@Hannah well actually a lot of the modern languages are all derived from ancient languages. For example, french, spanish, portuguese, romanian and italian have all evolved from latin. It’s just a consequence of evolution.
We can actually trace a lot of the roots of our different languages back to a previous language! Fundamentally we speak differently because language is extremely fluid (it changes very very rapidly), and we stopped living in the same place a long time ago, so there has been a lot of time for change.
I do remember a study from a year or so ago where some scientists were trying to see if there were certain words that were similar across all/most languages, because they would indicate that they’ve changed the least since the “mother tongue”. They found that words like “mother”, and “fire” were often pretty similar – “mama” is a common sound for many languages, and fire often has an “fi” sound to start. It was an interesting read!
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