopoeia or echoism.

4.  The pooh-pooh theory.  Language began with interjections, instinctive emotive cries such as oh! for surprise and ouch! for pain.

5.  The ding-dong theory.  Some people, including the famous linguist Max Muller, have pointed out that there is a rather mysterious correspondence between sounds and meanings.  Small, sharp, high things tend to have words with high front vowels in many languages, while big, round, low things tend to have round back vowels!  Compare itsy bitsy teeny weeny with moon, for example.  This is often referred to as sound symbolism.

6.  The yo-he-ho theory.  Language began as rhythmic chants, perhaps ultimately from the grunts of heavy work (heave-ho!).  The linguist A. S. Diamond suggests that these were perhaps calls for assistance or cooperation accompanied by appropriate gestures.  This may relate yo-he-ho to the ding-dong theory, as in such words as cut, break, crush, strike...

7.  The sing-song theory.  Danish linguist Jesperson suggested that language comes out of play, laughter, cooing, courtship, emotional mutterings and the like.  He even suggests that, contrary to other theories, perhaps some of our first words were actually long and musical, rather than the short grunts many assume we started with.

8.  The hey you! theory.  A linguist by the name of Revesz suggested that we have always needed interpersonal contact, and that language began as sounds to signal both identity (here I am!) and belonging (I'm with you!).  We may also cry out in fear, anger, or hurt (help me!).  This is more commonly called the contact theory.

9.  The hocus pocus theory.  My own contribution to these is the idea that language may have had some roots in a sort of magical or religious aspect of our ancestors' lives.  Perhaps we began by calling out to game animals with magical sounds, which became their names.

10.  The eureka! theory.  And finally, perhaps language was consciously invented.  Perhaps some ancestor had the idea of assigning arbitrary sounds to mean certain things.  Clearly, once the idea was had, it would catch on like wild-fire!

Another issue is how often language came into being (or was invented).  Perhaps it was invented once, by our earliest ancestors -- perhaps the first who had whatever genetic and physiological properties needed to make complex sounds and organize them into strings.  This is called monogenesis.  Or perhaps it was invented many times -- polygenesis -- by many people.

We can try to reconstruct earlier forms of language, but we can only go so far before cycles of change obliterate any possibility of reconstruction.  Many say we can only go back perhaps 10,000 years before the trail goes cold.  So perhaps we will simply never know.

Water Babies

It may help us understand the origins of languages if we take a look at what is sometimes called the Hardy-Morgan hypothesis, for the orijinator of the hypothesis - Alister Hardy, an English marine biologist, and Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer and journalist. It is more commonly known as the aquatic ape theory.

Humans have quite a few characteristics we don't share with our primate relatives. We don't have much body hair; we have a layer of fat under our skin; we have a descended larynx; we produce tears; we sweat a lot; we tend to have sex face-to-fact; we can hold our breath quite easily; we are able to swim even before we walk; and most importantly, we walk on our two legs just about all the time.

Hardy, in the 1960s suggested that perhaps (he was cautious, and waited 30 years to tell anyone about his idea) we, or at least our genus, Homo, must have spent some portion of our existence on this planet in the water, wading, swimming, even diving. This may have been why we learned to stand up straight (while wading, supported by water), then evolving the strength and coordination to do so without the support, and only then proceeding into the savannah.

There are other animales that have some of our odd characteristics: sea mammals like whales and dolphins have little hair, hold their breath, and have extra fat under their skin; others, like otters, have a lot of hair, but share the other abilities with us. The only other land animal that shares our lack of hair is the elephant, whose closest relatives include dugongs and manatees. Perhaps elephants, too, spent a portion of their evolution in the water. They do still breath through their trunks when under water. (Gaeth et al 1999)

Perhaps our commonalities with these animals also extend to language.

Musical Babies

Darwin himself once said "Humans don't speak unless they are taught to do so", ie language is learned, and not innate in the way that the famous linguist Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, the author of "The Language Instinct" say.

Mario Vaneechoutte and his students suggest that language comes from music, with some assitance from gestures and dance. Music is what is innate, not language. Like in many species of birds and mammals, singing (which uptight scientists prefer to call "calls", in order to keep language as our "special ability" distinct) in order to call for help, keep track of each other, and - most especially - in order to attract mates. That use of sound is most definitely something that can evolve, from simple to the complex.

