Translation Travails: Inept or outdated guidebooks that only provoke hilarity (IANS Column: Bookends)

As humanity evolved sufficiently to communicate articulately with each other, the foundations of language and all its benefits were laid.

At this time, it is generally believed that there was one common tongue, but as increasing population led to migrations, languages began diverging and proliferating. So did the scope for mutual unintelligibility and misunderstanding.

Of current languages, take Macedonian and Marathi, Spanish and Sinhala, or say, Punjabi and Portuguese. They appear all different and are even spoken on different continents, but they all happen to be members of the Indo-European family that accounts for most languages primary, recognised, or used across all world.

All stem from various historical languages, developing from different proto-languages, said to originate from one common language Proto-Indo-European, in this case.

But due to their succeeding levels of divergence, and other influences and impacts, only linguists and philologists can point out the similarities, and for the common speaker, other Indo-European family languages may seem as mysterious, as those from other families, such as Sino-Tibetan

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