Languages

The Proto-Indo-European language was followed by the Indo-European language, which later split into a number of languages.

Family tree of languages by Minna Sundberg
Family tree of languages by Dan Short
Family tree of languages on Wikipedia.

Language is related to culture and genetics, and genetic groupings correspond to linguistic families. The Basque langauge (Euskara) is known as an orphan language as it fits neither French or Spanish, is a very old language, has had very little change and the population is also genetically distinct.

The stable elements in any language are (1) first and second person pronouns, (2) parts of the body such as arms, legs, fingers, blood, bones, milk, etc. and (3) nouns such as house, earth and water.

A study by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay in the 1960s collected data from speakers of twenty different languages for a number of different language families. They identified eleven basic colour categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. They also found that, in languages with fewer than the eleven categories, the colours included followed a specific evolutionary pattern.

• All languages contain terms for black and white.
• If a language has three terms, it has a term for red.
• If a language has four terms, it has a term for either yellow or green (but not both).
• If a language has five terms, it has a term for both yellow and green.
• If a language has six terms, it has a term for blue.
• If a language has seven terms, it has a term for brown.
• If a language has eight or more terms, it has terms for purple, pink, orange and/or grey.

In each of the languages studied, the term for each colour corresponded to roughly the same shade in the Munsell colour system.

Languages change by (1) sound changes such as d to t and q to k, (2) vowel changes and (3) cultural changes (e.g. upwardly mobile people). There can be loss of sounds at the beginning, middle or end of a word, an additional sound, one sound becoming two or two becoming one, sounds reversed in order or a sound disappears from a language. There can be grammatical changes, semantic changes and the addition of new words and the loss of old ones. Words change meaning by extension (widening), narrowing, shift (of applications), figurative use, amelioration (losing original sense of disapproval) and perjoration (develops sense of disapproval)

Each language has a usual word order of Subjects, Objects and Verbs within sentences, for example:

• SVO - English, French, Hausa, Vietnamese (75% of languages)
• SOV - Japanese, Amharic, Tibetan, Korean
• VSO - Welsh, Tongan, Sqamash (10% to 15% of languages)
• VOS - Malagasy, Tzotzil, Houailou
• OVS - Just few, mainly Carib languages of the Amazon basin
• OSV - possibly Jamamadi, Apurina

In English the most usual word order is SVO but other word orders are possible (e.g. in poetry or for emphasis). Latin has free order but SOV is a common pattern. German prefers SVO in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. OSV was used in the Star Wars films to indicate a natural language pattern for the alien Yoda (Sick I've become. When nine hundred years you reach, look as good you will not.).

Both men and women use head nods and 'mhm' noises when another person is speaking but there seems to be a gender difference. A woman uses it to indicate she is listening and encouraging the speaker to continue, but a man interprets this to mean she is agreeing with everything he is saying. By contrast when a man does it, he is signalling that he does not necessarily agree, whereas a woman interprets it to mean he is not always listening.

The history of the English language is complex.

• Celtic plus Anglii plus Saxon = Old English (a)
• Old English (a) plus Greek plus Latin = Old English (b)
• Old English (b) plus Norse = Old English (c)
• Old English (c) plus Norman French = Middle English
• Middle English plus Renaissance, Exploration and Colonialisation = Modern English

There is a lack of a sex-neutral third person pronoun in English (especially after indefinite pronouns such as 'anyone'). Various proposals to introduce a such a pronoun (tey, ne, hesh, na, per) have been unsuccessful. This has lead to the use of 'he/she', 'him/her' and 'his'hers' as well as the plural form 'theirs'. The use of 'man' to include all people now sounds exclusive to males, whereas it was once used humans of both genders, with 'wifman' for females and 'wermen' (hence the term 'werewolf') for males.

There is a relationship between the length of a word and its frequency of use; this even occurs to some extent in languages such as German which have marked polysyllabic vocabulary. In English the majority of commonly used words are monosyllables. This may account for the tendency to abbreviate words when their frequency of use increases (e.g. mic for microphone, kids for children, phone for telephone, bus for omnibus).

Sources
The story of English by R. McCrum, W. Cran and R. MacNeil
Cambridge encyclopaedia of language by D. Crystal
BBC TV programme in 1991
Berlin & Kay study of colour names in language Wikipedia article