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wk_end 2 days ago

From a different perspective, it's not that wild at all - if you go back far enough, there's a decent chance that we all speak languages in the same "language family".

After all, being part of the same language family doesn't imply that strong a connection - English resembles, say, Farsi very very little. It just means that "the people who spoke language A at one point split off from the same people who split off to speak language B". From that angle, that the same language family is spoken in New Zealand and Madagascar is roughly as wild as the fact that homo sapiens lives in both places.

What's really wild is that modern linguistics has managed to demonstrate that the Austronesian languages are related across those vast distances and time spans.

9dev 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you generalise enough, all comparisons become useless: Sure, all Sapiens have common ancestors.

That doesn’t take away from the wonder of imagining people thousands of years ago literally travelling across half the earth to settle somewhere else, people we usually consider as extremely different and more "primitive" than we are.

Learning that these people led in fact a life very similar to ours, were intellectually equivalent to us, had the same struggles and goals and aspirations we do (for the most part of course), is deeply fascinating, to me at least.

saeranv 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That presumes that languages didn't evolve independently across different communities. The fact that different ancient languages have completely different grammatical structures, for example, provides some evidence of this.

ch4s3 2 days ago | parent [-]

> The fact that different ancient languages have completely different grammatical structures, for example, provides some evidence of this

It really doesn't provide that evidence. Proto-Afroasiatic the oldest agreed upon hypothetical proto-language probably only dates back 18,000 years. The modern brain, vocal, and tongue structures linked to complex speech were in place 100,000 years ago, and its thought that complex speech was in place by the time Homo Sapiens left Africa 50-70,000 years ago. That's a long time for grammar to diverge. Just in recorded history plenty of languages have gained and lost very complex grammatical features. Old Chinese for example was not a tonal language, but evolved tones. Small isolated languages can change rapidly, and trade languages tend to simplify.