Kairos
Senior Member
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- 1,103
Is anything "that simple"? I'm just talking in a nut shell here. Just our English language today as an example, if you trace it back to Old English, you wouldn't understand a damn thing. Both are English - but radically different due to our evolution. In fact, our technological revolution has been the basis of many new words to describe our new technologies.
I didn't say that all natural languages are mutually intelligible. I said that, grammatically, they are the same thing. There exists the same mathematical structure underlying all human language. You just don't know about syntax, morphology, and lexicography. You don't know what a context-free grammar is, or a frame grammar if that is the more accurate model, or any of it.
Using your example, I can trace modern English back to middle English, middle English back to old English, old English back to Saxon, Saxon back to the old Germanic dialects, and those back to the Indo-European language, and the Indo-European language back even further, on and on until everything collapses into one language that all of modern homo sapiens spoke when we were perhaps no more in number than twenty thousand people and an opening out of Africa was found.
There exists no totally different language. Even if you got into conlang, you'd just mimic the human language.