Certainly “most common”/“most understood” means “spoken over the largest part of the world’s surface”, in which case Mandarin is out and Spanish is probably the winner, with English a close second.
If you add up all the people that ever lived , I would say that most of them are still alive today or have been dead for a hundred years or less. That means that the answer to the question ‘what’s the most common language ever’ is going be the same as the answer to the question ‘what’s the most common language today’, no matter how you define common.
I don’t think it’s silly to be accurate about the definition of evolution, since (for example) creationists use it wrongly (e.g. assuming it defines how life began on Earth - which is ‘abiogenesis’.)
I’m not a biologist, but my definition of evolution is ‘change in characteristics over time’.
For example, when a superbug learns to cope with antibiotics over time and so humans die more often.
Perfect example of evolution. It’s good for superbugs, lethal for humans. Would you call that an improvement?
Antibiotic resistance is a consequence of evolution via natural selection.
As I have said twice now, the definition of ‘evolve’ is simply change over time. There is no implication of whether it is improvement, degradation, or neutral mutation. And I have to apologize to everyone for the hijacking, but pointless nitpicks are something I find annoying, even more so when they’re incorrect, even more so when it’s an incorrect nitpick of an English linguistics term, and most of all when corrected by someone who is neither a native English speaker nor a linguist speaking as if they were a linguist describing common practice in the field. That’s what brought on this ‘whole bout of silliness’.
Evolve has one very well established definition which implies growth and improvement. The word evolution does not necessarily imply improvement but it is absolutely one accepted meaning of the word.
There is nothing wrong with saying that a language evolves. But there is also nothing wrong with saying that evolution implies improvement either.
Omi no Kami’s professor is safe in saying that he prefers to use the word “change” to eliminate any room for interpretation, that doesn’t really mean that he’s saying the use of “evolve” is wrong.
Evolve has one very well established definition which implies growth and improvement. The word evolution does not necessarily imply improvement but it is absolutely one accepted meaning of the word.
There is nothing wrong with saying that a language evolves. But there is also nothing wrong with saying that evolution implies improvement either.
Omi no Kami’s professor is safe in saying that he prefers to use the word “change” to eliminate any room for interpretation, that doesn’t really mean that he’s saying the use of “evolve” is wrong.
Even more annoying is unwarranted righteous indignation. The definition of a common word is almost never simple.
I don’t have a source, but I’m under the impression that the total number of people who have ever lived is somewhere around 75 billion. Of course, that is an arbitrary figure and depends on how far into cavemen and monkeys we want to sample.
But if we go with that figure, and define the line between “some” and “most” as 50%, then your estimation suggests that approximately 37 billion people have been born in, say, the last 150 years. That number seems high, but I’m not an expert in analyzing histograms.
I don’t see anything wrong, personally, with saying a language evolved, but I mean it in a more metaphorical sense. Language change has a lot of the same characteristics as species evolution (which Darwin, actually, first pointed out) save for one important part: survival of the fittest. Changes in language survive not because they’re somehow more fit than the language was before the change or the language is with some other change. This is what Bill Labov called the Darwinian Paradox, and perhaps that’s what **Omi **and his prof meant by not improving.
I don’t have a good answer to the question at hand other than what’s already been said.
Is there a term for a phenomenon where something evolves in such a way that it changes the very environment in which it is evolving so as to effect its further evolution beyond that which would be effected solely by its environment? A sort of “compounded evolution”?
Neither am I, Shamozzle., but by making a bunch of simplifications I actually managed, without intending to do so, to replicate your 75 billion. This is what I did.
[GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION]
- I pretended that if at point a, let’s say 10000 BCE, 1 mln people were alive, and at another point, 9000 BCE, there were 3 mln people, that means that, over that period of a 1000 years, there were 50 generations of 2 mln people on average, which makes for a total of 100 mln individuals having existed over that period.
[/GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION]
-
Do that for the entire table and add it all up, you get a total of 75.801.625 up until 2005.
-
per my calculations, of these 75.8 billion, 20.7 billion were alive (or are still alive) as of 1900.
Anyway, this shows that it was probably to soon for me to say that the situation today equals the situation that accumulated as of 10000 BCE, but seeing as (again, per my calculations) over 45 billion people lived after 1000 CE as compared to 30 billion before that, taking into account any shifts (be they evolutions or changes) before that time is not going to make a whole lot of difference
Final note: any one caring and willing to conjecture as to how some valid calculations could be made: PLEASE!!!
Is that supposed to be a joke?
By who? Urdu and Hindi are not the same language in different scripts. Although the grammar and syntax is largely the same, there are significant differences in vocabulary.
I don’t either. In fact, French is the most Germanic of the Romance languages.
If you’re talking about speaking, there is no Chinese, though. Just Mandarin, Cantonese etc. But there is only one written language, so that could be called Chinese. But then there’s the question of literacy.
As Omniscient clarified nicely I was only trying to add to the discussion by mentioning a minor point of rigor that I thought was relevant, and that I didn’t think a lot of non-linguists knew. I honestly can’t figure out the reason for the hostile response, and it seems like we’ve resolved the issue anyway, so as far as I’m concerned it’s buried and done with.
And just for the record, I have no idea how you got from “I don’t research historical linguistics” to “I’m not a linguist,” but at this point I really don’t care enough to pursue it. :smack:
This cite answers both your question, and tries to address the OP’s question:
TOP LANGUAGES:
The World’s 10 most influential Languages
Note that Hindi and Urdu are lumped together. It’s not universally accepted, but it is certainly common in linguistic circles to consider them to be similar enough to be considered as one language.
Regardless of what linguists may say, fluency in one does not grant fluency in the other, so they can’t be the same language.
I can (or could) read and speak Hindu fluently. I cannot read Nastaliq script, and so I can’t read Urdu at all.
Can we have a cite that says that is a criterion for being the same language? Fluency and mutual intelligibility are not the same thing.
There are many languages that consist of a number of dialects, and the difference between two languages and two dialects of the same language is not something everyone is going to agree on. I’m sure you’ve heard of this definition: a language is a dialect with an army.
I can’t speak Hindi or Urudu, but I can read Persian script which is very close to that used for Urdu. Took me all of 2 or 3 days to learn it.
You might want to consider Serbo-Croatian. One language (unless you insist on a political definition of language) with two different scripts. Or Romanian/Moldovan.
Obviously you aren’t going to get one, because one doesn’t exist. I think most people would take it as read that written and verbal communication are essential elements of a modern language though.
I’m not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in China. What most people think is not really relevant in a forum that is supposed to be concerned with factual answers to questions. Given that the topic at hand is linguistics, we should be concerning ourselves with what they tell us.
It is a fact that many linguists consider Urdu and Hindi to be dialects of the same language (although some would disagree). It is a fact that many (maybe even most) linguists consider Serbian and Croatian to be the same language (although they are written in different scripts). I’m really only interested in facts here.
Note that my original post on the subject did not claim universal agreement among linguists, and so I offered that as a caveat for those counting numbers of speakers.