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Similarly, the word quack, referring to the call of a duck, is an approximation to the noise that ducks actually make. The vast majority of words, however, are purely symbolic, with no necessary relationship between the word or its sounds and the referent of the word.
Thus English uses the word cow to refer to a large, domesti- cated bovine animal, while French refers to the same animal as a vache: neither word sounds like the animal in question, or relates to it in any other way, and the fact that these two language have very different words for the same animal demonstrates that the relation- ship between the word and its referent is essentially arbitrary. The same kind of distinction applies to gestures: when a chim- panzee shows a companion that it is hungry by pretending to eat, it is using a representational gesture, but when a person nods their head to indicate assent or, in some cultures, refusal the gesture is arbitrary and therefore symbolic.
When a person shakes their fist in anger, they are delivering a blow in pantomime, and the gesture is rep- resentational, but when the same person raises a clenched or flat- tened hand in a communist or fascist salute, they have moved into the realm of the purely symbolic. Animal gestures and cries are largely non-symbolic. Usually they are either of the weeping and blushing kind, that is expres- sive cries or gestures, or they are representational, as when a chim- panzee pulls a companion in the direction it wants it to go.
When a bird cries out on the approach of a predator, and so warns its companions, it is reacting automatically to the stimulus of seeing the enemy. Its cry triggers off reactions in its companions, which take to flight, but the bird utters the warning cry even if there are no companions present. The evolutionary process will obviously favour animals where such expressive cries trigger off suitable reactions, but the element of symbolism is small.
Its symbolical quality is one of the things that makes human lan- guage such a powerful tool. The expressive cry or trigger stimulus can refer only to the immediate situation, to what is present to the senses, but the symbolical utterance can refer to things out of sight, to the past and the future, to the hypothetical and the possible.
The functions of language Language is used for more than one purpose. The person who hits their thumb with a hammer and utters a string of curses is using language for an expressive purpose: they are relieving their feelings, and need no audience but themselves. People can often be heard playing with language: children especially like using lan- guage as if it were a toy, repeating, distorting, inventing, punning and jingling.
There is also a play element in the use of language in some literature. But when philosophers use language to clar- ify their ideas on a subject, they are using it as an instrument of thought. When two neighbours gossip over the fence, or exchange conventional greetings as they pass one another in the street, lan- guage is being used to strengthen the bonds of cohesion between the members of a society.
Language, it seems, is a multipurpose instrument. But human co-operation is more detailed and more diversified than that found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. This human co- operation would be unthinkable without language, and it is obvi- ously this function which has made language so successful and so important; other functions can be looked on as by-products.
A language, of course, always belongs to a group of people, not to an individual. The group that uses any given language is called the speech community. Language types A human language, then, is a signalling system which operates with symbolic vocal sounds, and which is used by some group of people for the purposes of communication and social co-operation. There are over six thousand human languages spoken in the world today, which all fall under this definition of language, but never- theless differ widely from one another.
Various attempts have been made, therefore, to classify languages into different types. One scheme distinguishes two main types of language, the analytic and the synthetic. An analytic language is one that uses very few bound morphemes, such as are seen in English prefixes and suffixes refill, slowly and in the inflections grammatical end- ings of English nouns and verbs boxes, talking, talked. Chinese, for example, is a highly analytic language: it has few bound forms, its words being mostly one-syllable morphemes or compounds of free morphemes.
A synthetic language, by contrast, uses large numbers of bound morphemes, and often combines long strings of them to form a single word. Examples of highly synthetic languages are the Inuit languages and Turkish. Most languages lie between these extremes, for the synthetic—analytic division is not a sharp one: rather it is a continuous scale, a continuum, with languages occupying various points between the two extremes. Its weakness as a system of classification is that languages are mixed: some are more synthetic or more analytic in some respects, some in others.
Another well-known classification divides languages into four types: isolating, agglutinative, flectional or inflectional and poly- synthetic or incorporating. An isolating language uses no bound forms: words are invariable, and in the extreme case every word would consist of a single morpheme.
Vietnamese and Chinese are examples of highly isolating languages. In agglutinative languages, such as Turkish and Finnish, there are many bound forms, and these are, as it were, stuck together to form words, without their shape being altered during the process: within a word, the bound- aries between morphemes are clear-cut.
