Modern English has many word roots in Latin and Greek, but where did the Latins and Greeks get those word roots in the first place? Did somebody just make it up out of the blue? Or did they get it from an earlier language, and if that’s true, where did they get it from?

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Modern English has many word roots in Latin and Greek, but where did the Latins and Greeks get those word roots in the first place? Did somebody just make it up out of the blue? Or did they get it from an earlier language, and if that’s true, where did they get it from?

In: Culture

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most languages (with a few exceptions which we call Isolates) are part of wider group of languages which diverged in the past, but were originally very similar.

So there is Proto Indo European, Old Indo Aryan…..etc.

It’s easier to trace the origins of written language because….it’s written so something is left behind. With verbal communication it’s more difficult to understand some of the history simply because there are no records. So it’s educated guesses.

It’s likely we would never know what the “first” language ever was, we can just see which ones are newer/older.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Latin and Greek, like English, German, and most European and many other languages such as Farsi, Hindi and Gaelic, are all ultimately descended from something we call “proto Indo-European” – we don’t know how languages originated in the first place, but as people add new words and change the pronunciation of old words, languages turn into new languages.

[Here is a cool illustration](https://images.app.goo.gl/aoDkXe1CNyPiYREKA) of how some of these languages are related.

Anonymous 0 Comments

> Modern English has many word roots in Latin and Greek, but where did the Latins and Greeks get those word roots in the first place?

As it has been mentioned in other comments, those languages are rooted on some even earlier languages.

> Did somebody just make it up out of the blue? Or did they get it from an earlier language, and if that’s true, where did they get it from?

I would like to focus on this part, since it hasn’t been mentioned.

Yes, someone, or, instead, some group of people, made them out of the blue. People aren’t born with language “pre-installed” or something like that, it has to come from somewhere. Here’s the deal, we still aren’t sure when it began. The more we dig, the more our understanding of language increases, leading us to look in some places we hadn’t thought before.

For example, we’re now noticing that apes closely related to humans, like chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and such, have some sort of proto-language. They have calls, grunts, shouts, hums, and more that, in a way, count as a form of language, but it doesn’t have all the rules and conventions that a “formal” language has. Our current understanding of languages isn’t enough to say “languages begin here”, so we can’t say for sure -at the moment- what’s the last common language ancestor, but that won’t stop of from digging more and learning more about them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is better in r/asklinguistics.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m not a linguist but hopefully I can add something to the conversation. Like many others have said, modern languages “evolved” from old extinct languages. If you keep going back, there should be a certain point in time where things are invented. I guess the moment they became existant, if they are useful, that concept will continue to be used by future generations. For example, let’s look at the word “google”. It was not used until Google, the search engine was invented and became dominant, but now that it has, it’s sort of become a verb and maybe in the future, it will evolve into a concept like an entity holding limitless information. And if enough people find the concept useful and keep expanded upon it, I guess it can become a root for future languages, like Martian English or whatever.

Just pure speculations here, but we have seen countless examples like this in modern languages so it makes sense for me. I hope it somewhat helps you imagine the path languages can take.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a lot of theories about the origin of languages. One of most common one is people reproduce sounds of the nature, reflecting them but we still don’t know how the words actually take place of the basic sounds. Because it’s too old, it’s hard to track(Around BC 700.000-300.000) and there is no data to track except the languages we know.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you want to read a book, I recommend *The Rude Story of English* by Tom Howell. Easy to read, he makes it funny, while he traces the roots of English, from its starter-languages to actual England, to America, etc.