Before Babel: Could the first human language be reconstructed?

In fact, in both Chinese and ancient Egyptian, the word for "cat" is mao/mau.

Cats were domesticated in Egypt, and slowly spread to other parts of the world. (Like dogs, all housecats are descended from a single ancient population, not domesticated in multiple places and times. Although the dog has diverged greatly from the wolf and is now regarded as a separate subspecies, the domestic cat and the wild cat are too similar to distinguish genetically. The first dogs arose in Mesopotamia around 12KYA when humans began living in farming villages surrounded by heaps of tasty garbage, the first housecats in Egypt around 4-5KYA when granaries were first erected and the rodents got out of hand.)

The origin of the Latin word felis is unknown, but it was also used for the marten, and therefore may have been extended to the feral cat populations (also small hunters of rodents) that congregated around granaries and seaports and were enthusiastically welcomed for their pest-control services.. The origin of the word "cat" is also misty, but it's probably borrowed from the Afro-Asiatic language of some other people who lived near Egypt.

 

Makes no sense at all. Cavalli-Sforza has done the most recent genetic analysis of our species, and ended up with a quite detailed map of human migrations.

China, Egypt, Mesopotamia and India were already well-developed civilizations 5KYA. We have actual written historical records beginning not long after that time.

But the Western Hemisphere and Australia are this guy's biggest problems. Australia, by the way, was almost surely not reached by a land bridge 60KYA. Sea levels were much lower at that point in the ice age, but not so low as to walk from Singapore to Australia. Nonetheless, Paleolithic boating technology was quite adequate to cross the straits which were much narrower than today.

There were certainly a few adventurers who made transcontinental journeys between cultures. Kennewick Man, for instance: a European buried in what is now the state of Washingon in the 8th millennium BCE. But there were no major migrations.

Besides, we've got all kinds of genetic markers that trace our paths. That was the focus of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza's work. He even found people at the very southern tip of India who share a few markers with the Native Australians. Apparently a few people bailed out on the journey, and their distant descendants were still there when the second wave out of Africa 50KYA came through their territory.

I'll wait for the peer review of this paper!

 

We may never know the answer to this question, a possibility that makes every linguist weep. The problem is that languages change over the centuries and absolutely everything about them can turn over and become unrecognizable: vocabulary, phonetics, grammar, syntax.

But more than that, the basic world view of the community can change. Chinese has no tenses, and I attribute that to a people who have had a more-or-less continuous government for more than 2,000 years. From their point of view the past is pretty much like the future! But were they always like that? Did their language once have inflections that we could use to relate it to other languages outside the Sino-Tibetan family, but they're lost now? The Hopi language presents such a strange world view that it's difficult for Westerners to master. We just don't think like that.

Linguists used to talk about the "five-thousand year curtain." If you go back much farther than that, a language could change absolutely everything, so if we didn't have intermediate forms we'd have no clues to guess that the modern one evolved from the older one.

The Nostratus hypothesis (from Latin nos, nostra "we, our") says that all languages evolved from a single ancestor. People have been testing it for three decades, using massively-parallel computing. In the 1980s they announced their victory, presenting a list of about fifty words in twenty of the world's best-recorded, supposedly unrelated languages (Afroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Finno-Ugric, Indo-European, Japonic, Mon-Khmer, Mongolic, Na-Dene, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, etc.) that were "obviously" cognates--having traced them cybernetically through quite reasonable paradigms of phonetic shift. It was good work!

Unfortunately, the next generation of bigger and faster massively-parallel processors demonstrated that a set of fifty supposed cognates was not enough! Pure chance could have delivered exactly that many "apparent cognates," and even more! So we were back where we started. We can't build language families that go back more than 5,000 years.

But in this new century, that curtain has been pushed much farther back. The Na-Dene family of North American languages (Navajo, Tlingit, etc.) was found to be related to the Yenisei language of Siberia. (This finding has not been universally accepted so I may have to edit this post five years from now.

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) As you would expect, there is little or no common vocabulary, but the inflections and other bits of grammar and syntax are startlingly similar. When we note that the people of northwestern North America have been separated from the Siberians for about 8,000 years (this was a second migration: the people of Central and South America have been here for about twice that long, and there's evidence of an earlier migration from Europe more than 20KYA), we've opened that curtain a little wider.

