There is a Babylonian legend which says, once upon a time, there used to be only one language. Anthropologists and linguists increasingly seem to agree with the idea. Considering the theory that all the continents used to be one and their split and the topographical changes made people migrate from one place to other. Hence, all languages may have had a common source language and migration only created a dialect of that language.
It is interesting to note how far words travel. Of course, people have been wanderers for the longest time. "Settling down to form a culture" is a relatively recent idea. And if people have travelled for trade, expansion, in search of a better land or simply for the joy of travelling, they carried with them their language.
It is interesting to ponder over how some words took root in a foreign land and perhaps may have replaced its colloquial term. For example, the word for pineapple in Marathi, Kannada or Tamil is "ananas". It has origin in the Sanskrit word anaas. But in Arabic, Italian or French the word is a variation of the word ananas, ananasse, ananasso and ananas respectively. Where as there are completly different words for other fruits like apple or guava. (Pineapple is also called "bahunetra phalam" in Sanskrit meaning "the many-eyed fruit.")
Question is why does a particular word travel whereas others don't? Mostly it happens when there is no colloquial equivalent for that term in the loaned-to language. Or sometimes it simply catches on because it is trendy and then becomes localised. We might use only singular foreign terms, especially greetings and interjections which seem to travel faster. For instance even if we might know almost nothing of Italian or Spanish, we still seem to have picked up "ciao" or "hastalavista" when signing off.
In Hindi, there is a peculiar phrase for farewell, "Shabbakhair." People assume it to be Urdu in origin. That might be partially true. It is derived from the Arabic greeting for good morning, "Sabah al Khair,"; which has to be responded with a "Sabah al Noor" which means "the morning be glorious." Urdu being unique in terms of formation, flexibly absorbed the phrase and localised it as "Shabbakhair". (Urdu is written in the Persian script and mixes Hindustani syntactical style for sentence formation. Yet it maintains the Persian style of forming compound terms, eg. jashn-e-bahara meaning celebration of the spring, or duniya-e-husn-o-ishq ka tumhi shabab ho, to paraphrase idea, "you are the essence of the world of beauty of romance," (from the song Chaundvin ka chand) the complexity of the syntax adds to its aesthetics due to the rhythm it renders.)
The academics and scholarly of the Arabic language had long been concerned about the constant sopping up of English words in the Arabic language. Obvious solution was to either coin new words or repurpose old ones. So when the word for "telephone" was being contemplated over, the suggestion that received the approval was interesting. The Arabic word for telephone is "hatif." Hatif is repurposed from the Sufi notion of a worshipper, the dervish responding to the voice of "an invisible caller."
Technology is growing at such a fast rate that such measures may hardly work in the long term. Each new gadget that enters the market brings in a lexicon of its own and is quickly absorbed in most languages of the world. There is limitation on how much contemplation can help this matter because this change is revolutionary. And we cannot be pessimistic about this. Who knows the Age of Technology will perhaps take us back to speaking only one language and to a shape of language we never knew could exist.