In a flectional language, by contrast, the bound morphemes are not invariable, and a mor- pheme may signal several different features.
In a polysynthetic language, large numbers of morphemes, both grammatical and lexical, can be combined into a single word, as in the Inuit languages. This fourfold system arose in the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury, and is still often used today. It is not wholly satisfactory, how- ever.
The various definitions given are not always completely clear, and the four classes are not quite mutually exclusive: the Inuit lan- guages, for example, are both agglutinative and polysynthetic. For this reason, attempts have been made in recent years to establish different systems of language types. The two systems we have so far considered are both based on morphology, that is, the structure of words.
Many recent linguists have instead concentrated on word- order, and tried to base a typology on it. In Old English, however, both prepositions and postpositions were used. So in oper- and—operator languages the Verb precedes the Object, the Noun precedes its adjectives and possessives and relative clauses, and the Preposition precedes the noun phrase which it governs; Welsh is an example of an operand—operator language.
Unfortunately, a very large number of languages fail to conform exactly to either pattern: English, for example, is largely an operand—operator language, but places adjectives before the noun.
Some systems of language typology avoid this particu- lar difficulty by using non-syntactic features for the classification: for example, it is possible to use semantic categories such as Agent, Instrument, Experiencer and Patient, instead of or in addition to syntactic categories like Subject and Object.
None of the various approaches used, however, seems to have succeeded in establish- ing an all-embracing scheme of language types, and perhaps such an aim is in fact impracticable. They have, however, thrown much light on the structure of various languages and on the differences and resemblances between them.
Language universals The study of language types has been closely linked to the search for language universals, that is, features which all languages pos- sess, and must possess. Typology examines language variation, while the study of universals tries to establish the permissible lim- its of this variation, and both use the same kind of material.
The search for linguistic universals was given considerable impetus by the work of Noam Chomsky. Not all specialists in the field, how- ever, believe that all language universals are innate: some take the view that some universals may have psychological or functional explanations.
Some proposed universals are absolute, for example that all languages have vowels. It can be added that all languages have oral vowels but not all languages have nasal vowels. For example, Norn, a Germanic language related to Old Norse, was introduced to Orkney and Shetland by Viking settlers, and spoken there until the eighteenth century. Its use began to decline from the fifteenth century, when Norway ceded the islands to Scotland, and Scots was increasingly used instead.
However, a small number of speakers continued to use and write in the language, and by the middle of the nineteenth century a revival was in process. The revival gathered pace in the twen- tieth century, and, according to Ethnologue, a number of people now use it as first language, some 1, use it as their everyday language, and 2, others speak it fluently.
Cornish is now rec- ognized as an official language of the United Kingdom, and as a Minority Language within the European Union. A language can also become dead in another way. But, although dead, they have not died: they have changed into something else. And the people who live in Iceland today speak a language that has developed directly out of the language of the great Icelandic sagas of the Middle Ages. In fact all living languages change, though the rate of change varies from time to time and from language to language.
The mod- ern Icelander, for example, does not find it very difficult to read the medieval Icelandic sagas, because the rate of change in Icelandic has always been slow, ever since the country was colonized by Norwegians a thousand years ago and Icelandic history began.
But the English, on the contrary, find an English document of the year very difficult to understand, unless they have special train- ing; and an English document of the year seems to them to be written in a foreign language, which they may conclude mis- takenly to have no connection with Modern English.
Linguistic change in English The extent to which the English language has changed in the past thousand years can be seen by looking at a few passages of English from different periods.
Since it is convenient to see the same material handled by different writers, we have chosen a short passage from the Bible, which has been translated into English at many different times. Here it is first in a twentieth-century translation, the New English Bible, published in Now the elder son was out on the farm; and on his way back, as he approached the house, he heard music and dancing.
He called one of the servants and asked what it meant. How could we help celebrating this happy day? Your brother here was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is found. And he said vnto him, Thy brother is come, and thy father hath killed the fatted calfe, because he hath receiued him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not goe in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him. And he answering said to his father, Loe, these many yeeres doe I serue thee neither transgressed I at any time thy commandement, and yet thou neuer gauest mee a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: but as soone as this thy sonne was come, which hath deuoured thy liuing with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calfe.
