How did different langages and accents come about?

RND	Tower of Babel Jun 25 03, 9:08 PM

Gnomon

Anywhere that two people speak the same language but live in communities isolated from each other, they will start to speak slightly differently. Over time, they two communities will end up speaking different languages. This effect does not happen so noticeably when the two communities are in constant communication with each other, so the evolution of new languages has slowed since the introduction of global communications. Jun 26 03, 3:09 AM

exceller

Here is a link for the Tower of Babel story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel Apr 23 08, 11:41 PM

Baloo55th

From about 300,000 years ago the potential for speech has been present in man's line. When these people were few in number, their language would have increased in complexity as the need for expressing new concepts arose. As the language users spread out (very slowly at first - no wagon train races for the best land), users at opposite ends of the line would diverge as they met new things and often adapted old words to new items. This is conjecture when applied to the earliest days. It is backed up by similar recycling of words in the spread and splitting of Proto-Indo-European. Eventually, there would be different languages that would be incomprehensible to others. (A similar situation can be found in crow alarm calls across a continent.) Primitive base languages may well have been started in more than one place, adding to the complexity of things. Dialects are - or were - languages in the making, and accents could be dialects in the making or the effect of one language on another. The Welsh accents are a good example of this. They are basically English spoken with the stress pattern of Welsh. What is practically certain is that the Tower of Babel had nothing whatever to do with the matter. A chapter before Babel there is reference to different languages anyway. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/babel.html For a non-mythological look at the origins of language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language Apr 24 08, 6:13 AM

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