What was the worlds first language?

Factual Questions
1

And is that Q even answerable?

If we are all immigrants from Africa (a vast oversimplification of the details I know), surely all the languages from the human family tree are related (even if distantly).

We have types like Semetic and Indo-European with no obvious relationship to each other at all… yet they must have some common ground - considering both have common elements (such as alphabets & writing/distinctive sounds etc.)

So if we consider the first groups of humans - running around in East Africa eons ago - is it possible to determine (ever) what thier original language must have sounded like?

2

No one knows.

3

It’s hard to say if anybody will ever know for sure, but there are researchers trying to figure it out:
www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bulletins/bulletinSummer01/features/language.html

4

I’d say its a safe bet it was some sort of sign language.

Pointing, gesturing, etc.

Spoken language? I dunno.

5

Ogdian. Og Smash!

6

The language of looooooooove, baby.

7

Why would you say that it had to be a Signed language, bernse?

8

A web page by a scholar giving some preliminary conclusions on a Pre-Nostratic language.

A (preserved) NY Times article on the Nostratic Hypothesis. And more on the same theme. Ilya Yakubovich on the Nostratic Macrofamily.

Here’s the mother of all language superfamily hypotheses.

9

Hmmph! You animalcentric armchair linguists make me sick. There were civilizations of intelligent plants long before the mobile oppressors crawled from the sea.

The first language was Treebonics!

[sub]running, running…[/sub]

10

Hoom! I think you are being much too hasty and are being livingthingcentric, what about the language of rocks? or subatomic particles?

Brian

11

quote:

The first language was Treebonics!

HAHAHAHA That is hilarious, thanks a lot for posting it.

12

Not really. If a group emmigrated from Africa before the development of language was complete, they could have developed their own language independently of the groups that remained in Africa.

13

If English was good enough for Adam and Eve and their pet dinosaur…wha? feeling dizz <whump!>

Where am I? I had a dream I was Jack Chick.

Not as funny as Treebonics I’ll admit.

14

Well, Aklo is a pretty old language.

15

[slight hijack]
Which is the oldest language that is currently still in use? There are so many that come to my mind (Chinese, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Urdu), but I can’t think of the oldest… [/slight hijack]

16

gouda writes:

> Which is the oldest language that is currently still in use?

There’s no real answer to this question. The Chinese spoken today is not a single language but a set of about nine related but distinct languages. No speaker of any of these languages could understand the Chinese of 2000 years ago any more than a speaker of Italian could understand the Latin of 2000 years ago. Indeed, no language stays the same enough for even 1000 years. There are cases where what we call a language now is the same as what we call the ancestor of that language 1000 or 2000 years ago, but the two stages of the language are not mutually comprehensible.