Who Invented Words?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. On But Why, we let you ask the questions and we help find the answers. One of the things that many of you are curious about is language. How we speak, why we speak, and what we speak.

We do this podcast in English, obviously. It's a pretty popular language. There are more than 400 million people whose first or primary language is English. A lot more people learn some English to get around in the world. But it's actually not the language with the most speakers. That's Mandarin Chinese. There are more than a billion people speaking Chinese just as native speakers. You might be one of them. What's your guess on how many different languages there are?

Got a number? Well, it's just over 7,000, according to the best guesses of people who study languages. These people are usually called linguists. Just this year, they found 7,097 living languages. Living languages are languages that are still being spoken by at least one person.

But that number is shrinking all the time because many languages have just a handful of speakers, and there aren't enough new young people learning these endangered languages to keep them alive. So some linguists say there are really more like 6,000 spoken languages still around right now. The exact number is actually pretty hard to pin down. But the bottom line is that language is part of what makes us human. So today on the show, we are going to focus on verbal communication.

Our first question comes from Atlanta, Georgia. My name is Winland. I'm six years old. My question is, who invented words? We turned Winland's question over to a guy named John McWhorter. He's a linguist who writes books and gives talks and teaches at Columbia University in New York City.

Well, Wendland, I think that most people who study language would say that in terms of who invented the first words, it would have been the first people. And the first people who were exactly like us were in Africa, probably about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

So they would have been the ones who first came up with words for things, and then they would have passed those on to their children, and that would have kept going until you and me.

But I think what you're really asking is how did they come up with the words? Who are these wonderful people who came up with all of these wonderful words that we have for things? And that's a tough question because there are 6,000 languages in the world and they all have different words for things. And we can't go back in time. So we will probably never know what those first words were.

Now, some people have said that it must have had something to do with imitating the sounds that things make. And that might work with a cat because a cat goes meow. And it might work with a dog because a dog goes grr or something like that.

But if you think about it, most things don't make sounds. You can't come up with the sound that a door would make. Or there's no language where the word for door is door. And really, the first people probably didn't have doors because they lived outside. So it's very hard to say what would have led people to come up with some kind of word for sun door.

or tree, or run, or something like already, or maybe, or something like that. So it's a mystery. We'll never know why they came up with all of those words. We just know that once they did, there seemed to have never been any more people who didn't have any words. So how did we get all of those different languages, and how have they evolved?

Language changes all the time in the same way as the clouds in the sky are always moving. If you look up and you see the clouds looking one way today, then you don't look up tomorrow and wonder why the clouds aren't in the same places. They're always moving. Language is the same way because the sounds are always changing a little bit. So, for example, the word tree, it used to be pronounced more like tray.

You hear somebody saying something like, Trey. Now, you might hear them in a part of your mind as saying something more like, Tree. And so the way you're going to grow up saying, Trey, is something in between, something like, Trey. Well then, the person who listens to you talking and learns how to talk might hear it even more like, Tree. And pretty soon, the word is Tree.

Today, a lot of people don't say tree. They say tree. That's because tree sounds a little bit like tree. And your mouth kind of wants to go tree from tree. So the word changes bit by bit. So you can go from tray to tree. And if you imagine that happening to every word in every language all the time, then you know why one language could never change.

just stay the way it was. It's always inching along and changing into a new language.

So it's easy to see how over time a language might change. But how come we have different languages in different places? Why do they speak Spanish in Spain and Arabic in Egypt? If you have a bunch of people and one bunch goes in one direction and live there forever and one bunch go in a different direction and live there forever, then not only is everybody's language changing, but languages change in all sorts of different ways.

So if you have a word "tray" that means "tree", with one group, "tray" is going to turn into "tree". But then, in another group, "tray" might turn into something like "try", and then that becomes "tra" or something like that. Once again, take all of those sorts of changes happening to every single word all the time, and it means that you're going to get two different languages: one on one side of the mountain and one on the other side.

So that's why whatever that first language was has now become thousands of completely different languages. People were also isolated from each other, and so languages developed differently in different regions.

But that kind of isolation doesn't really exist anymore. Part of the problem today is that in a way it's kind of hard to really live on the other side of a mountain from each other because we have all of these machines that can have us hearing the same sorts of things, that have us talking to each other all the time.

And as a result, we tend to be talking more and more like each other. And so, for example, there are really a few languages that allow almost everybody on the planet Earth to talk to each other. So the English that I'm speaking is one of those. More and more people all the time speak English in addition to whatever other language they spoke. But after a while, their kids might not speak the other language. Their kids might just speak English.

