 So, quick recap, languages can be genetically related. This isn't like human familial relationships where two parents produce children one at a time but continue to exist themselves. With languages, what happens is the language will expand either by the people who speak it expanding or by outsiders learning the language, and then, in different places, they'll talk more and more differently from each other until, over time, they can't understand each other anymore. It's not a perfect analogy, but when this happens, we say that the resulting languages are descended from the original language, called a proto-language, and that they're genetically related to each other. We've seen this happen in history, with Sanskrit branching into the modern Indian languages or Latin branching into the Romance languages. From these known examples, we can figure out what it looks like when a group of languages are related, and we can then seek to identify those same patterns in other languages and determine whether or not they're related, too, even if we don't have any written records of the parent language. The method linguists used to do this is called the comparative method, and it's yielded some cool results, linking together huge groups of languages into giant genetic groups like Indo-European, Afro-Asianic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, and plenty of others. Can we go bigger? Can we group languages into even bigger and bigger groups? Or here's the real question. Could linguists prove that all the world's languages are related to each other? Before Latin, before proto-Indo-European, was there ever a proto-world? Well, maybe, but the normal comparative method isn't going to do us any good here. It works mostly by comparing the vocabularies of languages and looking for regular patterns between them. Like, where Spanish has the ch-th sound in its word for a thing, Portuguese will usually have a t-th sound in its word for that same thing, suggesting that maybe they had a common ancestor with the ch-th sound, and in Portuguese it changed to a t-th sound. Or maybe the other way around, this is too little to tell, point is, if you find enough of these regular correspondences, then at some point you have to say, okay, this is too much to be a coincidence these languages are probably related. Thing is, though, this method works best at short time scales, when the changes languages have gone through are the simplest and the easiest to figure out. At longer and longer time scales, the changes start to pile up and get more and more complicated, and it gets harder and harder to tell if these are actually regular correspondences or if it's just random coincidence. Not only that, but any time the meaning of words change in addition to how they're pronounced, that's also another piece of evidence lost. And given enough time, more and more words will start to mean different things than they used to. Because of all this, the comparative method can only really show us if languages are related if they diverged from each other fewer than, like, five thousand years ago or so, and human language is way, way older than that. This doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't a proto-world, though. Maybe there was. At some point, humans started speaking for the first time, creating the first-ever language, and from there it spread out and diversified and diverged until all the daughter languages were so different that we can't tell anymore. Or maybe not. Maybe language was invented multiple times independently, and modern languages are descended from different first languages. Thing is, we don't really know how language first happened. Like, we're the only animal on the planet that can really use language. Grillas using sign language and parrots repeating words and phrases is cool, but for reasons I'll get into some other time, the stuff they do never gets nearly as complicated or sophisticated as what humans do, no matter how hard we try to train them. So, at some point, we must have evolved the ability to speak. But we don't really know how that happened. Did we evolve the physical ability to speak at then the mental capacity for language, or the other way around with the mental capacity evolving at then the physical ability? Who knows? Did we start speaking immediately after we evolved the ability to speak, or did it take a while before we invented language? Who knows? Did our ability to speak evolve slowly, bit by bit, involving progressively more complicated systems of communication, or was there some single mutation that suddenly gave us the ability to use language all at once? Who knows? Did language happen when we started using the cries and yelps and grunts and other vocal signals that chimpanzees also use to communicate more precisely? Or maybe we actually evolved sign language first and only started using our mouths when we evolved the necessary equipment in our throats? Or maybe language is just its own completely separate thing that didn't develop directly from anything simpler. No one has any idea. And how would they? You can't really look at fossils and tell whether or not the creature they used to be inside of used language, let alone what that language was like. Maybe eventually neuroscientists and geneticists will be able to piece together exactly what order we evolved what in, and maybe from that we'll be able to figure out how language happened. But for now, we're kind of in the dark, and there's not much that traditional linguistics can do to solve any of these problems. So as far as I can tell, that ignorance basically leaves us with three possibilities concerning proto-world. One, proto-world did in fact exist, and all of the world's languages are genetically related. This doesn't necessarily mean that proto-world was the first language. Maybe the most recent common ancestor of all modern languages existed at the same time as a bunch of other languages, but now all those other languages are extinct. Or maybe it was the first language ever, but either way, possibility one is that proto-world was a thing that existed. Two, proto-world sort of existed. Like, let's say language evolved really slowly out of the simpler, non-language forms of communication our ancestors used. In between, they would have used some sort of communication that was more sophisticated than what chimpanzees do, but less sophisticated than real language. Like, maybe they developed some sort of complicated system of vocal signals that signaled for different stuff, but that they couldn't put together into complex sentences. Or maybe they had some sort of sign-language-like system supplemented by vocal signals. Maybe names were the first linguistic signs to develop, and we used them to get each other's attention. Or maybe we used singing and nursery rhyme-like stuff to socialize with each other, and language developed out of that. Point is, there's a lot of possible things that language might have first developed out of, but that wasn't itself quite language yet. So maybe all of the world's languages are descended from one of those pre-language systems, in which case there was sort of a proto-world? It just wasn't technically a language yet. Three, proto-world didn't exist at all. Like, maybe whatever genetic mutations allowed humans to speak spread through the population, and then, after the fact, language was invented multiple times, and those different initial languages eventually evolved into different groups of modern languages. We have no way of knowing which of these three possibilities was what actually happened. But the idea that proto-world might have existed is really interesting. So let's assume for a second that it did exist. Can we know anything about it? Well, besides a few fringe linguists who claim to be able to reconstruct some of it, the general consensus seems to be a little bit, but not a lot. Like, until about 100,000 years ago, all humans lived in Africa, and after that they spread out across the world. So we can be reasonably sure that it would have been spoken in Africa sometime earlier than about 100,000 years ago. We also think that humans diverged from chimpanzees around 7 million years ago. So unless that common ancestor could talk and chimpanzees lost the ability to speak, proto-world would have had to existed sometime after that. Besides that, well, I mean, we can look at all of the languages in the world and ask ourselves, what do all of these things have in common? And then we can assume that proto-world also had those traits, but we don't find a whole lot when we do that. Like, human languages can be really different from each other. So all you can really say is, like, it probably had both consonants and vowels. It probably had between 10 and 100 phonemes. You probably had to use your tongue to speak it, you know, stuff like that. And that's kind of it. Beyond that, we don't really know anything about proto-world and we probably never will, including whether or not it existed. I hope you found it kind of fun to think about, though. See you soon for more linguistics videos. -♪ Homecaring clues, the hardest grows, where time's the least. -♪ The rounded fruit begins to show filling every tree.