Languages

 Hello! Hallo! Hola! Three words, three languages, same meaning. 

Greetings all! Language has been a crucial invention of humans, accelerating the way we developed as individuals and society at large. It is a tool of great power, helping us to exchange ideas, entertain ourselves or simply express our feelings. Beginning from clicks and snaps to hoots and basic sounds to the present world, which has tens of hundreds of languages, thousands of dialects and countless accents.

Wikipedia defines a language as a "structured system of communication. Languages are the primary means of communication of humans, and can be conveyed through speech, sign, or writing." A language is simply a range of vocalizations made by humans that conform to a certain set of rules (grammar) that define their usage. A language may or may not have a script, which is a group of characters that represent the vocalizations of the language. Languages may also have accents (the way an individual pronounces the words) and dialects (a sub-variety of a language). The number of characters in a language can range from 2 in the Machine Language all the way up to 74 in Khmer (Cambodian). That is, of course, when we don't include pictographic languages such as Chinese, with some estimates that all the way up to 135,000 unique characters! That's some number (phew, and we Hindi-speaking peeps think that 52 characters are migraine-inducing :). 

The idea of the exchange of ideas is itself old. Like really old. At least 30,000 BCE for that matter, is when the earliest cave paintings were painted on the walls of caves in France. Spoken languages can go even older, as far back as the Upper Paleolithic Era. The oldest continuously spoken language and the oldest language not actively in use are Tamil and Sanskrit, respectively. Tolkāppiyam is the oldest surviving example of Tamil literature, which experts date to have been written anytime between 5320 BCE and 8th Century CE. 

Speaking a language is so important for our existence. Yet, we largely ignore the fact that what you are doing this instant, that is reading a script of a language, which causes the vocalizations of those characters in your head, which then sets in your mind ideas that were once in mine, which I wrote. There you go, we just communicated! Way to go, pal! We started from simple sounds, then pictographs, then full-fledged languages, then code languages that helped in wartime, followed by digital languages that I'm using to type this blog, and now we have emojis, emoticons and acronyms that have the ability to communicate a large number of emotions in just a few characters. 

People developed languages maybe to simply communicate basic things to one another, like whether or not it was an excellent time to go hunting, or deciding on primitive hunting strategies. But today languages are much more than just a mode of communication. It represents cultures. It represents mindsets. It represents the intellectual abilities of individuals or society. It means thousands of years of human evolution and intellectual development that paved way for new ideas and inventions. Languages connect lives, not just words.

Thank you for spending a few moments reading this. Adios amigos!