And he said vnto him, Sonne, thou art euer with me, and all that I haue is thine. It was meete that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is aliue againe: and was lost, and is found. We have no great difficulty in understanding that passage, but nevertheless there are numerous ways in which it differs from present-day English. In grammar, we notice the use of the personal pronoun thou and its accusative thee, together with the associated pronoun- determiner thy: and after thou the verbs have the inflection -est or -st gauest, hast.
The use of thou in the passage in fact shows the disadvantage of using translations for our illustrative material, for it does not reflect normal English usage in The usage in the pas- sage is due to the influence of the original Greek. The spellings of the passage are quite close to modern ones, except for the use of u and v, which are not used to distinguish vowel from consonant: v is always used at the beginning of a word vnto , and u is always used elsewhere serue, out, thou.
Notice, however, the spelling of dauncing, which does rather suggest a different pro- nunciation from dancing. There is in fact plenty of evidence to show that pronunciation in differed in many ways from pronun- ciation today, even when the spellings are the same. The vowels in particular were different, as we shall see later. As our third example we can take the same passage as rendered by John Wycliffe, the first person to translate the entire Bible into English.
Wycliffe died in , and his translation probably dates from the last few years of his life. The punctuation of the passage has been modernized. And he clepide oon of the seruauntis, and axide what thingis thes weren. Forsoth he was wroth, and wolde not entre.
Therfore his fadir gon out, bigan to preie him. But aftir that this thi sone, which deuouride his substaunce with hooris, cam, thou hast slayn to him a fat calf. And he seide to him, Sone, thou ert euere with me, and alle myne thingis ben thyne.
This is much more remote from Modern English, especially in vocabulary. In grammar, there are noun-plural endings in -is thyngis, hooris, etc. The passage also uses i instead of j ioye ; the letter j was in fact merely a variant of i, and the mod- ern vowel—consonant distinction in their use was not established until about The word-order of the passage, however, is very close to that of present- day English.
For our final example, we go back before the Norman Conquest, to a manuscript of the early eleventh century. The punctuation is modernized. As the English of this period is difficult for the modern reader, we give only the opening of the passage.
In the later passages, some of them are replaced by words borrowed from French after the Norman Conquest approached, servant, received. The passage also differs from present-day English in the way words change their endings according to their grammatical func- tion in the sentence.
This could be demonstrated from many words in the passage but three brief examples will suffice. The passage also differs from present-day English in word-order. Translated literally word for word it runs as follows: Indeed, his elder son was in field; and he came, and when he the house approached, he heard the noise and the crowd.
Then called he a ser- vant, and asked him what it was. Then said he, Your brother came, and your father killed a fat calf, because he him safe received. There we see three different types of word-order, different arrange- ments of Subject—Verb—Object. This word-order occurs in subordinate clauses, opened in this case by the conjunctions because and when. These three types of word-order are common in the earliest forms of English, and are still found in Modern German.
The English language, then, has changed enormously in the last thousand years. New words have appeared, and some old ones disappeared. Words have changed in meaning. The grammatical endings of words have changed, and many such endings have disappeared from the language. There have been changes in word-order, the permissible ways in which words can be arranged to make meaningful utterances. Taken all together, these changes add up to a major transformation of the language. It can also be seen, even from the four passages that we have quoted, that the pace of change has varied.
The differ- ences between the Wycliffe and the preconquest passage, too, are very great. It is conventional to divide the history of the English language into three broad periods, which are usually called Old English, Middle English and Modern English. No exact boundaries can be drawn, but Old English covers from the first Anglo-Saxon settlements in England fifth century AD to about , Middle English from about to about , and Modern English from about to the present day. These periods are often subdivided, giving such subperiods as Late Old English c.
Mechanisms of linguistic change All living languages undergo changes analogous to those we have just seen exemplified in English. What causes such changes? There is no single answer to this question: changes in a language are of various kinds, and there seem to be various reasons for them.
The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation. From the middle of the sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of the speech organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in effect systems of phonetic symbols. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws even though sound laws often reflect universal tendencies , but simply particular sound laws for one given language or dialect at one given period.