But that's still nothing compared to the age of our species. I've seen more than one anthropologist postulate that the technology of spoken language was probably invented around 70KYA, because at that point in the archeological record there is an explosion of new kinds of activities that imply a level of organization that simply could not have been maintained by animals without speech, no matter how intelligent. Perhaps the most amazing of these activities was the first successful migration out of Africa around 60KYA. That group of adventurers from the San tribe traveled all the way to Australia where they finally found good weather and abundant food, and eventually populated the entire continent.

If language is indeed 70,000 years old, I don't think any linguist in his right mind expects to trace all of the living languages back to it. It could have been invented in multiple times and places. What argues against that hypothesis is the evidence of so many other technologies that did not arise independently. Most technologies are 99% ideas and only 1% artifacts, so they can be carried from village to village pretty quickly. Language is 100% cerebral, so it would have spread like lightning. Every tribe would have picked it up from its neighbors, even if they were hostile, simply by observing them using it, slapping their foreheads, and thinking, "What a great idea!"

Sure, the human population was not spread out as widely as it is today, but still Africa is a pretty big place. Language could have been invented in two places, or more. Nonetheless, if this anthropological perspective is true, it makes all non-African, non-Australian languages related in one big family. Actually, since all of our ancestors came over in one migration, which just happened to also be a group of San adventurers, the Australian languages could also be related to ours.

Latin is the hub of the Italic subgroup of the Western branch of the Indo-European language family, closely related to Greek and the progenitors of the Celtic and Germanic subgroups. More distantly related to the members of the Eastern branch, most of which are in the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic subgroups, and to a few oddballs with no obvious path of ancestry like Albanian and Armenian.

DNA analysis shows that the Basques are not related to the Indo-European and Finno-Ugric peoples who essentially define the name "European." It's been reasonably postulated that they might be the last descendants of the Cro-Magnon, who had Europe to themselves as a Paleolithic paradise for about 20,000 years until the Neolithic Indo-European tribes arrived and took over, with their superior technologies, most notably agriculture.

What goes around, comes around. The Cro-Magnon had done the same thing to the Neanderthals--a different species but close enough that they interbred.

Sounds like the plot on next week's "Nikita."

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Sure. What bothers me is that the Celts were the first Neolithic, Indo-European tribe to set foot in Europe. They had the continent (and the assignment of marginalizing the Cro-Magnon) to themselves for centuries before the Hellenic, Italic and Germanic tribes showed up at the margins and verrrry slowly began spreading out. Would it not be the Celts then, who did most of the intermarrying with the Cro-Magnon, thereby picking up a smidge of their Neanderthal DNA? Why would the Greeks, Sicilians and Dutch have it in the same proportion, since they got it third-hand from intermarrying with the Celts? As did the Slavic peoples from intermarrying with the Bohumil (the people after whom Bohemia is named) and other Celtic tribes in eastern Europe who hadn't already been wiped out by the Goths? And who can explain why the Huns and Bulgars, latecomers to the continent, would have it at all? Does this mean the European Jews, also latecomers, have it too? Wow, that's some aggressive DNA.

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I find it amusing that the K in P-I-E kmtom is so ephemeral that most of the "Kentum" languages have also lost it: German hundert, Italian cento ("chento"), Spanish cien ("thien"), Portuguese cem ("seng".) Greek is one of very few modern languages that still has it (he-katon), and perhaps this so impressed the early linguists that they automatically assigned it to our branch of the family.

Does anybody know the Armenian and Albanian words for "hundred"? Tocharian? [edit #1: Armenian is harur, which gives me no clue, but since "ten" is dasseh it might be lumped in the Satem or Eastern branch of the family.] [edit #2: Albanian is njëqind. I think I'll just leave that one alone!]

They're still arguing over the location of the urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Last time I checked everyone was certain that it was the Pontic Steppe, but today they're looking at Anatolia!

Um... dozens? When we wish the Christian armies a long hot afterlife in Hell, we focus on their obliteration of two of the world's only six independently-developed civilizations, and weep over what they might have taught us about our species and the universe if we'd let them mature. Nothing wrong with that wish. But we can also hurl a few more curses down at them for what they did to the paleolithic tribes north of the Rio Grande and the sprouting neolithic tribes in what is now the eastern USA. What we might have learned about the paleolithic-neolithic transition by watching it happen! Its influence on language alone is a loss worthy of tears.

