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Genesis 11, 5-9
This legend, which has come down to us through the Bible, allegorically poses one of the greatest enigmas of linguistics: the origin of the great diversity of human languages. There are currently around 4,000 different systems of expression through which people communicate their ideas, feelings and desires.
Languages are dynamic; many different derivations have arisen and, over the course of time, have given rise to the multiplicity of languages we know today. Dead languages have fallen by the wayside, either because of internal evolution towards other languages, as in the case of Latin, or simply because they have disappeared, swept away by the relentless march of history, such as Etruscan and Etruscan.
A number of linguistic families have been identified around which the living languages in the world today are grouped, as well as some of the dead ones.
Among the most important of these, the following groups can be distinguished:
Indo-European languages are currently spoken by half of humanity. The main sub-groups of the family are: Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, Iranian, isolates and Indian.
The diagram of the evolution of the Indo-European branch shows graphically not only the evolution of the different languages that make up these but also those that have disappeared.
(Source: Editorial Neguri. Great Encyclopaedia of the World)
Note: The Basque language is a European language although it does not belong to the Indo-European family. It is considered a linguistic island.
In our times, the need for communication is aggravated due to the great advances in transport and communication that have reduced the physical differences between countries and people as never before. Linguistic differences, on the other hand, remain unchanged. Moreover, due to the expansion of the more industrialised countries, the less developed countries, their language and, with it, their culture, are in danger of disappearing.
The ideal of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity is supported by easy access to culture: personal culture is the basis of equality, since without it there can be no equality between men; national culture is the basis of liberty, it is difficult to understand a free community in its own culture if it is not also free; and international culture is the basis of fraternity, only when culture is a common good among all peoples can fraternity be understood and attempted among all.
(Source: Berlitz.com © Statista 2024)
Each language is a cultural monument and all have the same right to live and develop. In this study, this problem will be approached from the following perspective: all languages, despite their diversity, share some minimum linguistic universals, which in some cases are more evident.
The most complex program, even though it performs the most sophisticated tasks and its construction and operation are difficult to understand, can be reduced, in its instructions, to the simplest combination of two elements: 0 and 1. The most complex linguistic structure can be reduced to the basic structures we have mentioned, subject-comment, determiner-determiner.
To try to solve the problem that has produced linguistic diversity, that is, the impossibility of communicating efficiently among all human beings, there are a variety of solutions: those who proclaim that a living language should become the universal standard, as in the case of English, French, Japanese, etc.; to those who seek an artificial and neutral language as a non-traumatic and non-imposing solution that can be extended as an auxiliary language, allowing other languages to survive.
Those who seek to impose a single language for quantitative reasons are not considered a valid solution: if Chinese should be established as a universal language in terms of the number of speakers, if English has a privileged position in terms of its influence in the cultural field, however, it is costly to learn, since two different languages coexist in it, Saxon and Latin, as can be deduced from its vocabulary, the same objective, e.g. work and labour.
Indo-European, as can be seen in the graphs, is geographically very extensive and quantitatively very numerous. Consequently, a possible solution to the problem of incommunication must take as a point of reference the common characteristics of the most numerous group of languages on the planet: Indo-European. Not without taking into account the contributions that other languages with non-Indo-European roots can make to a better understanding, as in the case of Basque, which is European but not Indo-European, of the minimum universal structures.
This study is based on this fundamental idea: the need for a universal, natural, simple and neutral language, which, based on the common characteristics of the different languages originating from Indo-European, allows communication between people in an easy and simple way. In order to achieve this objective, we are going to analyse, comparatively, different languages in order to bring out what is common to all the conventional systems we call languages.
