LANGUAGE
4500 BCE to 2022 · Six Millennia of Human Expression
Language is the software of civilisation. From the first clay tablets to the transformer architecture — we have always been building new ways to mean.
For the first time in history, machines have joined the conversation. The transformer architecture and LLMs mark a threshold as significant as Gutenberg's press.
Proto-Indo-European Origins
The reconstructed common ancestor of most European and North Indian languages begins to diverge.
Cuneiform in Sumer
The birth of writing. Clay tablets recording transactions evolve into the first complex literary system.
The Proto-Sinaitic Script
The earliest ancestor of the alphabet, simplifying writing from hundreds of logograms to a few dozen phonetic signs.
Rise of Classical Arabic
The Quran and the Islamic Golden Age establish Arabic as a global language of science, philosophy, and trade.
The Gutenberg Press
Mass production of text leads to the standardization of vernacular languages and a surge in global literacy.
The First English Dictionary
Robert Cawdrey's 'A Table Alphabeticall' attempts to standardize a rapidly shifting English tongue.
Morse Code Transmission
The first time complex human language is transmitted instantly across distance via electrical pulses.
FORTRAN Released
The first widely-used high-level programming language, enabling humans to speak instructions to machines.
The First Email
Ray Tomlinson sends 'QWERTYUIOP' as the first electronic message between two machines.
The World Wide Web
HTML becomes the universal grammar for digital information, connecting billions via a shared protocol.
The Transformer Paper
Google researchers publish 'Attention Is All You Need', defining the architecture for modern Large Language Models.
ChatGPT & Natural Language AI
Machine logic achieves fluent, conversational human language, redefining the relationship between thought and text.