Researchers can only guess when humans first began forming sounds into words to communicate thoughts (there certainly weren’t any books to record the invention of language). Ancestors of the humans species possessed the mouth and throat parts necessary to pronounce words nearly two million years ago, but they likely didn’t have much to talk about until they started creating complex tools and building fires more than a milliom years later. The first system of words might have described tools and fire-making techniques. “Carl blow on fire, fire grow big,” Carl the Homo erectus – our immediate evolutionary ancestor – may have explained to this campfire pals 500,000 years ago.

No doubt the earliest members of our species – Homo sapiens – added to the conversation when they appeared around 200,000 years ago. But as they started leaving Africa to explore Asia, Europe, and eventually the rest of the world around 600,000 years ago, our human ancestors began to develop more complicated tools – and probably words to describe them – within their own tribes.Their vocabularies grew and splitt off from the languages spoken by more far-flung groups. The farther these pockets of humanity moved from southwestern Africa – the point of origin for both Homo sapiens and language – the more their languages changed. And that’s why we have nearly 7000 languages spoken around the world today.

What are the five most commonly spoken languages in the world?

And how do you say hello in them?

#1 – CHINESE “ní hâo” (nee-how)

#2 – SPANISH “Hola” (OH-lah)

#3 – ENGLISH “Hello” (hell-OH)

#4 – HINDI “Namaste” (nah-MA-stay)

#5 – ARABIC “Salaam” (sah-LOM)

Why did the U.S military deploy Native American code talkers in World War II?

Although it’s crucial in battle, communication is worthless – even dangerous – if it’s intercepted by the enemy. Even messages created by complex ‘encryption machines”, which convert plain words into secret codes, can be hacked given enough time. Native Americans, however, speak complex languages that are virtually unknown outside their tribes . Since the First World War, they have used their unique linguistic abilities in the U.S military’s signal corps as “code talkers,” translating sensitive communications into their language and transmitting them much faster than any machine. Even if enemies learned to decode Cherokee, Comanche, Navajo, Choctaw, or any of the other code-talker languages, they would still need to figure out the secret terms for words that didn’t exist in those languages. The Navajo word for “iron fish,” for instance, was used to describe submarines. A tank became “turtle” in Comanche.

The code talkers’ mission was so top secret they weren’t even allowed to share details with their loved ones. Their existence was finally made public in 1968 ( 23 years after the close of the war ), but it took several decades before they were recognised for their crucial role in winning World War II.

THE FRENCH ARMY DISCOVERED a short of “universal translator” – at least for ancient Egypt’s written language – in 1799. Uncovered near the Egyptian village of Rosetta, this slab of granite was engraved with a royal announcement from 196 B.C. written in both Greek and hieroglyphics, an ancient Egyptian script composed of pictures that represented sounds, Egyptian words, and by 1822 a French genius named Jean – François Champollion had cracked the code. Suddenly, archaeologists could make sense of the symbols scattered across Egypt. Tombs, temples, and monuments became open books.

Why do Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow?

This question has a flaw from the get go. Eskimos – a broad term for people native to frigid subarctic region in the United States, Canada,Greenland, and Russia – don’t speak a single language. They actually speak five of them, none of which has a hundred words for snow. The myth of their ice – obsessed vocabulary comes from the way their languages work. Eskimos create larger words (and full sentences) out of smaller “root” words. Their languages have only a few root terms for snow, but to those small terms they add other words to create long one-word descriptions of the snow’s conditions and uses (“the snow is icy and dangerous, “for instance, or “this wet snow is excellent for making a snowman “). The structure of Eskimo languages makes it seem like they have hundreds of words for everything, not just snow.