The Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world with at least six thousand years of history. Chinese character inscriptions have been found in turtle shells dating back to the Shang dynasty1 (1766-1123 BC) proving the written language has existed for more than 3,000 years.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period ( c.
The project to trace the origins of Chinese civilization, in addition to finding signs of human activity more than 1 million years ago, has also proved that China's history includes 10,000 years of culture and more than 5,000 years of civilization.
How China Convinced 1.5 Billion People To Speak A Single Language - The Entire History of Mandarin
Which is the world's oldest language?
Dating to at least 3500 BCE, Sumerian could well be the oldest written language in the world. The earliest evidence of Sumerian is on a limestone tablet known as the Kish Tablet, found in Iraq. Sumerian was eventually succeeded by Akkadian, with the latter becoming the new vernacular language.
This tiny nation on the Italian peninsula holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest existing republic in the world. With a total area of just 24 square miles (62.2 square kilometers), San Marino is one of the smallest countries in the world but has managed to hang onto its independence for centuries.
The empire was sometimes referred to as Great Qing but increasingly as Zhongguo. Dulimbai Gurun is the Manchu name for China, with "Dulimbai" meaning "central" or "middle" and "Gurun" meaning "nation" or "state".
Studies of Chinese populations show that 97.4% of their genetic make-up is from ancestral modern humans from Africa, with the rest coming from extinct forms such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. “If there had been significant contributions from Chinese H.
Further down the list, Armenia (established 2492 BC), North Korea (2333 BC), and China (2070 BC) also stand out as some of the world's earliest organized societies. Each nation's antiquity reveals unique developments in language, culture, technology, and governance that significantly shaped human history.
The world's first language is challenging to pinpoint because spoken languages existed long before written records. Some of the earliest known written languages include Sumerian, Egyptian, and Akkadian, with written records dating back to around 2600 BC or earlier.
In conclusion, Hebrew is the more ancient language but Arabic has preserved much more of its linguistic roots, however, both of them share a common ancestor.
The English language is approximately 1,400 years old. It originated from a West Germanic language and was brought over to Britain in the mid 5th century by the Anglo Saxons (during a migration).
The spoken Chinese language is comprised of many regional variants called dialects. Modern Chinese dialects evolved between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC. The differences in dialect are due to the different pronunciation and vocabulary. The official dialect of China is Mandarin, also call “Putonghua”.
UNESCO is giving credit where credit is due: Chinese is officially the most difficult language in the world. To give you an idea of the complexity of this language: The written form gives no clues as to pronunciation… And pronunciation and intonation completely change the meaning of a word.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia.
Given that the common height of an ancient Israelite was somewhere between 5 feet and 5 feet 3 inches, this could make the common cubit somewhere between 16-17 inches. Billington notes that an 18 inch cubit would mean the person was about 5 feet 8 inches (taller than most Israelites of this period).
For the oldest still-spoken languages, Hebrew and Arabic are notable. Their written evidence dates back around 3,000 years, and they belong to the Afroasiatic language family, which traces back 20,000 to 10,000 years.
For centuries, researchers have been fascinated with the question of which word was the first ever spoken. Because there are no records from the period when language first emerged, the answer is not known.
Sanskrit is considered to be the mother of all languages because many of the world's languages, including English, Latin, and Greek, have borrowed words and grammar rules from Sanskrit. The language has also had a profound influence on the development of Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil.
In modern Hebrew, Sin (Hebrew: סין) is the word for China, just as modern Hebrew uses other ambiguous biblical place names for contemporary countries, such as Sfarad (Hebrew: ספרד) for Spain and Tzarfat (Hebrew: צרפת) for France. In the Vulgate, Jerome of Stridon translated “Sinim” as "Terra Australis" into Latin.
Although Chinese society is welcoming and Chinese people are friendly to foreigners, regularly failing to understand the culture or language can make you feel isolated.
The first Asian people, represented by the skulls from the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian in China, more closely resemble contemporary Africans and Europeans than they do modern Asians.
