Introduction

This is a Time Line of languages.

B.C.

10,000 B.C.

• Paleolithic Man is happily grunting about spears, wooly mammoths, and hot cave women. They had no known writing system and their spoken language probably consisted of little more than grunted nouns and verbs with a liberal amount of pointing — especially at spears, wooly mammoths, and hot cavewomen. In their spare time, Paleolithic Men doodled on many cave walls, but completely failed to invent a writing system.

2,000 B.C

• Qin Shi Huang unified all the writing systems of China into a system known as Hanzi which is still in use today to write modern Chinese.

500 B.C.

• The proto-language theorized to be the common ancestor of the Germanic language family was theorized to be alive and well in Scandinavia.

43 B.C

• The Romans arrive in England; and as they do so, the English Celtic language will be forever changed to suit Latin syntax and grammar. Very little Celtic words will survive, and only place names will still have their original names — such as London, Dover, Kent etc…

0 B.C

• The date some monk claims someone was born. People still doubt his evidence, not only that relating to a proper date, but the 'evidence' that the person existed at all. This person, and the monk who was a fan of said person, have nothing to do with this wiki, just fact we're using a time line.

A.D.

700

• The Japanese begin to get anal about their poetry. During this time, from 700-1100 (the Heian period), you were nobody if you didn't know your japanese poetry. If you couldn't recite the latest tanka by the latest author, you were such a poser. Get out of my castle!

1867

• Thomas Francis Wade starts what will become known as the Wade-Giles system of romanized Chinese transliteration by using it in the first Chinese textbook in English. Of course, it doesn't become known as the Wade-Giles system until the Giles men have their way with it in 1892.

1887

• Esperanto is first published by L.L. Zamenhof under it's original name : Lingvo Internacia. Some people like it. Others like it, but think it could be better and will later split off to form their own language that they think is better than Esperanto. Many people look on from the outside, wondering "WTF?"

1892

• Herbert Allan Giles publishes the Herbert Giles Chinese dictionary and in so doing, standardizes the work begun by Thomas Francis Wade on a romanized transliteration of Chinese begun in 1867. The system becomes known as the Wade-Giles system.

1957

• Simplified Characters of Hanzi are put into use. It catches on, but people in Hong Kong, Rural China, Singapore and Taiwan say "no thanks" and stick with the more complicated version, now known as Traditional Characters.

1958

• Pinyin is adopted as the official and preferred method of romanized transliteration for Chinese by the People's Republic of China. Naturally, everyone likes it. Except people in Beijing, who manage to cling to the older Wade-Giles system.

1960's

• Charles Hockett introduces his list of the design features of language. Linguists have been revising and debating them ever since.

1987

• In the centennial year of Esperanto, the United Nations gives an estimate that 8 million people from 130 different countries spoke Esperanto. World peace still hadn't been achieved. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was dead at the time.

2008

• Esperanto fails to bring about world peace.

Related Pages

• List of Countries
• List of Languages

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