Linguistic studies of the Indo-European languages show an agricultural/animal-husbandry society that spread from the region around India circa 8,000 B.C., moving westwards, and splitting into a northern (slavic) and southern (Germanic/Greek/Latin) branch. This seems to agree with your posted article. The British, when they first colonized India, were amazed at how many similarities there were between the language of India, and English.
Actually it spread from a region around Anatolia and Georgia and spread in two directions. The Eastern branch of the Indo-European family includes the Balto-Slavic and the Indo-Iranian groups, and other less well-known like Armenian. It was formerly called the "satem" group because the K in the original Indo-European word kmtom for "hundred" had already been palatalized into S before the Eastern group fragmented. (Satem is the Sanskrit word. It's sto in Russian.) The Western branch includes Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Albanian, and Greek. It was called the "kentum" group because the K in kmtom had survived, as in Latin centum and Greek hekaton. However, palatalization is a strong force and since then the C in centum has become S, CH, or TH in the Romance languages, and H in the Germanic. Anybody know the Gaelic or Albanian word for hundred? However, I have marked the Indo-European migration into Europe as much later than 8000BCE. The Etruscans, the Basques, and the people who built Stonehenge, just to name the ones we can name, were pre-Indo-European peoples--at least one of whom built a civilization--who lived in Europe during the time period referenced. The Celts were the first Indo-European tribe to arrive in sub-Scandinavian Europe and I've always heard their date as no earlier than 4000BCE. And how long ago did the Indic people arrive in India? They overran the Harappan civilization, which hadn't even been founded in 8000BCE. But the general info in the article is correct. Agriculture made possible permanent settlements, and marks the transition from the Mesolithic (hunter-gatherer) era to the Neolithic (village) era. That was obviously the necessary first step toward inventing civilization, which can be deconstucted as merely qualitatively larger permanent settlements in which people aren't all acquainted and related. See my other thread. It was recently discovered that figs are the first known cultivated crop, and the discovery pushed the Dawn of Agriculture a thousand years further into the past.
Fraggle Rocker: Wow - thanks for the edification. I know there's a lot more known about this than I've read. I've studied many of those languages, to varying degrees, but only obtained fluency in three of them. I read about the figs in the other post. Very interesting, and makes sense, since figs are so ubiquitous, and take root from cuttings so readily (or, at least they sure do here in Hawaii, where I grow dozens of species). What I've also found interesting in linguistics is that the Indo-European languages all use suffixes on nouns, verbs, and adjectives to change meanings. I.e., singular or plural, gender, case, etc. are all at the end of the word. In some African languages (Swahili, for example, which I studied somewhat), those determinations come at the beginning of the word (as an insert), so you know immediately, without having to wait to the end of the word. In oriental languages, I believe there are no 'endings' or 'beginnings', though I'm not very studied yet in that area of knowledge. Perhaps you know more about this than I, as well. I know virtually nothing about the various language groups of the Amerindian tribes. So, was there ever a 'first' language used by the first true humans? Or were there already several languages? We can trace to an "Adam" or an "Eve" from which all people alive today have as common ancestors (circa 150,000 years ago?), but they were in a matrix of many others - so were there several languages already then in existence?
Until the last years of the 20th Century, there was a brick wall in linguistics. It was acknowledged as impossible to track the history of any language family beyond about 10,000BCE. That was just around the dawn of the Neolithic Era, meaning that we couldn't trace the origins of language back into the hunter-gatherer days. The reason was that 12,000 years seemed to be enough time for absolutely everything in a language to change beyond recognition. Inflected languages (i.e. the verb endings you mentioned) become agglutinative (shoving words together like Chinese or, to a large extent, German). Entire vocabularies are replaced. Syntax transforms into some new pattern with no discernable relation. [BTW, regarding the Asian languages...Chinese has no inflections and does not even have the concepts of tense, number, etc. If it's important to make it clear that the dog ate the carrot yesterday you just say "yesterday." Japanese, on the other hand, is a nightmare of inflections. The verb endings even reflect the social status of the speaker relative to the listener, and women and men have two different paradigms.] Then massively parallel computing entered the scene. As in many avenues of research, we had reached the limits of the ability of bigger disk drives, more memory, and faster processing speeds to solve advanced problems in linguistic analysis. But more processors operating on different fragments of the problem were the key--compare this to chess, in which a hundred processors working in tandem beat Gary Kasparov. The brick wall came down like the ending on the Pink Floyd album. Well maybe not in 3 minutes 42 seconds or whatever. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But after months of brute-force comparisons, the massively parallel processor group did what no humans could have done: discovered complex arrays of phonetic shifts and grammatical evolutions going back so far that... well I won't give away the ending just yet. Out of the couple of thousand human languages that are available for study, each with a vocabulary of more than ten thousand words, the reward for all this work is something on the order of fifty words in all the European and Asian languages that have common ancestors. A few body parts, a couple of numerals, a pronoun or two, an animal... etc. I've seen the word lists and now that they're written down they're not all that remarkable. Considering that Russian pyat, Latin quinque and English five are all absolutely the same word, there's nothing on these lists that defies our understanding of the ability of spoken sounds to undergo regular shifts over the millennia. It's just that there are so few of them, we could never have found them by ourselves. We think that some words are immutable, that