not sure about the history of languages…
but the listed questions are the ones im curious about…
as far as i know, latin branched to french, english, italian, german, russian, etc… AND chinese branch to korean, taiwanese, vietnamese, and japanese,,, not sure about phillipine…
- when was the birth of the latin language?
- was latin the first language?
- birth of sign language, and what was after that and before? or evolved into, or what was sign language based off of?
- what was before chinese language?
- what came first, latin or chinese? from what i hear, even chinese was in a way based off of latin….
- last but not the least, why does languages evolve? does it change from time to time? or do they built their own culture so they just change around some stuff?
not sure, but to me phillipines is like the tomato of fruits and vegetables… like i know they're asian, but their language seems more latin based, and they look more hispanic, but kinda not…
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Well, you have many misconceptions. Let's start with Latin. Latin did NOT branch to English, German, or Russian; French and Italian, yes. The ancestor language to most European languages is Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This language left no written records, and its origins are not known. It has been reconstructed by backtracking through its descendants.
One of its descendants was Proto-Italic. This eventually gave rise to Latin, which in turn gave rise to French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, romansch, Catalan, and dozens of other languages (some now extinct).
Another descendant of PIE was Proto-Germanic. This eventually gave rise to West Germanic, which in turn gave rise to both English and German. Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans are realted languages with the same ancestry.
Yet another descendant was Proto-Balto-Slavic. Russian and the other Slavic languages such as Slavonic, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc. came from this branch.
Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. It did NOT branch into Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese. It is in no way based on Latin. There is no one single language 'Chinese'. There are several languages and dialects grouped under the umbrella of a single writing system. These all probably did come form the original Chinese. Taiwanese is one of those – its a Min Nan dialect.
Tagalog from the Phillipines is a Malayo-Polynesian language. It's related to many other languages in the area, and to some pretty far afield – such as Maori of New Zealand and Hawaiian. It has been influenced by Spanish, a Latin-derived language, but there is NO Latin basis for it.
This is a very abbreviated look at an extremely complex subject. There's no way to give a comprehensive discussion in something like Y!A.
For your questions:
Birth of Latin – Some time before 800 BC.
Was Latin the first language – Absolutely not.
Sign language – Many types were probably used over the centuries, but the oldest known documented system is from Spain in 1620.
What came before Chinese – Sino-Tibetan
Latin or Chinese first – Hard to say. The oldest known written Chinese is from about 1100 BC; oldest written Latin from about 800 BC. As far as spoken, that's really unknown. Realize that the spoken Chinese of 1100 BC would not be understood by anyone today.
Evolution of languages – There are full books written on this subject. Suffice it to say they all evolve. After about 500 years or so, languages change so much that a current speaker cannot understand the original.