The development of a language resembles biological evolution. It happens minute by minute, generation by generation, so it is difficult to determine where one language ends and another language that develops from it begins.

🔺Finnish

Finnish was not used in writing until the 16th century, but it has a much deeper, older history. It belongs to the Ugro-Finnic language family, which also includes Estonian, Hungarian and several languages used by national minorities in Siberia. Despite this, Finnish contains many loan words that have been introduced into it from other languages over the centuries.

In many cases, Finnish has preserved these borrowed words in a form closer to the original than the languages from which they were borrowed. For example, the word aiti, meaning “mother”, came from Gothic – which, naturally, is no longer in use.

⠀
🔺Farsi

Have you never heard of Farsi? Farsi is mostly spoken today in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. You may have heard of Persian, and your imagination probably imagines a genie emerging from a bottle. It’s essentially the same language, just under different names. Farsi is a direct descendant of Old Persian, which was the language of the Persian Empire.

Modern Persian was formed around 800 AD, and what makes it different from many modern languages is that it has changed relatively little since then. Today’s speakers of Persian can take, for example, a text written in 900 AD and read it with even less difficulty than a native English speaker can read, say, Shakespeare.

⠀
🔺Greek

The Greek language originated around 1500 BC. Although it has changed considerably from the ancient version, it is still spoken by some 13 million people. Modern Greek is now very much the official language in Cyprus and Greece. More than a thousand years ago, some of the world’s most respected scholars and philosophers communicated in Greek.

Many of the foundational documents of Western philosophy, such as the works of Aristotle and Plato, logic and mathematics, astronomy and other branches of science were originally written in that language.