they stay with us forever. Pronouns, numbers, the most common everyday words. Yet English very, use, and question are Norman French borrowings. The Japanese use Chinese numerals for counting. Urban Brazilians have lost the universal Latin second-person informal pronoun tu and replaced it with voce, a contraction of "your grace." You begin to understand that when we said an entire language can turn over in 12,000 years, we weren't exaggerating. To expect to find fifty words that hadn't changed in quite a bit longer was counterintuitive. But to actually find them... well that took a computer, as they say. Anyway, the Indo-European, Finno-Ugro-Ural-Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and all the other languages spoken throughout Eurasia and North Africa are now a single superfamily. Linguists, clever scholars with millions of words at their disposal, gave it the pedestrian name of Eurasiatic. I don't know how far back this pushes the origin. I can't find a website with the dates, which are surely controversial anyway, but I think the branching into the "Caucasoid" and "Mongoloid" peoples that account for the entire population of the region goes back at least 40,000 years. The computers are still chugging away at the rest of the world's languages. Since the indigenous New World people started migrating from east-central Asia no earlier than 25,000 years ago, it's a no-brainer that their languages are in our superfamily, even though the MPPs haven't yet improved on the three-family model derived in the 1980s. (The Eskimo-Aleuts, the Indians of what is now the eastern USA and eastern Canada, and everybody else.) I think the Australians, who made landfall about 60,000 years ago, are still a bit of an enigma. And the Polynesians, whose DNA apparently identifies them as descendants of both Australians and eastern Asians. But the big question mark is Africa. So far there are no conclusive pointers to indicate a relationship between what is shaping up to be a single Sub-Saharan African superfamily and the Eurasiatic. But there are inconclusive hints. You, and possibly I, will live to see the question answered. It would be the answer to a lot of questions. The biggest one is: Why did modern humans (Homo sapiens) suddenly migrate out of Africa some 80,000 years ago? Did something happen that gave them the desire? Did something happen that gave them the ability? Or both? What if it was language? What if language arose while we were still in Africa? That would certainly have been a quantum jump in the nature of human society. It kind of makes agriculture, industry, and computers--the three "Paradigm Shifts"--look like trifles. We could suddenly communicate a lot better than the other animals. Think more complicated thoughts. Make and execute more elaborate plans. Pass more important lore on to our descendants. Maybe... Imagine, plan, and execute a multi-generation journey into a whole new world with completely different climates, food sources, topography, predators, and adventures? If it turns out that we learned to talk before we left Africa, it wraps human prehistory up into a nice, elegant little package.
It would appear, Fraggle Rocker, as if you are/were a linguistics major. Congratulations to you and your associates for having worked on such a complex task. I'm always fascinated at seeing the comparisions of languages, and how sounds shift, etc. I'm intrigued, for example, that the sound shift from German to low-land sea-oriented Dutch is very similar to the sound shift from Spanish to low-land sea-oriented Portuguese, at least to my ear. I'd be very interested in learning more about the origins of the Polynesian languages, which you seem to suggest are likely tied to the Eurasiatic superfamily. Some words are very similar to English/German. For example, the word for mountain in Hawaiian is mauna (like in Mauna Kea, where Keck is located and on the slopes of which I live). The word for sea in Hawaiian is kai. There are many other such 'ties' that are intriguing. Personally, I believe the Polynesian language might also have a tie to early judaism. This is based on some cultural similarities. Early judaism allowed for a person who accidentally killed another to run to a safe area, to get away from the vengeful family; by mosaic law he was to be protected from retaliation if he reached the place of refuge. In Hawaii, such custom also existed before 'discovery' by Cook. Early judaism also provided for male circumcision (and still does), a highly curious custom apparently not prevalent in other cultures at the time (based on the story of David being required to prove he killed his enemies by bringing back their foreskins -yikes!). Likewise, the Polynesian culture provided for male circumcision, as readily evidenced by many large phallic rocks left in place on various Hawaiian islands showing a circumcised penis. To me, this indicates that there was likely a cultural tie stemming back to circa 4,000 years ago. Anyway, many thanks for your excellent post.
No, just a hobbyist. I feel the same way you do about that stuff so I've been studying it since high school. Hmm. You'll have to explain that in more detail. I'm not sure what you're picking up on. Spain has plenty of its own lowlands where they speak Castilian Spanish, and Catalonia has its fair share too. To me, Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan/Occitan/Provencal/French form a continuum in phonetics and other attributes. It's the Malayo-Poynesian family. Tagalog, and the Melanesian and Micronesian groups are all one big family. That's one of the things that makes etymology so difficult: coincidence. The Japanese word for "lady" is onna, the Italian is donna. Coincidence? Actually, yes. BTW, "mountain" is a Norman-French borrowing, not a native Germanic word. In German it's Berg. It is a very delicate operation to trace the history of anything in English because of the occasional Brythonic word of the Celtic natives adopted by the Anglo-Saxon invaders into their/our own language, the Norse words added later by the period of Scandinavian colonization, the infusion of an entire French vocabulary following the occupation in 1066 (itself full of Norse words from its own "Norman" = "North Man" invasion), and the explosion of Latin, Greek, and other scholarly borrowings in recent centuries. The first settlers in that region arrived around 40,000BCE. Long before there was a Jewish people or religion. Interesting similarities but it's difficult to make a case for anything except coincidence. Or, it's just as possible that these are much older customs from before the diaspora of the Eurasiatic people, and they only survived in a few tribes who went their separate ways.