We must not think of a sound law, however, as a sudden change which immediately affects all the words concerned. If [b] changes to [p] in a given lan- guage, the change may first appear in words which are frequently used, and gradually spread through the rest of the vocabulary.
Indeed, the sound law may cease to operate before all the relevant words have been affected, so that a few are left with the earlier pronunciation. During childhood, we learn our mother tongue very thoroughly, and acquire a whole set of speech habits which become second nature to us. If later we learn a foreign language, we inevitably carry over some of these speech habits into it, and so do not speak it exactly like a native. But it is not true of the similar phonemes in French or Italian, where the voiceless plosives are pronounced without any following aspiration.
Many English speakers of French and Italian, even competent ones, carry over their aspirated voiceless plosives into those languages, and this is one of many features that make them sound foreign to native speakers.
In bilingual situations, therefore, the second lan- guage tends to be modified. But if a large and closely knit group of people adopt a new language, then the modifications that they make in it may persist among their descendants, even if the latter no longer speak the ori- ginal language that caused the changes. This can be seen in Wales, where the influence of Welsh has affected the pronunciation of English, and the very characteristic intonation patterns of Welsh English have been carried over from Welsh, even among those who no longer speak it.
Many historical changes may have been due to a linguistic substratum of this kind: a conquering minority that imposed its language on a conquered population must often have had its language modified by its victims.
Changes may also be due to contact between speakers of differ- ent dialects. In the long term, this can lead to the creation of a new variety of the language, as was the case in New Zealand, where English-speaking settlers from different parts of the British Isles came together in the nineteenth century, all bringing their own dialects.
By the twentieth century, the variety that we now recog- nize as New Zealand English had emerged from this linguistic melt- ing-pot. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries could be seen as consisting in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes of the period: the increased power and wealth of the mid- dle classes, and their steady infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.
An example of this is the pronunciation of the final consonant in words such as hunting, shooting and fishing. This is true, but it is also true that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood.
Perhaps it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged.
This, however, cannot explain changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that there is some systematic trend in the failures of imitation: if they are merely random deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no nett change in the language.
For some of these random variations to be selected at the expense of others, there must be further forces at work. One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimization of effort. We all try to economize energy in our actions, it is argued, so we tend to take short cuts in the movements of our speech organs, to replace movements calling for great accur- acy or energy by less demanding ones, to omit sounds if they are not essential for understanding, and so on.
Such changes increase the efficiency of the language as a communication system, and are undoubtedly a factor in linguistic change, though we have to add that what seems easy or difficult to a speaker will depend on the particular language that has been learnt. Suppose we have a sequence of three sounds in which the first and the third are voiced, while the middle one is voiceless: the speaker has to carry out the operation of switching off voice before the second sound and then switching it on again before the third.
Changes of this kind are common in the history of language, but nevertheless we cannot lay it down as a universal rule that fuzzy is easier to pronounce than fussy.
For them, plainly, fussy is the easier of the two pronuncia- tions, because it accords better with the sound system of their own language. The change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimi- lation, which is a very common kind of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to conform with that of the following plosive.
A more recent example of the same kind of thing is the common pronun- ciation of football as foopball. Sometimes it is the second of the two sounds that is changed by the assimilation. Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pro- nunciation in order to increase efficiency. Consonant clusters are often simplified. Spellings with d are first found in the thirteenth century, and are completely normal by the sixteenth.
Probably because the pro- nunciation thunder actually calls for less precise movements of the speech organs. Sometimes, too, ease of pronunciation apparently leads us to reverse the order of two phonemes in a word metathesis : this has happened in the words wasp and burn, which by regular development would have been waps and brin or bren.
The changes produced in pursuit of efficiency can often be tolerated, because a language always provides more signals than the absolute minimum necessary for the transmission of the mes- sage, to give a margin of safety: like all good communication sys- tems, human language has built in to it a considerable amount of redundancy.
But there is a limit to this toleration: the necessities of communication, the urgent needs of humans as users of lan- guage, provide a counterforce to the principle of minimum effort.
If, through excessive economy of effort, an utterance is not under- stood, or is misunderstood, the speaker is obliged to repeat it or recast it, making more effort. This direction may be chosen because it makes the sound inherently more audible: for example, open nasal vowels seem to be more distinctive in quality than close ones, and in languages which have such vowels it is not uncommon for a nasal [e] to develop into a nasal [a].
