Proto-Sapiens (the first human language)

In Genesis 11:1 it says, "And the whole world had one speech (literally "one lip")."

If you are not a Jewish or Christian believer, or maybe even if you are, that might seem "far-fetched". In fact, you might be inclined to dismiss it as an irrelevance when it comes to the study of human language.

If you have a background in languages, or are just interested, you may be familiar with the idea of language families. The best known one, and by far the most spoken worldwide is the Indo-European language family. This includes a huge spectrum of languages ranging from English to Hindi, including, for example the Dari language of Afghanistan. All these languages share common vocabulary and grammatical features. A reconstruction of the original parent language is called Proto-Indoeuropean or PIE and you can listen to what it might have sounded like on YouTube. It is conjectured that this language was spoken about 5000 years ago in what is now Ukraine or possibly Anatolia (Turkey).

What I only recently discovered is that extensive work has been done to go beyond Proto Indo-European (and other parent languages) to reconstruct the original human language. It is held by many researchers that human language has a single origin (monogenesis) as borne out by the similarities shared by all human languages. Rahlen is one of the linguists who has conjectured particular words which would have been in the original.language, such as ma (what?) and aqua (water). It is thought that the original human language followed a sentence structure SOV. This would mean that a sentence began with the subject followed by the object and then the verb: "I it done".

The name of this language is Proto-Sapiens, Proto-Human or Proto-World.

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