The world’s first language

What was the world’s first language?

You may remember from our post a week or so ago, “What is the world’s oldest language?”,  that really there is no identifiable oldest language, despite claims to the contrary.  Perhaps, just perhaps, there was an original world language; we identified this as a logical possibility.  In the Bible, Genesis ch.11, there is the story of how a united human race, with one language and culture, decided to build a tower up to the sky, and God confounds their speech, perhaps becuase of their folly and pride.  The Bible itself does not refer to the tower as the “Tower of Babel” although that is how the story is known.  We get our word “babble” from it.

Reconstructing a proto-language

If you research languages over time, it is often possible to reconstruct what words were in an original language that it was descended from.  By comparing French “chanter” (to sing), Spanish “cantar”, Italian “cantare”, and seeing how sounds in those languages changed over time, you could deduce that the Latin word for sing is “cantare”.  Because we have a written record of Latin, that can be confirmed.  You can take this further back in time and work out a fair bit about Proto-Indo-European, the posited ancestor for most European and many subcontinental languages.  If we look at the word for “heart” in different languages, we can work out that the Proto-Indo-European for “heart” was something like “kerd”.

Latin – cors, cordis (=heart, of the heart); credo (=I believe)

Sanskrit – hrd

German – Herz (k sound turning to h in Germanic languages)

Welsh – craidd (a word for centre)

Albanian – kri

Hittite – karz

Can we go back further and find a Proto-World language?

Perhaps.  The mainstream view is that there are about twenty unrelated language families, plus some language that do not seem to be related to other languages at all.  Linguists such as Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) spent ages comparing words in languages for things such as kinship terms and parts of the body which we know are susceptible to relatively easy comparison.  Fascinatingly, he came up with cognate sets of words for languages across the globe.  Here is list of words from around the world meaning milk/breast/suckle/udder:

Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *mlg – suck/breast/udder

Arabic – m-l-j – suckle

Old Egyptian – mndy – woman’s breast, udder

Proto-Indo-European – *melg- -to milk

Latin – mulgere – to milk

Saami – mielga – breast

Hungarian – mell – breast

Tamil – melku – to chew

Malayalam – melluku – to chew

Chinook – mlqw-tan – cheek

Quecha – melq’a – throat

Surinam – emooki – suckle

Guamo – mirko – to drink

Whilst this seems persuasive, and I’m very tempted to believe there is something in it, it’s widely rejected in linguistic circles.  There are two complementary reasons for this.  Even within this list, there is a lot of variation in meaning – has Greenberg chosen whichever language within each family of languages to suit his argument?  Vowel are ignored, which is probably reasonable, but there is also big variation in the middle consonants.  The other side of the coin is that it is possible to find random resemblances between words in languages that are unrelated, for example Chinese “nu” (woman), Hungarian nö (woman), French “nana” (slang word for woman).  Apparently unrelated words have been shown to be solidly related, such as English “wheel” and Hindi “cakka”.  Some would argue that some words in any language change remarkably little over time, which would lend a little more credence to the idea of Greenberg’s Proto-World.

Conclusion

TL;DR? Whilst there are some intriguing theories about a Proto-World language we need to know much more.  You can find out much more about learning languages here at Lingua Learn UK. We offer virtual language training in over fourteen language to adults, individuals and businesses, groups, kids and teens.

About your blogger

Hello, I’m Tim – head of Lingua Learn UK.  I have been involved in languages teaching for over thirty years, principally in French, German and Spanish.  At Lingua Learn UK, I co-ordinate native speaker teachers of 14 languages, all university graduates and qualified teachers like me.