Babies like music. They love listening to their mothers speak to them. The mothers like to use a sort of sing-song speech ("motherese"), which babies like even more. Babies begin to vocalize in very "musical" ways, and often hum or sing in short or long "phrases", with modulations. Babies prefer major rather than minor intervals. And before they even learn individual words, they imitate the "melody of speech" (prosody). Even fetuses can remember sounds in the last trimester.

Because our larynx is lower in the throat, our tongues are free to move around inside the mouth more and our ability to hold our breath means we can control our exhaling and inhaling. We are born ready to make music and so speech. In fact, music and speech use the same areas of the brain, including Broca's area.

In regards to dancing, we see babies moving rhythmically while listening to music and even when not. We see the ease with which they can imitate the movements of others (perhaps by way of the famous "mirror neurons"?). And regarding gestures, maybe you have noticed the connection between movements of the body, especially the hands, and movements of the mouth, especially the tongue. I still stick out my tongue when I try to play guitar, and I have seen children make grinding movements of their mouths when using the old school pencil sharpeners.

A lot of the grammar that seems so essential when we look at written language, in speech is much more obvious: We use pauses, tone changes, melodies, rhythms, eye movements, facial expressions, and gestures that add information to our speech. Perhaps you (like myself) use the pauses we hear or imagine to guide our use of commas and periods. And perhaps you have noticed how much more difficult it is to understand someone when talking on the phone than when you are across the table from them.

In addition to the hypothesis that we were once "aquatic apes", Vaneechoutte adds that we were and still are very much "musical apes".

References

Chomsky. N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton, The Hague.

Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Concise Editon and Commentary by Carl Zimmer (2007), Plume, Penguin Books.

Gaeth, A.P., Short, R.V., & Renfree, M.B. (1999). The Developing Renal, Reproductive, and Respiratory Systems of the African Elephant Suggest an Aquatic Ancestry. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 96, 5555–5558.

Hardy, Alister Clavering (1977). "Was there a Homo aquaticus?". Zenith. 15 (1): 4–6.

Morgan, E. (1997). The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis - The Most Credible Theory of Human Evolution. London, UK: Souvenir Press.

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Morrow.

Vaneechoutte, M., & Skoyles, J.R. (1998). The Memetic Origin of Language: Humans as Musical Primates. J. Memetics, 2. Accessible at: http://users.ugent.be/~mvaneech/ORILA.FIN.html

Vaneechoutte, M. (2014). The Origin of Articulate Language Revisited: The Potential of a Semi-Aquatic Past of Human Ancetors to Explain the Orijin of Human Musicality and Articulate Language. Human Evolution, 29, 1-33.


© Copyright 2003, C. George Boeree

The Origin of Language by Weir



The origin of language:
what’s underneath the tree of languages.



The question of the origin of language is by far the most interesting and probably the most mysterious in linguistic research. The answer to this question is complicated by a number of factors, some of which are obvious and some of which are not. There are many attemts out there chasing the so-called Proto Language, but they all remain a long shot in the dark. The present explanation remains very closely aimed at this question, and provides a very researched-backed account to this interesting issue by stiching together linguistic, biological, and evolutionary facts to fit in the bigger picture of language origin. Before we get to when language evolved, we first need to know what evolved.

THE FOSSIL RECORD

Let’s start with the obvious fact that language leaves no fossil record. Ancient peoples (including other hominids) may have had spoken language, but if a language dies out completely, as theirs certainly have, we have no idea how it functioned and therefore whether it was like modern languages. All we have to go on is physical remains of actual bodies. From the perspective of the fossil record, here is what we know happened:

A. Other hominid species had similar but not identical vocal tracts — e.g. Neanderthals had hyoid bones like we do, though this is only a necessary and not a sufficient factor in human vocalization.
B. Earlier hominid species had brain cases both of increasing size and increasing complexity. Unfortunately, we can derive relatively very little information about how language functioned from this fact alone — almost nothing at all, in fact. It is even disputable that an enlargement in the brain mass and/or development of particular regions of the brain have a direct implication for particular functions of the brain, which in all cases is of course missing.

A Neanderthal hyoid bone (replica)


WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

Evolution essentially never operates by great leaps but instead usually operates by small changes that accumulate over time. I think this is the key fact that we must consider: how could something as seemingly complex and interconnected as language evolve on its own? I’d argue that’s because most people who’ve made proposals before have not fully articulated what evolved.