And Mandarin Chinese is another one of those languages. And so we have fewer and fewer languages as time goes by. Some people think that in about 100 years, we're only going to have 400 or 500 languages left out of the 6,000. But is that a bad thing? We want to communicate better with one another, don't we? So wouldn't it be easier if we all just spoke one universal language?

The thing about that is that languages are a lot like animals. If you look at a book about animals, one of the funnest things is just how many there are. You've got the

We've got the alligators and the giraffes and the moles and the cockroaches and the storks and the disgusting little things that are in the ocean, everything in between. Languages are like that too. All languages are very different from each other. It's not just that each language is different words. Each language puts the words together in all sorts of different ways.

So languages are cool. And each time a language stops being spoken, and you can really only experience it by looking at a book that probably not very many people really end up looking at, then you've lost something that is fascinating just by itself. Coming up, who invented the alphabet?

Those are all different ways of saying hello. Now, even in English, you can say it in a lot of different ways. Hi, howdy, hey there, good morning, and the list goes on. So there are lots of ways to say hello or to greet someone in other languages, too. Here are just a few examples.

Hello, my name is Paula and I'm speaking from Brazil. Here in Brazil we speak Portuguese and here we say hello. We can say oi or if you're answering your phone like hello, you can say alô. So you can use either that oi or alô. My name is Adrian. I grew up in Wales and to say how are you, we would say should my.

Hello, my name is Katia. I live in England, but I'm Danish and I grew up in Denmark. In Denmark, when we say hello, we say hi. And quite often when we say goodbye to someone, we say hi hi. Bonjour, je m'appelle Rebecca. Je parle français parce que ma mère est d'Algérie.

Hello, my name's Rebecca. I speak French because my mom's from Algeria. How do you say hello? A, B, C, D, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, U, R, S, T, U, V, O, U, X, Y, and Z. I know my

Next time won't you sing with me?

You know what that is, the alphabet, of course. And you know exactly what order to say it in, don't you? I mean, maybe you also know how to say it backwards if you're really clever. But you know what order it's supposed to go in. That order got one of you pretty curious. My name is Nephilee. I'm eight years old from Burlington, Vermont. And my question is, why is the alphabet in the order that it is? Here's our guest again, linguist John McWhorter.

To tell you the truth, the answer to this question is one that's just no fun. And that is that there is no reason. The order of the alphabet has never made any sense. All we know is that the people who invented the first alphabet put the letters in a certain order. And then when they pass those letters on to other people, and finally other people pass those letters on to us,

We just kept the letters in that order because it didn't hurt anything, and that's all we ever knew. There are things in life that are like that, and, you know, sometimes you have to just get used to it. It's like a traffic light. Red, yellow, and green. Red means stop. Green means go. Yellow means something like slow down. Now, if you think about it, there's no reason why stopping is red. There's nothing green about it.

about going somewhere and there's nothing alarming about yellow if you just had to choose and you didn't know any other way of doing it. Those things are just choices that somebody made a very long time ago and they seem fine. They don't hurt anybody. And so you just learn it that way. You learn that red means stop.

But on another planet, it could be purple that meant stop or pink that meant go. So red, yellow, and green is just the way it is, and that's the way it's going to be. That's the same thing with the alphabet. The best I can do to give you any sense of it as being for a reason is to say that X, Y, and Z are hanging down at the end. And that's because with the first alphabets, you didn't need an X or a Y or a Z.

Those letters weren't needed in the languages that those people spoke. But as the alphabet got passed on to people speaking other kinds of languages, sometimes people wanted certain new letters. X and Y and Z were those kinds of letters. If you think about it, even now, X and Z feel kind of strange. They're only in so many words. They're kind of the peculiar letters, kind of like Q.

And so X, Y, and Z are at the end because they were invented later and it seemed natural to just tack them on to the end. But if we're talking about Y, it's B, C, D, E, F, G. The answer really is red, yellow, and green. Oh, well, I guess some things don't have a fabulous, interesting answer.

Now, if you have a question you'd like us to track down, we would love to hear it. Get an adult to help you record your question and send it to us at questions at butwhykids.org. It's easy to do on a smartphone. You can just use the memo function, get right up close to the phone, tell us your name and your age and where you live, and then ask your question. Special thanks this week to all of you, kids and adults, who sent in your hellos in so many different languages.

And thanks also to Sue White and the kids at Quarry Hill School in Middlebury, Vermont, for singing the ABCs for us. We'll be back in two weeks with an episode about religion and why, kind of like languages, there are so many different religions out there. But Why is produced by me, Jane Lindholm, and by Melody Beaudet at Vermont Public Radio. And we now have a newsletter. If you'd like to sign up, go to butwhykids.org and you'll find a link there.

And if you like us, subscribe in iTunes and write us a review so other families can find the podcast too. Thank you so much for listening. Stay curious.