I think that humans developed language skills when
they reached a part in evolution that they needed to be able to communicate so
that they could evolve more, if we had not developed language we would still
all be cavemen as we wouldn’t be able to evolve.
I believe sign language was the first mode of
language to be created because cave men used sign language as a way to
communicate by pointing and other basic signals however it was a very different
form of sign language to what we use today. Speech was the second mode of language
because after cave men started to sign they started to grunt to go with the
sign language and eventually they got clearer and began to speak actual words.
Writing was created after spoken language, it is a way to put what is spoken
onto paper (or clay) it was designed to be able to tell people in the future
what had happened, it was also used to keep record of things like slaves.
Writing was invented around 4000BC in Mesopotamia
(modern day Iraq) however there is also older writing that was made up of
pictures however this form of writing was not complex enough to class as actual
writing. Mesopotamia cuneiform was created by pressing a reed stylus into soft
clay and then letting it harden. It was a form of writing in which each symbol
represented an entire word. Advantages of the invention of writing are that we
can communicate with people far away and to a large community.
Ancient languages that have been lost can be
deciphered by using computer algorithms.
The oldest surviving language is Tamil, it dates
back to about 3500BC is spoken form and about 500BC in written form. Tamil is
still spoken by about 80 million people today all over the world.
Websites:
http://www.wisegeek.com/where-was-writing-invented.htm
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/decipher.html
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070424044813AA0ILZJ
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