I think we can do this by breaking down the human language faculty into its component characteristics. In the 1950s and 60s, Charles Hockett articulated what he called the Design Features of Language, a set of criteria that distinguish different kinds of animal communications systems from each other. This was important because it anchored the study of the origins of human speech firmly in a biological context with which we could compare the properties of human languages with that of other species. These design features relevant for humans included:


  • The use of a vocal-auditory tract — humans emit noises from their bodies to communicate, and do not emit chemical trails or flashes of light as other species do.
  • Broadcast transmission and directional reception: human speech spreads through the air in all directions, and is received by anyone within the field of broadcast.
  • Transitoriness — human speech fades rapidly and can only be received roughly at the time of transmission.
  • Interchangeability — a human has the ability to both send and receive the same signal. This is not true of some kinds of insect communication, for example.
  • Total feedback — a human has the ability to hear oneself.
  • Specialization — human language sounds are specialized for the use of language and do not in general have any other functional use.
  • Semanticity — human speech signals can be matched with specific predictable meanings
  • Arbitrariness — the relationship between the semantic content of the speech signal and the acoustic form of that signal is essentially arbitrary (onomatopoeia are the exceptions that prove the rule).
  • Discreteness — human speech signals can be broken down into discrete units that do not bear any meaning in and of themselves (namely, phonemes).
  • Displacement — human speech can be used outside of the contexts for which the signal was originally designed (all kinds of natural language negation might fall under this phenomenon).
  • Productivity – language can be used to create new and unique meanings that have never been uttered before.
  • Traditional transmission — the actual words of human languages are not innate, but are rather trasmitted from one generation to the next via culture.
  • Duality of patterning — meaningless units of sound are combined to create meaningful words.


Some of these criterial features of language are related to each other; others are independent. What is important to recognize though is how many of these criteria are found in the communication systems of other plants and animals. For example, the highly complex system of alarm calls used by vervet monkeys to warn the troop of predators involves many of these features, including the vocal-auditory tract, transitoriness, broadcast transmission, semanticity, and even arbitrariness, since a call for an eagle has no particular iconic similarity to an eagle in comparison to that for a leopard (the uniqueness of arbitrariness of human languages has been exaggerated by some).


TIMING

I think Hockett’s list of criterial features gives us a much better starting point than trying to intuit language-y things from the fossil record. More importantly, it allows us to compartmentalize the development of particular aspects of language in particular parts of human evolution, and does not require us to believe all facets of it exploded into being all at once. To get the relative timing of these events though requires us to look at these Hockettian criteria through cladistics, the study of branching relationships in species, languages, etc. In cladistics, the principle of cladistic parsimony suggests that if two organisms Y and Z descend from an ancestor X, and both descendants have the same evolutionary feature, then we must assume that that that feature was also present in their ancestor organism. Using this cladistic principle we can trace the evolution of specific features back quite a long way:

The use of the Vocal-Auditory tract for communication has probably been with us primates for tens of millions of years, since the origin of primates in fact, if not before that. The same goes for the other early features (2)-(5). At least 65 million years ago to this fellow, Notharctus:


Walking with Dinosaurers


Specialization, Semanticity and Arbitrariness are features that are actually found in nonprimate communication systems, such as those found in birds. This means that these features have arisen independently in different genera of animals and so are probably easier to acquire and therefore (?) earlier than other more sophisticated criteria. I will hazard a guess that we had these by the time our line, close to the apes, broke away from Old World Monkeys about 25 million years ago


Where things really get tricky is identifying when the last five criteria arose, those which truly set us apart from other animal communication systems:

Discreteness basically boils down to the ability of the brain to coordinate the vocal tract to articulate segments of sound and consistently treat those segments of sound separately from other possibly similar segments of sound. Human children start learning to aurally distinguish different speech sounds essentially from birth, and begin to control and articulate different aspects of the vocal tract in the first year of life (the babbling stage). Probably the late Australopithecines had similarly extremely rudimentary ability to articulate different kinds of speech sounds consistently on target, as it were, but we can’t know for sure if this is true and when these facts became categorical phonemes in the modern sense (probably the distinction between phones and phonemes is late in the evolution of speech). I will assign this a (somewhat arbitrary) age though of 2-3 million years ago.

