The following information is an excerpt taken from
Exploratorium Magazine Online:
Where Do Languages Come From?
We don't ask
ourselves where languages come from because they just seem to be there: French in France, English
in England, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, and so forth. Yet if we go back only a few
thousand years, none of these languages were spoken in their respective countries and indeed none
of these languages existed anywhere in the world. Where did they all come from?
In some cases, the answer is clear and well known. We know that Spanish is simply a later version
of the Latin language that was spoken in Rome two thousand years ago. Latin spread with the Roman
conquest of Europe and, following the breakup of the Roman Empire, the regional dialects of Latin
gradually evolved into the modern Romance languages: Sardinian, Rumanian, Italian, French,
Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. A language family, such as the Romance family, is a group of
languages that have all evolved from a single earlier language, in this case, Latin.
But while the Romance family illustrates well the concept of a language family, it is also highly
unusual in that the ancestral language -Latin - was a written language that has left us with copious
records. The usual situation is that the ancestral language was not a written language and the only
evidence we have are its modern descendants. Yet even without written records, it is not difficult to
distinguish language families, as can be seen in Table 1.
| Language | "HAND" |
| English | haend |
| Danish | haand |
| German | hant |
| Russian | ruka |
| Polish | reka |
| Serbo-Croatian | ruka |
| Spanish | mano |
| Italian | mano |
Can you think of words that we use that might come from the Latin "manus" meaning "hand"? How about manicure? Use a dictionary and find at least five other words that the root word comes from the Latin "manus" meaning "hand". Write the word and its description on the chart below:
