What Language predates the Epoch of Gilgamesh?

People have been telling stories for as long as they have had the power of speech.

 

One ancestral language? Epics and epochs.

I've run across that line of research as well. Fifty years ago linguists all agreed that it was simply impossible to do research going back more than 12,000 years, because that seemed to be the maximum period of time required for everything about a language to change so completely that it became unrecognizable. Vocabulary, grammar, phonetics, everything.

Except now they've got computers doing a million comparisons per second and they're discovering hitherto unimaginable relationships so fast that it's hard to keep up with them. Finno-Ugric and Ural-Altaic have already been merged, but now they've joined that pair to Indo-European, and by now probably to Japanese and Korean, to form a "Eurasiatic" family. I saw a table, they've got two numerals and two body parts that retained their original words, through a series of violent but mappable phonetic changes, way back into the Stone Age.

If you've seen it narrowed down to two families, the second one must be either Africa or the Western Hemisphere. And the writer I checked out seemed optimistic that ultimately it would all be reduced to one ancestral language that was spoken before we migrated out of Africa.

That makes so much sense that I can see how tempting it is to believe it without proof. What enabled Homo sapiens to explode out of Africa and establish safe, thriving populations in every climate zone? Something very few other large animals had ever accomplished? Perhaps language. We developed it in Africa and then brought it out with us, so all our modern languages are descended from a single ancestor.

Night Poet:

Even with a spell checker it's easy to mistake "epoch" for "epic." I didn't know until a recent visit to the Smithsonian that "Gilgamesh" is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable.

 

I understand

I have ceased trying to draw any conclusions about people from their spelling. A cynical point of view but it saves me from working at a level that I find depressing because... well here I am just about to go into it, shame on me!

As for how well one understands a story and how sincere one is in posting messages on a BBS that frequently veers off in flippant directions, both of those measures are broad spectrums upon which it's not easy to place a post and its poster. And I don't know how much correlation there is between the two variables.

I have diligently plodded halfway through "The Magic Mountain," "Huckleberry Finn," and "One Hundred Years of Solitude," until my head hurt and I had to give up in frustration and awe. My wife loves all of those books and wrote papers on them that I typed for her. The only reason my understanding of any of them, despite my sincerity in trying to, is greater than zero is a fortuitous private source of personal "Cliff Notes."

Whatever the source or motivation of the inquiries, GL has raised two interesting issues that may or may not have been their intention:

Surely not. An answer based on nothing but an educated hunch extrapolating backward from a story-telling skill that was already highly developed when when the first written records were created.

Probably one single mother tongue. An answer that could not be guessed at before the availability of the latest computer analysis techniques. A truly surprising and growing list of cognate words among the Indo-European, Ural-Altaic-Finno-Ugric, and other language families of Eurasia has already been established, pushing the cutoff for comparative linguistics well beyond the 12,000 year barrier that has been assumed unassailable since the age before "philology" became "linguistics." If this super-superfamily can ultimately be related to the families of Africa and Australia (my own guess at the current state of the research without trying to dig up last semester's theses), we're looking at a human race that already had a sophisticated language before we started migrating out of Africa. Which raises the intriguing hypotheses that language was one of the resources that enabled Homo sapiens to thrive in virtually every climate zone and ecosystem -- an achievement we share with just a few predators like the wolf.

I've presented my theory in a few other threads about how the striking similarity between the adaptability, curiosity, and highly evolved social structure of wolves and humans led to the voluntary creation of the world's first multi-species community. And I believe that experience, of learning to care about "people" of a totally different species, paved the way for us to emerge from the tribal communities of the Mesoolithic era into the larger village networks of the Neolithic, and ultimately to build civilizations that could not have functioned if we hadn't already developed the ability to feel kinship toward people quite different from ourselves.

So regardless of the "sincerity" of the original question, it serves as a springboard for conjecturing about the possibility that without first learning to live with dogs and enjoy it, we might never have built cities, nations, and computers. And that, arguably, might never have happened if at least one of the two species had not invented language.

 

Do you have any good sources of speculation on the origin of the people who lived on Ireland at that time? From what I can gather, even though the Celts had settled virtually all of Europe by the time the other Indo-European tribes got there, they had only been there since around 2,000BCE, long after those edifices were built.

So who was there first? All we have is the ruins of the Etruscans, the language of the Basques, and the monuments of a people we can't even name on Ireland and Great Britain. Perhaps the whole continent was previously occupied by another single ethnic group from an earlier wave of migration that was almost totally displaced by Indo-Europeans.

 

The link is broken and it just takes me to the home page of the webzine. A search on "alphabet" brought up too many hits and none of them seemed right. Could you double-check the link please? Or is it just me?

Anyway, alphabets and syllabaries all seem to be derived from older systems of logograms. Humans first devise symbols for places and important objects and animals, then they discover phonetics and slowly change the mapping of the symbols from things to sounds. Or else they don't, like the Chinese.

Actually there's a strong phonetic component to Chinese characters, many of them are a combination of one word that sounds like the word in question and another that has a related meaning. But at this rate it will take about 5,000 years to evolve into a phonetic alphabet.

If there's evidence of an alphabet that predates cuneiform, etc., I'd like to see it.

 

Yeah, it just loaded OK for me too. Guess I caught it on a bad night.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

My wife, Red Fraggle, and I get a lot of comments about our handles. It's encouraging to see so many people who were touched by that show. It was an intelligently crafted story, full of archetypes, like Gilgamesh.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

We paid for HBO for about two years just for Fraggle Rock.

As for the paper's hypothetical link between the Indians and the Semites, it seems like people have been trying to build that case since colonial days. These researchers at least seem worthy of the name "scientists" and they're not pushing the old "Lost Tribe" chestnut, but still I'll wait for some more extensive peer review before I take their hypothesis seriously.

The big problem is that it flies in the face of rather a lot of research that's been done in the past two decades that neatly sorted out the mysteries of the New World migrations and the taxonomy of its ethnic groups. Anthropology, archeology, DNA analysis, dental patterns, and linguistics have converged into a pretty convincing "three waves" model.

The Athabascans came over the Bering land bridge at least 16,000 years ago (some evidence suggests they may have sailed over on higher seas 4,000 years earlier but it doesn't materially affect the model) and their descendants are ALL the people south of the Rio Grande and MOST of the people east of the Rockies. Their languages and physiology have neatly matched up and defined a single ethnic group.

The Na-Dene followed the same route around 4,000BCE (again it might have been a bit earlier and again it doesn't make much difference) and ended up settling primarily west of the Rockies in what is now the USA and Canada. They have similarly fallen into a convincingly defined ethnic group.

Those groups both started their treks in almost the same area in Central Asia. But as yet no evidence has been found to relate them to each other, except distantly as Mongoloid peoples who split off from the Asian branch before the epicanthic eye folds became universal.

Then around 2,000BCE the Eskimo-Aleuts arrived, finding the continent so crowded that they stayed in the Arctic latitudes that they were already acclimated to. Their language and culture are clearly related to the peoples of Arctic Asia. They and their cousins have earned a place in the Trivia Hall of Fame by being the aboriginal people with the widest range of longitude: the Asian side of the family reaches almost to Finland's doorstep while the American side has settled Greenland. More than 3/4 of the way around the globe.

Anyway, many of the tribes that the paper discusses in the borderline Four Corners area are Athabascans. That means their ancestors left Eurasia no later than 14,000BCE. They are clearly of Mongoloid stock, not Caucasoid like the Semites. I don't think anybody has pinned down where or even who the ancestors of the Semites were 6,000 years before civilization sprang up in Mesopotamia.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that they made the migration, first from Mesopotamia to that staging area in Xinjiang or Mongolia or whatever modern region it falls in, and then to North America. And let's also assume for the sake of argument that they intermarried with everyone they met along the way, so by the time they started their second trek through Siberia they were more Mongoloid than Caucasoid. (After all, the Mongols did precisely the same thing in reverse on the eastward trek that deposited them in Turkey. To say nothing of the amazing metamorphosis of the Bulgars into Slavs.) Still all of this took place thousands of years before the appearance of the common alphabet hypothesized in the article.

Maybe the Na-Dene people brought it with them. The timeline barely fits. But the paper speaks of cultural influence spreading northward from the Athabascan people in Mexico, who could not have had this alphabet, into the Four Corners area. The movement would have to have been just the opposite for the Na-Dene, the only people recently enough arrived in the New World to have brought it with them, to have instead brought it south to the Athabascans.

As I said, I'm not disposed to dismiss this work until I see it reviewed by someone with a lot more credentials than mine. But until then I will at least remain skeptical. It leaves some huge questions unanswered.