Language is a mirror of the development of a people. If the host nation leads a rather primitive way of life, its language will consist of words and constructions denoting surrounding objects, simple actions and emotions. As the language develops, not only technical terms appear, but also words for expressing abstract concepts - this is how literature appears.
The science that studies languages collectively is called linguistics. She is relatively young, and therefore, today she belongs to the few branches of science in which serious discoveries are possible. Of course, the establishment of a connection between the languages of the tribes living in different parts of the island of New Guinea is difficult to attribute to discoveries of great practical value. Nevertheless, the process of comparing and contrasting different languages in the dynamics of their development is interesting and can lead to unexpected results.
1. In the Old Russian language, nouns had the forms of three numbers: the dual number was added to the usual singular and plural. It is easy to guess that in this form the noun denoted two objects. The dual number disappeared from language use more than 500 years ago.
2. Related languages are not called so because of their similarity, they can be quite different. They are relatives, one might say by their father, that is, there was (and may continue to exist) one language spoken by the population of a large state. Then the state broke up into a number of small powers that did not contact each other. Languages in the process of development began to differ from each other. A typical example of the father of a group of related languages is Latin. It was spoken throughout the Roman Empire. After its disintegration, its own dialects developed in the fragments. This is how Latin gave birth to the group of Romance languages. It includes, for example, French and Romanian, in which only a trained philologist can find similarities.
3. They tried and still try to connect the Basque language with any language of Europe - it does not work. We tried to associate it with the Georgian language - we found a couple of hundred common words, but the similarity ended there. Some linguists even believe that Basque is the proto-language of all of Europe, and that other groups and families have already developed from it. This is indirectly evidenced by the complexity of the Basque language - during the war it was actively used to compose encrypted messages.
4. The New Greek language can be considered unique, but not an orphan. He himself forms the Greek group of languages and is in it in splendid isolation. Everyone has heard, of course, about the ancient Greek language, but it ceased to exist long before the appearance of modern Greek, which dates back to the 15th century. Modern Greek is spoken in Greece and Cyprus. It is the official language of the European Union.
5. There are countries in which the state language is absolutely foreign to a given territory. These are mainly former colonies. For example, in Nigeria and India, the official language is English, in Cameroon, French, and in Brazil, Portuguese. The use of a foreign language as a state language does not at all mean that national languages are bad or undeveloped. Usually, the language of the colonial empire is used as an internal official language in order not to offend different tribes living under the shadow of one state.
6. The Old Slavic language is not at all a common Proto-Slavic dialect. Old Church Slavonic first appeared on the territory of Northern Greece, and only then began to spread to the east. The division with Old Russian was then quite simple: important worldly documents were written in Old Russian, church documents were written in Old Slavonic.
7. In South America, in the places where the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru converge, there are several dozen Indian tribes of very small numbers - a maximum of 1,500 people. All tribes speak different, and quite different languages. For the inhabitants of those places, fluently speaking ten languages is not a gimmick, but a necessity. And, of course, there are no textbooks, not all tribes have written language, and only a few loners can boast of literacy.
The designated area is inhabited exclusively by polyglots
8. Disputes about the penetration of foreign languages are being conducted, probably, in most countries of the world. Those who argue usually fall into two camps: those who stand up for the purity of the language and who believe that nothing terrible is happening - the process of globalization is underway. Icelanders are the most jealous of the purity of their language. They have a whole government commission, which quickly creates the words that are required in connection with the development, primarily of technology. Apparently, such actions are supported by the population - otherwise, instead of invented words, foreign ones would take root.
9. It is obvious that statements on the same topic made in free form by a man and a woman will differ. Women tend to add diminutive suffixes to words, they use a lot more different adjectives, etc. In Russian and most other languages, this is just a psychological feature. And in some languages of the peoples of Southeast Asia, American Indians and Australian aborigines, there are special word forms and grammatical structures that are used depending on the gender of the speaker. In one of the villages of Dagestan, they speak the Andian language, in which even elementary personal pronouns like “I” and “we” differ between men and women.
10. Politeness can also be a grammatical category. The Japanese use at least three verb forms, depending on whose action they describe. In relation to themselves and their loved ones, they use a neutral form, in relation to their superior - obsequious, in relation to inferior - somewhat dismissive. If you wish, you can also learn to express yourself in Russian (I - "bought", the superior - "acquired", the subordinate - "dug"). But these will be different verbs, not the form of one, and you will have to break your head. Japanese just has grammatical forms.
11. In Russian, the stress can fall on any syllable, it depends solely on the word. In French, the stress is fixed - the last syllable is always stressed. French is not alone - in Czech, Finnish and Hungarian, the stress always falls on the first syllable, in the Lezgi languages in the second, and in Polish the penultimate.
12. Languages appeared much earlier than clocks, therefore the time system of any language can be considered (very conditionally) the first clock - in all languages the time system is tied to the moment of speech. The action either takes place at this moment, or it happened earlier, or it will happen later. Further, with the development of languages, options appeared. However, there are languages that do not express the future of action - Finnish and Japanese. Finding this, linguists rushed to look for languages that do not express what the action took place in the past. For a long time, the search was fruitless. Luck smiled at the American linguist Edward Sapir. He found the Indian tribe of Takelma, whose language does not have the forms of the past tense. Languages without present tense have not yet been discovered.
13. There are languages with a developed system of genders, and most of them, including Russian. There are languages that have masculine, feminine and neuter gender, but there are almost no generic forms. In English, for example, only pronouns and the noun “ship” have gender - “ship” is feminine. And in the Armenian, Hungarian, Persian and Turkic languages, even pronouns do not have genders.
14. Chinese, Creole, and some of the languages of the peoples of West Africa can be considered languages without grammar. They do not have the usual ways of changing or connecting words, depending on the function that they perform in the sentence. The closest analogue of such a language is the broken Russian language of the German invaders, presented in old war films. In the phrase “The partisan is not coming here yesterday,” the words do not agree with each other, but the general meaning can be understood.
15. The most correct answer to the question "How many languages are there in the world?" there will be “More than 5,000”. It is impossible to give an exact answer, because only on the differences between dialects and languages many scientists have made a name for themselves. In addition, no one still can say that he knows the exact number of tribal languages in the jungles of the same Amazon or Africa. On the other hand, languages that are few in number are constantly disappearing. On average, one language disappears on Earth every week.
Distribution map of leading languages
16. The well-known "wigwams", "moccasins", "tomahawk", "squaw" and "totem" are not at all universal Indian words. It is part of the vocabulary of the Algonquian languages, of which the Delaware (“Delaware”, to be precise) is the most famous native speaker. Algonquian tribes lived on the Atlantic coast and, unfortunately, they were the first to meet pale-faced newcomers. They adopted several dozen Indian words. In other tribes, the names of dwellings, shoes, battle axes, or women sound differently.
17. The peoples of Africa speak a huge number of original languages, but the official languages in the overwhelming majority of countries are French, English or Portuguese. The only exceptions are Somalia, where the official language is Somali, and Tanzania, with Swahili.
