Chasing Lost Languages
If humans have been talking for 200,000 years—for most of our species’ existence, that is—then an estimated half a million languages might have been spoken in all. To put that number in perspective, around 7,000 languages are spoken today. And because writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of those half a million languages are lost to us, having been spoken in a preliterate world and died before they could be recorded. That’s half a million distinct systems of knowled