In considering such changes, however, we cannot look at the isolated phoneme: we have to consider the sound system of the language as a whole. Let us imagine that in the vowel system of a language there is a short [e], as in bet see for example the vowel diagram in figure 4, p.
In this way, a whole chain of vowel changes may take place. In this example we have assumed that the contrast between the three vowels is important enough in the functioning of the language for speakers to resist any changes which threaten this contrast. This will be the case if large numbers of words are distinguished from one another by these vowels, in other words if the contrast between them does a lot of work in the language. The functional load carried by a contrast is a major factor when speakers decide unconsciously whether to let a change take place or not.
This does not mean, on the other hand, that a phoneme with a small functional load will necessarily be thrown out of the sys- tem, either by being lost or by being amalgamated with another phoneme.
It also depends on the degree of effort required to retain the phoneme, which may be quite small. On the other hand, it takes very little effort to retain the distinction between them. So, using only three articulatory positions, and three distinctive articula- tory features plosiveness, nasality, voice , we get no fewer than nine distinct phonemes. For the same reason, if there were a hole in the pattern, it would stand a good chance in time of getting filled.
Many of the same causes can be seen at work. This influ- ence is strongest in the field of vocabulary, but one language can also influence the morphology and syntax of another. In the realm of vocabulary and meaning, the influence of gen- eral social and cultural change is obvious.
As society changes, there are new things that need new names: physical objects, insti- tutions, sets of attitudes, values, concepts; and new words are pro- duced to handle them or existing words are given new meanings. Moreover, because the world is constantly changing, many words insensibly change their mean- ings. As in pronunciation, so at the other levels of language we see the constant conflict between the principle of minimum effort and the demands of communication.
Minimization of effort is seen in the way words are often shortened, as when public house becomes pub, or television becomes telly, and also in the laconic and elliptical expressions that we often use in colloquial and intimate discourse. But if economy of this kind goes too far, some kind of compensating action may be taken, as when in Early Middle English the word ea was replaced by the French loanword river, and in the seventeenth century the bird called the pie was expanded to the magpie.
In such ways, the redundancy which has been removed from the language by shortenings may be reinserted by lengthenings. There is also interplay between the needs of the users and the inherent tendencies of the language system itself. One way in which the language system promotes change, especially in grammar, is through the operation of analogy, which also tends to produce economy.
Analogy is seen at work when children are learning their language. Then it learns a new word, say plug, and quite correctly forms the plural plugs from it, by analogy with these other pairs.
Analogy, then, is the process of inventing a new element in conformity with some part of the language system that you already know. The way in which analogy can lead to change is seen when the child learns words like man and mouse, and forms the analogical plurals mans and mouses. Ultimately such childish errors are usually corrected, but analogical formations also take place in adult speech, and quite often persist and become accepted.
The rarer a word is, the more likely it is to be affected by analogy. The unusual noun-plural forms in present-day English, which are the ones that have managed to resist the analogy of the plural in - e s, are mostly very common words, like men, feet and children, or at any rate are words which were very common a few centuries ago, like geese and oxen.
Language families The process of change in a language often leads to divergent development. Imagine a language which is spoken only by the population of two small adjacent villages. In each village, the lan- guage will slowly change, but the changes will not be identical in the two villages, because conditions are slightly different.
Hence the speech used in one of the villages may gradually diverge from that used in the other. If there is rivalry between the villages, they may even pride themselves on such divergences, as a mark of local patri- otism.
Within the single village, speech will remain fairly uniform, because the speakers are in constant contact, and so influence one another.
The rate at which the speech of one village diverges from that of the other will depend partly on the degree of difference between their ways of life, and partly on the intensity of commu- nication between them. If the villages are close together and have a good deal of inter-village contact, so that many members of one village are constantly talking with members of the other, then divergence will be kept small, because the speech of one commu- nity will be constantly influencing the speech of the other.
But if communications are bad, and members of one village seldom meet anybody from the other, then the rate of divergence may well be high. When a language has diverged into two forms like this, we say that it has two dialects. The flux of language 49 Suppose now that the inhabitants of one of the villages pack up their belongings and migrate en masse. They go off to a distant country and live under conditions quite different from their old home, and completely lose contact with the other village.
