- Joined
- Nov 24, 2005
- Messages
- 50,664
- Reaction score
- 10,691
In a reality-based scenario, languages with modern syntax would have evolved in parallel in different populations descending from very similar recent ancestors.I see everyone in this thread is dismissing it because of the bible, but let's tuck the knee jerk reaction of anti-religious sentiments away for a second.
Are y'all suggesting that the first 2 or more languages developed simultaneously? Wouldn't the first humans to develop speech at some point speak the same language?
Which is totally possible, but given the facts that speciation probably requires a bottleneck, we see bottlenecks (including one so severe that every living human appears to have one common female ancestor (not to be confused with the first anatomically modern human female)) in DNA evidence, and the fact the language appears to be an inborn trait, I think it’s probably more likely that all modern human languages descend from a single ancestor language for the most part.
There have been some interesting cases of languages being spontaneously created. There was a group of deaf children who were put together in a care facility who quite naturally developed their own sign language with a large vocabulary and universal syntax.