Before Babel: Could the first human language be reconstructed?

Roman A is Greek alpha, which is a rotated version of Phoenician 'aleph, whose name is the West Semitic word for "ox." The Phoenician letter was a stylization of an older hieroglyph of an ox's head. The apostrophe in 'aleph is the glottal stop, a common phoneme in the old Semitic languages, and the letter was used to phonetically represent this sound. Other letters in the Semitic abjad had similar phonetic evolution from older pictorial hieroglyphs: beth, "house" for B, gimel, "camel" for G, etc. (Those are the Hebrew words, I don't know the earlier West Semitic or Phoenician pronunciations.)

As I pointed out earlier, the word "language" means a set of standardized symbols, i.e., abstractions. Sensory reality is not abstraction, it is what abstractions are abstracted from.

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

A famous passage in one of C.S. Lewis's Perelandra novels described a commune in which everyone took turns doing kitchen work, but men and women never worked in the kitchen on the same night. His explanation is that men require many more words to understand a task, whereas women grasp it intuitively. For example, when washing dishes, one man will say to the other "Put this small green bowl on the second shelf above the long counter, next to the large blue bowl."

When two women are performing the same task, one will say, "Put this over there with the other one."

This was true in earlier eras because women were stuck at home nursing babies. In our era, as women have been freed from this bondage (both by child-care technology and by simply having fewer children), an increasing number of pioneers in all disciplines are female.

Con artists say it's just the opposite. It is easier to read women because their facial expressions and body language include more "tells" than ours. But it is harder to lie to them because most of them have raised children and can spot a lie. (Even those who haven't had children of their own have often helped raise their younger siblings, have had jobs as teachers, etc.)

 

That's what I meant. They don't have much faith that their reconstructions are accurate enough to communicate. Hopefully it would seem to be simply a bizarre dialect from a distant outpost, and after a few weeks of work they might be able to understand each other.

 

No discernible relation to each other. As noted above, the "5000-year curtain" can easily mask a relationship between two languages that separated very long ago. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonetics, even the attitude toward the universe can turn over completely and leave no traces. The link between Navajo and Yenisei is 8,000 years old and it's so tenuous that it hasn't yet been completely accepted by the linguists' community. Nobody has found any cognates (the same word gone through different phonetic changes), they just have some striking similarities in grammar and syntax.

If, as anthopologists have suggested, the very first language was developed seventy thousand years ago, we have absolutely no hope of tracing the evolution of its daughter languages.

That's often due to migration rather than change in the language. The Finns are generally regarded as "Scandinavians" because they live right next door to the Swedes and Norwegians. But the Scandinavians are Indo-European people whose ancestors migrated up from the Pontic Steppe (or perhaps Anatolia, as some scholars now suggest), whereas the Finns are a Finno-Ugric people related to the Hungarians, and their ancestors migrated from much further east. The languages of the two groups are not related, or at least not obviously.

All phonetic alphabets and abjads (alphabets with no vowels like Hebrew) are in fact descended from the Egyptian writing system. However, non-alphabetic phonetic scripts are not. This includes the abugidas such as those used in India, in which each symbol is a consonant with a diacritic mark representing an attached vowel, and syllabaries such as those used by the Japanese and the Cherokee, in which each symbol represents a consonant-vowel combination. And of course non-phonetic systems like Chinese logograms were also devised independently.

If the first language was indeed invented 70KYA, the human population was much smaller (a 5-digit figure) and much more concentrated. Most technologies consist primarily of ideas rather than physical artifacts, so they can spread very quickly, and show up a thousand miles away long before anyone there might have come up with the same idea. Language is one hundred percent ideas, so it can spread even faster. It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that when one tribe invented language, it spread throughout the entire human population (which was confined to Africa) long before anybody else thought of it.

Of course this doesn't mean that's what happened, but it makes it a respectable hypothesis--one which we will almost surely never be able to test.

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"Babel" is simply the Hebrew name for the city of Babylon, which was the capital of the empire we now call Babylonia. Many towers were built there, and archeologists and biblical scholars have long struggled to identify one which might have been the source of the mythical "Tower of Babel." One that is frequently cited is Etemenanki, dedicated to the god Marduk, built around 600BCE.

The Babylonian Empire was resilient and existed in various forms for quite a long time. The city of Babylon was originally part of the Akkadian Empire around 2300BCE, when its vernacular language was Akkadian, but Sumerian was used in religious rituals. Babylonia emerged as an independent state around 1900BCE, at which time both Akkadians and Sumerians spoke their native languages.

A relatively minor tribe, the Aramaeans, were eventually conquered and integrated into the empire. For reasons I have never discovered, their language became the lingua franca of the empire, and, eventually, virtually all of Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions. If the legend of the Tower of Babel refers to Etemenanki and is set in the 7th century BCE, the language of Babylon at that time was well established as Aramaic.

Aramaic survived long after the Aramaean people had been swallowed up into the Melting Pot of the Mesopotamian gene pool. It remained the common language for much of the Middle East right up into historical times and even, barely, into the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire. There is still an Aramaic-speaking community with a diaspora that reaches as far as America, and they maintain Aramaic-language websites. Sadly, it is likely that in the 21st century there will be no newborn generation speaking it as their native language, largely because of the wars and ethnic turmoil in Syria and Iraq that are the legacy of the "Cold War" between the USA and the USSR, when we used the Middle East as our chessboard and its people were our pawns. That's where most of the remaining speakers live and they are frantically emigrating to safer countries.

(This chessboard also included Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Turkey and that entire gigantic, benighted swath of the globe. Americans and Russians have a lot to atone for, but neither of us seems to care.)

Back on topic... Aramaic was the language of Palestine in the time of Jesus. If he was a real historical figure rather than a legend, he would have spoken Aramaic in daily life. Although as a leader of the Jewish community he would have been obliged to be able to recite the Torah in Hebrew, which was otherwise a dead language until its resurrection by the modern state of Israel.

So the language of Babel was probably Aramaic. Nonetheless, like any myth it is difficult to pinpoint in time, so any of the other languages of the region could also be postulated. It's like asking, "What language did the Hobbits speak?"

Many of the languages of the Middle East were and are members of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, which spans both Asia and Africa. These include Sumerian, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Maltese and Amharic. This family has five other branches which are found only in Africa: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian (extinct) and Omotic. It's unknown whether the family arose in Africa and was carried to Mesopotamia by immigrants, or vice versa.

However, Akkadian is not related to any known language so its origin (and that of its people) is unclear. Akkadian and Sumerian borrowed liberally from each other due to their proximity. This is an example of a sprachbund, adjacent unrelated languages developing similarities due to sheer proximity, like the thousands of Chinese words in Japanese.