Languages are a profoundly human thing. Humans love to connect and share. No doubt animals do this too, but humans seem to take it to another level. It seems more and more clear to me that humans at some point in our past invented language simply because we were desparate to share our view of the world with others.
Animals are capable of communication and some of themm, like bees, can communicate very specific information but human language is just orders of magnitudes more complex and much more capable of sending complicated and nuanced messages about pretty much whatever we want. Animals on the other hand are restricted to the set of phrases they were born with.
Dogs can say "Intruder!" "I am sad" "I am in pain" "I love you" "I am excited" but not much beyond that. Humans can say "A purple octopus once appeared in my bedroom in a flash of light and cooked up 43 croissants which it then threw out the window before disappearing again leaving my room in a mess". That sentence has probably never been said before and probably won't be again. Despite having never before been said before, you can understand it perfectly. This is because language is a system. How does this system work? And how did it come about?
Some of the clues are in the words themselves. The word "like" is descended from a word meaning "image" or "similarity". We form our view of the world by looking outside and seeing what is reflected within ourselves. We look out at the world and we are drawn to certain things. A cute cat, a friendly dog, exciting music. We feel a draw to it. We feel that the spirit of the thing or animal is reflected in our own being.
The ancestors of most of the Europeans living today came from the Pontic Steppes region which covers part of Ukraine and Russian. We don't know what these people called their language but linguists call it Proto Indo European. It wasn't written down but we can reconstruct it by looking at the language that it became which includes most language of Europe.
In Proto Indo European *lig- meant an image or similarity. This eventually became Proto Germanic *līką which meant body. Proto Germanic is the ancestor of the Germanic languages. Proto Indo European slowly morphed into Proto Germanic amongst the people that went west from the Pontic Steppe and settled in Scandanavia.
*līką also started being attached to the end of words to say that something was similar or like something else. This is how -ly came into English. So "day" started out as the equivalent of "day-like" (which got shortened to "daily" over time).
How did a word meaning "body" come to mean "pleasurable"? It probably has something to do with how humans actually conduct themselves and gives us a clue into how language works. Anything that is agreeable and understandable to us is, at least to a certain degree, likeable. Imagine how our ancestors must have felt when they came across a weird animals. Maybe the animal wasn't even dangerous but it was strange and scary.
Things that were more similar to them such as wolves were probably much more likeable and humans and wolves began a partnership that has lasted the ages. Things that conformed to our ancestors expectations and ideas about the world must have been very desirable. So over time a word with quite a generic meaning of "image" or "body" came to mean "likeable" "conforming" "agreeable" because of the associations our ancestors made with things.
What does this have to say about language? I have come to see language as a sort of reflection or image of how we humans see the world. It celebrates our successes and triumphs and shares the joys we experience in the world. It also reflects our bad sides. Insults, swear words and slurs represent the aggressive, angry and combative side of our humanity.
Why I eventually fell in love with the study of language is that every word has a story and every word can teach us a little bit about the story of humanity. Our past is baked into the words we use. Humans like to organise things. We like to understand and categorise our world. But language is not just something that tells us about the past. It can be a signpost for the future. Words are not dead things only meant to sit in a dictionary and used with utmost care. They are living embodiments of our hopes, dreams, successes, fears and failures. We should care more about words but not in a rigid confined type of way. We should care about what we are trying to say and what message our words have to convey.
Our ancestors worked out a way to communicate with each other and talk about their experiences. They wanted to build a world where they had an impact and they could like the world they created for themselves and their families. All the languages existing in the world today are gifts handed down to us by our ancestors. Let us continue to study these gifts but also let us open ourselves up to new possibilities. I am sure that is something we like doing.
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