The rate at which the two dialects diverge will now increase, partly because of the difference of environment and way of life, partly because they no longer influence one another. After a few hundred years, the two dialects may have got so different that they are no longer mutually intelligible. We should now say that they were two dif- ferent languages. Both have grown by a process of continuous change out of the single original language, but because of diver- gent development there are now two languages instead of one.
When two languages have evolved in this way from some earlier single language, we say that they are related. But as long as we bear this in mind, we shall find that family trees are a convenient way of depicting the relation- ships between languages.
Recently, scholars have begun to experi- ment with more nuanced methods for visualizing the relationships between languages, using the same software which geneticists use for analysing and diagramming relationships between geneti- cally related populations. Various different sorts of diagram can be generated by these techniques, but a common form is a net- work indicating the distance between several languages, such as in figure 5.
For example, when the Romans conquered a large part of Europe, North Africa and the Near East, their language, Latin, became spoken over wide areas as the standard language of administration and government, especially in the western part of the empire.
Then, in the fourth century of our era, the empire began to disintegrate, and, in the centuries which followed, was overrun by barbarian invasions — Huns, Slavs, Germans — and gradually broke up. In the new coun- tries that eventually emerged from the ruins of the western empire, various languages were spoken. In some places, both Latin and the local languages had been swept away and replaced by the lan- guage of an invader — in England, by Anglo-Saxon, in North Africa, by Arabic.
But, because there was no longer a single unifying centre to hold the language together, divergent development took place, and Latin evolved into a number of different new languages. In general, the further a place was from Rome, the more the new language diverged from the original Latin. In the early Middle Ages there was a whole welter of local dia- lects developed from Latin: each region would have its own local dialect. But, as the modern nation-states developed, these dialects became consolidated into a few great national languages.
Languages descended from Latin are called Romance languages. Each of the Romance languages has developed its own morph- ology and syntax, but they all bear signs of their common origin in Latin. The most obvious resemblances are in vocabulary: each language has undergone considerable changes in pronunciation, but the Latin origin of large numbers of words is quite evident. The members of such a related group of words are said to be cognate. We have little documentary evidence dating from before the twelfth century AD for the languages that developed from Latin, but it is probable that many significant developments in Latin pre-date this period.
However, Latin was probably used as a more or less standardized written form for these languages in the early Middle Ages. In non-Romance-speaking areas, however, such as Anglo-Saxon England, Latin was learnt as a second language, mainly for reading and writing. This use of Latin as a largely literary language may have contributed to its preservation as a fixed, literary language, which continued to be used for religious, educational and scientific purposes throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern period.
It is in this form that it influenced the lexis of many western European languages, especially English. Some language families This process of divergent development leading to the forma- tion of new languages has occurred many times in human history, which is why there are now over six thousand different languages in the world.
An examination of these languages shows that many of them belong to some group of related languages, and some of these groups are very large, constituting what we can call language families. A language which has arisen by the process of divergent development may itself give rise to further languages by a continu- ation of the same process, until there is a whole complex family of languages with various branches, some more nearly and some more distantly related to one another.
An example of such a family is the Semitic group of languages. At the time of the earliest written records this was already a fam- ily with many members: in Mesopotamia were the East Semitic languages, Babylonian and Assyrian, while round the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were the West Semitic languages, such as Moabite, Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew.
Also surviving are Syriac, Ethiopian and Hebrew, the last of which is a remarkable example of a language being revived for everyday use after a long period in which it had only been used for religious purposes. But the Semitic languages are themselves related to another family, the Hamitic languages, and at some time in the remote past certainly long before BC there must have been a sin- gle Hamito-Semitic language which was the common ancestor of all Semitic and Hamitic languages.
The language of ancient Egypt belonged to the Hamitic group; today, of course, the language of Egypt is a form of Arabic, but a descendant of the ancient Hamitic language of Egypt, Coptic, survived until about the fifteenth century, and is still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.
Surviving Hamitic languages are spoken across a large part of North Africa, and include Somali and the many dialects of Berber. Another large language family is the Ural-Altaic. This has two main branches, the Finno-Ugrian and the Altaic though some authorities deny that these branches are in fact related.
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