Expert: Maria - 5/10/2004

Question
Hiya!
I was wondering what the first known spoken language was - latin?
Also, do you have any knowledge of faerie language - is there a known source, or do authors writing fiction on the subject make that up as they go?
Sincerely,
Emma

Answer
Hello Emma,

Actually it is very difficult to say what was the first known spoken language in history, or rather I dare say almost impossible.

In fact, if we go back to the beginning and examine the origin, evolution  and diversification of human   language, we can certainly make a list of several languages, but not say which has been the first.

The only thing we can say  is  that the first well-documented languages were born:

1-in ASIA [see Sumerian cuneiform, South Mesopotamia(today Iraq) in the 5th millennium B.C , and Chinese ideograms, 4th millennium B.C.]

2-in AFRICA at the same time [see Aegyptian hieroglyphs ,4th-3th millennium B.C.]

3-in EUROPE [Indo-Aryan or Indo-European  language, i.e. an unrecorded prehistoric language from which  nearly all European languages are descended , c.2500 B.C].

Just to this Indo-European language family LATIN belongs, as well as - much later - Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian(Romance Group); English, German,  Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish [Germanic Group ]; Ancient and Modern Greek [Greek Group]; Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech [Slavic Group] ; Albanian [Illyrian group].

Therefore LATIN  is NOT the first known spoken language as it dates back to 1500/ 1000 BC, since Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese are much older, as they are also the oldest writing systems, while  the first alphabet ,i.e. set of graphs, or characters, used to represent the phonemic structure of a language was invented by the Phoenicians ( 1200 BC) and then borrowed by  the Greeks and the Romans, so that we use still today the Latin alphabet that derives exactly from the Phoenician letters.

With regard to the origin and evolution of language, this is a very hard  and vexed question that is still today discussed by  linguists, anthropologists, palaeontologists, ethologists, geneticists , neuroscientists and other scientist who are concerned with this matter.
In fact, scientists say that  language is the very thing that makes us human. But when did we first start talking and how did language evolve over the millenniums into the diverse form of communication,  it is today a very difficult question.

Finally, as for FAERIE language, this is NOT my field of expertise.
But, as far as I know,  this lilting fluid language, spoken by the various elfin cultures and races,  has no written form, so that ,when they need to written, the faerie folk generally use some other language.

Best regards
Maria