The first option, according to which the same language existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years in different pre-human groups, seems unlikely. The evolution of languages over the last few thousand years is well studied from written sources and shows that languages diverge rapidly as their speakers spread geographically. The second, more likely, option assumes that the genetic ability to learn languages evolved in relation to their common base. Individual languages form the plane of expression of this base. Damian Blasi and his colleagues, after analyzing the “basic vocabulary” of 40 to 100 lexical items from 62 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, showed that there is a stable connection between sound and meaning: lexical items with similar meanings have similarities in sound. This similarity may be due to the origin of different languages from a common ancestor, to borrowings between languages, or to other reasons that make certain sounds preferable for expressing certain meanings (Blasi et al. 2016).
At one time, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed not only differential calculus but also the idea of a single human language based on the nature of things themselves. Newton wrote: “The dialects of each language being so divers and arbitrary a general Language cannot be so fitly deduced from them as surely as from the natures of the things themselves, which is the same for all Nations and by which all Language was at the first composed” (Elliott 1957, p. 7). Leibniz believed that there is an alphabet of human thought, made up of simple concepts or “letters” and that innate language is based on this alphabet (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 379).
Strange as it may seem, thoughts are not made of concepts, not of images, not of letters, not of words. Thoughts are made of meanings. Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):
“No one has trouble with the idea that ‘the same novel’ can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern—a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus ‘the very same novel’ can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart” (Hofstadter 2007, p. 224).