Once our ancestors had discreteness, they were primed to evolve Productivity (because they could suddenly create many more words than they could have before) and the Duality of Patterning (since discreteness largely implies that sounds are distinct from meaning). I really don’t know when this might have evolved, but we would want to look for evidence that early hominids’ interactions with their environment are increasingly complex both in the sense of tool use and in the manner in which they process food. Homo erectus arises on the scene roughly 1.8 million years ago (either in east Africa or, less likely, perhaps in what is now the Middle East as evidenced by the finds in Dmanisi Georgia). One of the things we know about H. Erectus is that they had more advanced tool designs than earlier Australopithecines, and they discovered how to manipulate fire and they also learned how to cook food. To my mind, this increasingly sophisticated kind of manipulation of their environment could have necessitated the kind of proto-language that we have been talking about here. I will guesstimate an age based on the earliest evidence of fire being used for cooking, splitting the difference between the oldest suggested ages and the youngest: 900k to 1 million years ago.

The most sophisticated aspects of human language on Hockett’s list are aspects of traditional transmission and displacement, the ability to use language outside of the context for which it was envisioned. These facets of language use would be necessary for the development of idioms and any lexicon larger than a few hundred words. We know that displacement is one of the features that human babies learn somewhat late, around the age 3-4 if I recall correctly, so it must have been very late to evolve. Displacement would also have been necessary to use any form of negation, to talk about is not happening, as well as any form of tense system that distinguishes past, present and future. Combined, these two features would allow something like the kind of discourse possible in the most technologically primitive societies today.. Because we have (very) tentative evidence of art among Neanderthals (though nowhere near as much as from the earliest Homo sapiens) and other evidence that Neanderthals could plan for the future, I will take a shot in the dark and say that something like the earliest form of modern language appeared at roughly the time H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens speciated, around 450-500k years ago.


So, there we have it: evolutionarily modern human language might have arisen about half a million years ago.

I want to stress that much of this timeline is highly speculative. My specialization is linguistics, not human evolution (although I do read quite a bit about human evolution in my spare time). I would like to invite any specialists in human evolution to cross-check their understanding of the fossil evidence with what I have articulated here.

So, did language evolve only once?

If we view language evolution as a complicated multistage process, the question becomes moot, since ‘language’ is not one thing but many. At each stage of human language evolution, some of our ancestors developed a more advanced form of communication, and others did not. Half a million years ago, when there were probably at least four or five different hominid species still extant (H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, H. denisova, H. floresiensis, and H. erectus), probably each of these hominids had some form of communication system more advanced than any nonhominid communication system. Where we draw the line between proto-language and full-on language is to a certain extent a matter of degree than a categorial fact.

EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE


illustration link


How languages evolve - Alex Gendler
   TED-Ed  |  04:02

May 27, 2014 - View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-languag...
Over the course of human history, thousands of languages have developed from what was once a much smaller number. How did we end up with so many? And how do we keep track of them all? Alex Gendler explains how linguists group languages into language families, demonstrating how these linguistic trees give us crucial insights into the past.

 

The Origins Of Human Language
by Ancient Yoke  |  Apr 21, 2023  |  20:20

This week's video is about the origins of our species communication and how It's developed into the languages we speak today. As always, thanks for watching and please consider liking and subscribing.


Daniel Everett, "Homo Erectus and the
Invention of Human Language"
Harvard Science Book Talks and Research Lectures
Mar 31, 2020  |  HARVARD UNIVERSITY  |  1:10:42

HARVARD SCIENCE BOOK TALK 
Daniel L. Everett is the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University. He has published more than one hundred articles and twelve books on linguistic theory, including Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious.

In this video, Everett examines the culture of the first known human species, Homo erectus, focusing especially on their physical and cultural evolution such as tools, travel, and settlements.
He then makes the case that these accomplishments are best explained by the invention of language. Language in turn is shown to be the transfer of information by symbols, where other components of language, such as grammar, play roles in support of symbolic communication. 
Concrete evidence for symbols among erectus populations is found in their tool construction and “dialectal” tool distinctions. The talk is based of Everett's book, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.

* * * * * * * *


EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
by NGS

Language allows us to share our thoughts, ideas, emotions, and intention with others. Over thousands of years, humans have developed a wide variety of systems to assign specific meaning to sounds, forming words and systems of grammar to create languages. Many languages developed written forms using symbols to visually record their meaning. Some languages, like American Sign Language (ASL), are an entirely visual language without the need for vocalizations.

Although languages are defined by rules, they are by no means static, and evolve over time. Some languages are incredibly old and have changed very little over time, such as modern Icelandic, which strongly resembles its parent, Old Norse. Other languages evolve rapidly by incorporating elements of other languages. Still other languages die out due to political oppression or social assimilation, though many dying languages live on in the vocabularies and dialects of prominent languages around the world.

Teach your students how the languages of the world have evolved over time, and how their own languages continue to evolve today with this curated collection of resources.