Hints of the first language

A. Because creoles are the result of language starting anew, they shed light on what the world’s first language was probably like.

B. Because gender and conjugation take time to appear, we can assume that the first language was one like creoles, or Chinese, in lacking these.

C. In the same way, because languages take time to wend into marking shades of possession, exactly how one learned of something, shades of subjecthood, and so on, we can assume that the first language did not have alienable possessive marking, evidential markers, ergativity, and similar traits.

D. Languages distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with prefixes and suffixes: happy, happiness, happily. Because affixes start as separate words and arise through grammaticalization over time, we can assume that in the first language, one word could often stand as a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, as in languages today with few affixes, such as Chinese. Sranan creole is a language like this, where the word hebi can have many meanings:

Sranan Creole (Suriname):

A     saka   hebi!   A   hebi     e-hebi   mi!

the  bag    heavy the weight  is-weigh me

“The bag is heavy! Its weight is weighing me down!”

E. Thus, while we most likely cannot know what the first language’s words were, creoles give us the closest approximation of what its grammar would have been like.