Essay On Spoken Language
Even before the dawn of civilisation, people have been talking to one another. The earliest record of written communication stretches back almost 5,400 years ago, and some speculate that spoken languages have been around for at least 100,000 years – around 60% of human existence, or 15 times as long as civilisation itself. (Derbyshire)
Languages are the building blocks of communication – sets of words related to one another so that people understand the world around them and the intents of others. Languages, usually, are regional – people speak the language that they grew up around. People in Germany speak German, and people in India speak Hindi. But there’s a paradigm shift happening right under our noses (literally). The fact remains that …show more content…
Our brains pick up on the speech mannerisms of other people almost immediately and adapt our own speech to sound similar. Just sit in a room full of British people and you’ll find yourself slipping into their accent.
This need, this drive to communicate means that people blab constantly, exchanging ideas and adapting to the world accordingly. When new vocabulary arises, people use context to find the meaning and use it for their own purposes. In English, for example, there are word modifiers that can change a word’s use or its meaning in the sentence, and can be interpreted even when the resulting word is novel.
These elements inevitably lead to the evolution of languages over time. Twentieth-century English, if submitted for publication today, would require several edits; Shakespearean English is occasionally supplemented with a complete modernisation on a separate page; and Beowulf is just as recognisable to today’s Anglophones as it is to Germans.
Different sets of words change faster than others, too – last year’s slang is unidentifiable, but the language of our laws stem from when terms were translated into English from Latin in the eleventh century. Our pronouns (she, them, you, etc.) are even recognisable in other
Languages are the building blocks of communication – sets of words related to one another so that people understand the world around them and the intents of others. Languages, usually, are regional – people speak the language that they grew up around. People in Germany speak German, and people in India speak Hindi. But there’s a paradigm shift happening right under our noses (literally). The fact remains that …show more content…
Our brains pick up on the speech mannerisms of other people almost immediately and adapt our own speech to sound similar. Just sit in a room full of British people and you’ll find yourself slipping into their accent.
This need, this drive to communicate means that people blab constantly, exchanging ideas and adapting to the world accordingly. When new vocabulary arises, people use context to find the meaning and use it for their own purposes. In English, for example, there are word modifiers that can change a word’s use or its meaning in the sentence, and can be interpreted even when the resulting word is novel.
These elements inevitably lead to the evolution of languages over time. Twentieth-century English, if submitted for publication today, would require several edits; Shakespearean English is occasionally supplemented with a complete modernisation on a separate page; and Beowulf is just as recognisable to today’s Anglophones as it is to Germans.
Different sets of words change faster than others, too – last year’s slang is unidentifiable, but the language of our laws stem from when terms were translated into English from Latin in the eleventh century. Our pronouns (she, them, you, etc.) are even recognisable in other