Do you mean we, speaking our modern languages, or we, attempting to speak our academic reconstructions of their languages? Proto-Indo-European has been lovingly crafted by generations of linguists, like the Lego model of the World Trade center in the Smithsonian's National Building Museum. But I'm not sure any of those linguists honestly believe that if they hopped out of their time machine, after a 5000-year trip backwards (having found the right urheimat!), anyone would actually understand them.

 

Please don't say "verbal" when you mean "oral." "Verbal" means "using words," and includes both oral and written communication. In popular parlance this distinction has become muddled, but this is the Linguistics board so let's use our words properly.

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ASL and the words on this screen are examples of verbal communication.

Not all communication is language. In the most expansive definition, language is a system of standardized symbols used by a community to communicate. These symbols can be sounds, gestures, carvings, drawings, knots, piles of stones or notches on trees.

Simply watching somebody perform a task and copying her motions is not language. But reading and writing IS.

That was the very dawn of the Iron Age, so you would have been one of the first blacksmiths. And you would have been a very popular fellow. The horse had already been domesticated for about 2,000 years and people had been waiting impatiently for you to invent the horseshoe.

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We've all been trained in the performance of complex tasks, starting with our parents, then our teachers, and continuing with our supervisors, managers and other mentors in our professions, hobbies, etc. All of this training is dominated by verbal explanations, both oral and written. I daresay there are very few tasks in the modern world that can be learned well and completely just by observation and mimicry.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, some anthropologists identify 70KYA as the most likely era of the invention of the technology of spoken language. There was an explosion of human activities of myriad types, which they specifically identify as activities that would be impossibly difficult to perform, much less learn, without speech.

Yes, deaf people get along very well in the modern world with sign language. But it has a major drawback: you can't communicate and use your hands to perform another task at the same time.

I can hear our female members shouting, "Sexist pig!"

This was not writing. It was, specifically drawing. Some elements were noticed to be common among many drawings and were stylized and abstracted to carry specific meanings that everyone learned to understand. This happened about 6,000 years ago when the first writing systems were invented, using these symbols as logograms: one symbol representing one word. Chinese still uses logograms because it's the only way speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, and the other mutually unintelligible languages that we mistakenly call "dialects" can communicate with each other. The Japanese have held onto about 2,000 of these logograms but also use a phonetic syllabary. Virtually all other cultures use phonetic symbols, even though some (notably we anglophones and our cultural competitors the French) don't use them very well.

. . . . sexist pig . . . . sexist pig . . . .

Most women had a nursing baby much of the time, so it wasn't practical for them to chase mastodons. They had to be the gatherers. Since they became experts in choosing herbs and finding out what they can do, they also became the healers. It's been suggested that they also developed a better color sense than men because the key to efficient gathering is being able to tell which fruits are ripe and which leaves and mushrooms are poisonous.

You must not be married. If you'd ever had an argument with your wife you'd know that women are capable of the most oppressive silence--which can last for several days until you suddenly realize that you were, indeed, wrong. Whereas men instinctively start jumping up and down and screaming at the top of their lungs every time one of them manages to toss a ball into a basket.

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I think it was Steve Martin who explained that women are still gatherers and men are still hunters. It's obvious if you go shopping with us. A woman goes through the store picking everything up, touching it, noticing the size and texture, and comparing its color to the one next to it, and when she finds the one she wants, she puts it in her basket. Then she goes to the next grove--oops I meant "store"--looking for something else.

A man, on the other hand, says, "Me need shirt. Me go hunt shirt." He walks into one store, picks up one shirt, throws its lifeless carcass over his shoulder, drags it to the cashier, and carries it home saying, "Shirt dead. Me go watch TV."

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I suppose spoken language is both oral and aural. But we produce it with our mouths so I suppose that's why we call it that. After all, many deaf people learn to speak, so the people who produce spoken language very slightly outnumber those who hear it.

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On the other hand, dogs and many other non-human animals learn to understand tiny bits of our language, so perhaps those who produce it orally are in fact outnumbered by those who respond to it aurally.

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"Vocal" would be good too.