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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

Weren't most languages spontaneously developed?

No. Most languages evolved from earlier languages through gradual linguistic drift. Some languages emerged by putting fluent speakers of two or more existing languages into a shared environment and having them form a common language.

Nicaraguan Sign Language is the closest example we have of putting a bunch of humans who don't know any language into a shared environment, and watching them develop a new language, with minimal influence of existing languages.

Of course, this was not actually a linguistically isolated community. But, for obvious ethical reasons, it is probably about as close to one as we will get.

That makes sense. They likely all have ancestors that were spontaneously formed, but are not so themselves. It seems like dialects might be spontaneously formed, and I wonder how we draw the line between languages and dialects.

The majority opinion I believe is that there is no common ancestor to all of today's languages, implying there have been several languages without parents. Of course, that's a thin majority, and those that believe it aren't that attached because there's no real way to know for sure. It would be neat if languages all had a common ancestor though, because that would leave open the possibility that language developed evolutionarily alongside our ability to understand it. Then maybe no language ever would have been spontaneous.

>I wonder how we draw the line between languages and dialects

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy

Most modern sign languages come genetically from British sign language or French Sign Language.

https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/ewtpnj/sign_langu...

In the remote past, yes. It is more interesting that this happened recently.

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