A Short History of the German Language (RLE Linguistics E

different communities reach a certain stage of civilization and invent or, more usually, borrow and adapt an alphabet.

the earliest extant documents go back no farther than about 3000 B.C.

They prefer to concentrate on those periods of language for which there is documentary evidence,

many linguists regard questions of the origin and early development of language as belonging to the fields of psychology, philosophy, and anthropology rather than to that of linguistics.

in what circumstances and why did primitive man first begin to speak? What were the first human ‘words’ like? What were the early steps by which human language developed? Such questions have been asked at least since the days of Plato and the writers of the stories of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel in Genesis; since the eighteenth century (since, for example, Herder’s essay of 1772, Über den Ursprung der Sprache) interest in them has been continuous.

From Latin the Romance languages (Italian, Sardinian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Provençal, Rhaeto-Romanic, Rumanian) are descended

became the international language of medieval Europe

represented chiefly by Latin, whose earliest texts date from the sixth century B.C.

divided into South Slavonic (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, and the Slovene of Carinthia and Styria in Austria

East Slavonic (Russian in its various forms