Why is the world so diverse wh
Why is the world so diverse whWhy Is The World So Diverse When It Comes To Languages?
It is known, even to a person to whom the entire study of
language isn't familiar, that the language is the greatest factor
on which most of the human activities depend. Without any form of
language, any cooperation and communication would be almost, if not
totally impossible (World Book Encyclopedia 62). This significance
of language is what draws scientists to study origin, differences
and connections between languages.
Constant change of today's languages is what amazes linguists
even more. With the emergings of the new nations there was quite a
number of new languages. One such case is the language of Former
Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, which is now called Croatian by Croats,
Bosnian by Bosnians, and Serbian by Serbs. Though these languages
were once united and actually dialects of one another, they split
as the three nations split. With this came huge amounts of new
words in Croatian and Bosnian which caused the Serbo-Croatian to
rupture even further.
There are few conditions that keep a language unchanged. They
include a stable government, good communication, a centralized
educational system, a set of beliefs and traditions, and a spirit
of national unity (63)
Beginning And Change of Language
Today's languages all have three basic systems, phonology,
grammar, and semology, and many have fourth system, writing.
In the beginning, people talked and conversed, but they needed
something that would record and later on recall words (Sparke 42).
This destitution has resulted in early alphabets, pictograms.
Pictures were used to represent objects and items. It was easy for
people to represent those objects with the pictograms but it also
was very hard to find a pictogram that would fulfill idea of, for
example, craving (Laind 50-54).
Around 1000 B.C., the Phoenicians were the first people to use
graphic signs to represent individual speech sounds (American
Heritage Dictionary 65). Their alphabet is the foundation of
today's Latin and Cyrillic alphabets used in most Indo-European
family languages. Phoenician letters looked really different than
Latin and Cyrillic.
The Cyrillic alphabet is the first to emerge since Greeks have
borrowed Phoenician symbols first. Most of the signs have been
changed when they entered Greek. Romans too needed some kind of
symbols for their language, so they too used Phoenician letters,
but via Greeks. Romans changed them how they wanted and created
Latin; Greeks altered them their way and created Cyrillic. Though
arrived from one common source, these two alphabets are
considerably different from each other. This example of how a
common ancestry can be changed and result in several different
progenies is a very interesting idea which is investigated by the...
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