The recent acquaintance with the German language made me ponder about a basic human skill – Languages. While our close relatives, the chimpanzee can only make sounds, use sign language and facial impressions but cannot talk, it is amazing how we, the Homo sapiens one single species can talk in thousands of languages.
In India alone there are 200 registered dialects and 18 official languages. Infact it is the first country to ever do a linguistic study with Astadhyayi written for Sanskrit in 5 BC and Tolkappiyam written for Tamil around 2 BC. The Europeans started it a few centuries later.
I also noticed that the sounds among languages are shared, but not necessarily the meaning. For example in German there is this sound “au” where
- “a” is pronounced as ‘a’ in apostrophe
- “u” is pronounced as ‘u’ in noun
- In Tamil it is the 12th consonant- In Hindi it is the 11th consonant
A similar sounding word in different languages would refer to different things. That essentially means in the same human mind at different location/ages/time the same sound reminded of different things. I guess it would be fun to learn linguistics for people who are intrigued by languages. With all that said, if any of you are interested in learning one of the oldest and alive languages Tamil here are a few links, you can even get a degree online :)
http://pm.tamil.net/pub/pm0100/tolkap.pdfhttp://www.tamilvu.org/coresite/html/cwhomepg.htm
How did you conclude that Chimpanzee's do not talk? ;)
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