# Earliest Languages question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 12, 2015, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804 "2015-03-12T04:11:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/41 "2015-03-15T11:19:39Z")
> [@pianodave](#): > > So when two people of two different communities met, and their words for, say, “house” were different, did they pick one and drop the other? Combine them? In general, what processes occurred when languages mixed? > I’d assume that in conquering or subjugating peoples the language would unify in some way? > > Dave A hugely important mechanism for language change is intermarriage: a husband and wife who grew up speaking different languages; one of them learned the other’s language imperfectly; and that’s the language they generally speak to each other. If you have lots of couples in the same situation in a given village, children will learn some of the “mistakes” they hear, and interpret them as “correct.” They grow up speaking to each other in this way, pass this on to their own kids, and voila – it _is_ correct. These changes tend to be “simplifying” ones (loss of verb inflections, reduction of consonant clusters…)…but, over centuries, there are often (not always) compensating “complicating” changes in some other aspect of the language. (Remember, complexity really means redundancy, and some amount of redundancy is a GOOD thing. Communication is physically imperfect – noisy rooms, wax in your ears, etc. – so we need redundancy to communicate.) What causes many villages to have many non-native-speakers among its husbands or wives around the same time? Mass migration – which often comes during or soon after a military invasion (but there are other mechanisms as well). ---
**Author:** ![Ramira](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ramira/32/344_2.png) [@Ramira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ramira)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/42 "2015-03-15T11:34:01Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > 1. Conquering people imposed their language on subjugated people. Arabic (but it swept in large chunks of subjugated languages, down to individual letters) ?? “down to individual letters” ?? Arabic was not imposed on the populations in the Islamic conquests. It was the administration language but it only spread slowly and only replaced the native local languages systematically in the realms of its language cousins, the afro-asiatic languages. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/43 "2015-03-15T14:43:48Z")
> [@Ramira](#): > > ?? “down to individual letters” ?? > Arabic was not imposed on the populations in the Islamic conquests. It was the administration language but it only spread slowly and only replaced the native local languages systematically in the realms of its language cousins, the afro-asiatic languages. Arabic did not replace all languages in the areas it administered, but it filtered down from the top and eventually became the default native language, especially in areas where other semitic languages had been present. Some survived, some did not. When it swept beyond semitic language areas in the early years, a great deal of borrowing was done in both directions. Arabic language > [@](#): > > The Islamic Conquests introduced Arabic to new non-Arab regions, such as Spain and Persia. As a result, Osmanli, Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Malay, Berber, Swahili and Hausa all adopted some Arabic alphabet into their writing systems and Arabic adopted 12 letters from others (for example, Persian P CH Zh and Ga). These sounds entered Arabic through loanwords (Bateson, 58).[20] I ---
**Author:** ![Ramira](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ramira/32/344_2.png) [@Ramira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ramira)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/44 "2015-03-15T15:37:44Z")
I am sorry but what you quote is wrong and badly expressed. The alphabet in Arabic for the standard arabic is not changed, only for dialects and only in some regions are any added letters innovated (not adopted only the sounds entered into arabic from the language contact). What you wrote was wrong. It was not very much imposed as the language of the populace, it like other imperial languages penetrated from use in the administration. there is no great sign that the arab imperial administration cared about the language of the population, and this remained so for centuries and centuries. The mention of the malay the swahili and the Hausa show great confusion as the adoption of arabic alphabet there has very little or nothing to do with the arab conquest and is about influence from religious usage, not the arab conquest (altough a little bit for the coastal enclaves applies to the swahili). ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/45 "2015-03-15T16:49:57Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > An interesting experiment would be to present test subjects with pairs of words meaning “little” and “large” from a variety of unfamiliar languages (for example “iti/nui”;“beag/mór”; “pieni/iso”), and ask them to guess which is which. If their ability to identify the meanings correctly was significantly better than chance, it would weigh in favour of this theory. Sounds like you’re referring to [this famous experiment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect). (I could have sworn that there was another, similar famous experiment dealing with size; but if there is, I’m blanking on the name right now.) > [@get\_lives](#): > > I’ve read that the older the language is, the more clicks it has. Some African languages use a lot of clicks, although I don’t know if any outside of Africa do. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I’d expect them to be a recent development, given their complexity. They possibly emerged just as a simplification or consonant clusters, though I’ve also seen a hypothesis that they spread (and the presence of click consonants is an areal feature almost exclusive to eastern and southern Africa) as a way of avoiding taboo words. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/46 "2015-03-15T17:52:16Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > The examples I’ve heard of are all concerned with trade or slavery. I don’t know if that’s universally true. In the case of Mediterranean Lingua Franca, who were the slaves and who was the exploited party?: > > [Mediterranean Lingua Franca - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca) … 😕 I’ve always heard the term lingua franca in reference to the first item you mention, trade. Why would that particular one have to be related to slavery? ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/47 "2015-03-15T18:12:17Z")
I didn’t say that it was related to slavery. I said that the examples of pidgins and creoles that I’ve heard of were EITHER related to trade OR to slavery. In the case of a lingua franca, which is one type of pidgins and creoles, they are related to trade. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/48 "2015-03-15T18:15:37Z")
Ah OK, so you were presenting it as an example of a pidgin which is linked to trade and not to slavery. Sorry, I hadn’t understood. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2015, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804/49 "2015-03-15T23:06:09Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > I can’t come up with a site/cite, but it was a legit article, not some [Cracked.com](http://Cracked.com) click-bait junk. Careful! As a charter member you may not know that the SDMB uses the same clickbait ads as Cracked. 😛 A non-slavery example comes from Pinker’s _The Language Instinct,_ in which he tells of workers who came from all over to Hawaii first developing a pidgin so they could work and do business with each other, then their children developed more complex grammatical rules and turned it into a creole. Of course, this was still based on trade in that trade is the main way people from different cultures interact. Interesting book, at least when compared with his _The Blank Slate._ Respectful of Chomsky without being worshipful. I give it a nine. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/earliest-languages-question/714804.md?page=2)