# The first language that all others evolved from...



## COF

I'm told that there was a language spoken in the Middle East that all other languages essentially came from.

Is this true, and if so, what is it

EDIT: Typo, "overs" was meant to be "others".

EDIT 2: Typo corrected.
zebedee


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## Talant

Hi COF,

I very much doubt it, unless you mean the one the australopytecus used (or someone a little younger). I do believe that there is a handful of languages who are the roots of all the other ones. The Indoeuropean (?) (In Spanish, "Indoeuropeo") is one of the biggest. It has produced most European languages and some Asiatic ones. But there are others. For instance, Vasque or Euskara has nothing to do with Indoeuropean.

Bye


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## Outsider

1. If there ever was a language which was spoken by all human beings, you can be sure that it has long become extinct.

2. There are many theories about such a primordial language, some of them serious, most just ignorant, but none has come up with enough evidence to convince linguists that it's true. 

Read more here.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

There are no shortage of theories on this area, and not just crackpot ideas concocted by amateur enthusiasts (although there are a lot of those too); you may want to start by checking out Wikipedia's article on Joseph Greenberg, who was one of the major academics proposing the existence of linguistic "supergroups." Several of his findings, like the existence of the Afro-Asiatic group, have been accepted theory for some time, while others are still highly controversial, and may always be, since there is no methodology that can provide anything resembling an accurate analysis for what he postulated.

Russian academics have in particular spent a lot of time and effort on this field. You may want to research what you can locate about Nikita Krugly's findings as well. Such as they are, whether the theorist assumes the source as "Proto-Nostratic", "Boreal" or from the continent of Mu, I don't know of anybody strongly propounding a Middle Eastern source any more.


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## Frank06

Hi,


COF said:


> I'm told that there was a language spoken in the Middle East that all other languages essentially came from. Is this true, and if so, what is it


In short, it's not true. BTW, one language from which all others are derived, no matter how attractive a view, isn't (and cannot be) proven at all.
The only people I know who locate the 'first language' in the Middle East are biblical literalists and certain jewish orthodox groups. Needless to say that in their view that language is (some kind of ancient) Hebrew.

COF, I am very much interested in crackpot theories,  could you give more details what you were told?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## übermönch

Well, though it certainly wasn't spoken in middle east, a first language thing seems quite plausible to me. There is no reason to invent a completely new language if someone in the community already has one, that is why all languages we know (aside from very few isolates like Basque) can be traced back to several common ancenstors - just because we lack enough knowledge of long-dead languages doesn't mean they appeared differently to those we studied enough. The language Superfamily theorists have some reason - there are obvious similarities in grammar and sometimes simple voc. between old World language groups (drawidian, uralic, altaic, indoeuropean, kartvelian, afroasiatic) which differs them from KhoiSan, Bantu, Chinese and New World languages. 
I've seen a site which compared words in several language groups, I hope I can find it.


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## Outsider

This was an interesting read: "Proto-World and the Language Instinct", by Mark Rosenfelder.


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## mytwolangs

Frank06 said:


> COF, I am very much interested in crackpot theories, could you give more details what you were told?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


 
One theory said this - 
At some time, they were building a tower up to heaven. They got so high, could not believe what they saw, and all of them spoke a different language. They could not understand each other and no one else could. The Tower of babble? Something they were building in Babylon. 
This is one story I heard years ago before the Web.

It makes for a good story, but who knows. Sounds silly to me.


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## Falcons508

Thats just a bible story... Im pretty sure it is a myth.

And that's is not exactly how the story goes either.


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## whattheflock

I like the idea that there were several hominid groups even as recently as a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. But then, little by little, they were gone. So about sixty thousand years ago, give or take a week, several groups of humans began a long, never to return, migration all over the world, and pretty much one single group of humans managed to spread out from the heart of Africa to all over the world (even America!).
So, if there were ever a "universal language", it's probably the one spoken originally by the group(s) of people that launched this global re-population.

I suppose this is a latter-day Babel Tower version, no?


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## Outsider

Just one note: the "never to return" scenario you speak of is not completely accurate. Recent genetic research has shown that human populations sometimes went _back_ to Africa (for example) after they'd left it for the first time.


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## whattheflock

Cool, but how long after was the return? Because maybe by then they were so changed from their ancestors that it might as well be the migration of different people. Certainly with different languages. I mean, look at the changes we all have gone through in the last five thousand years. Just imagine if the original wave of immigration returned, let's guess, ten thousand years later.
Good observation, though. Good food for thought.
Hmmmmm.... (*meditating*)


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## Outsider

Yes, we're talking about "migrations" that lasted for generations.


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## übermönch

Outsider said:


> This was an interesting read: "Proto-World and the Language Instinct", by Mark Rosenfelder.


He talks about spontaneous mutation, which indeed is hard to believe. Couldn't those vocal cords have gradually developed in the hominid branch through natural selection? Humans are not the only animals which have the ability to emmit different sounds in different situations, there are even ones which aren't worse at it than humans - called "anthropoglot"s.


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## Outsider

I'm not sure I understand your objection. Natural selection and spontaneous mutation are two sides of the same coin, evolution.


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## Chazzwozzer

Oh, COF, do you mean Sumerian? Check this out: Sun Language Theory

I don't know if this theory is widely known in other countries, actually.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Chazzwozzer said:


> Oh, COF, do you mean Sumerian? Check this out: Sun Language Theory
> I don't know if this theory is widely known in other countries, actually.



Oh, my favourite internet fringe linguist and pan-turkist Polat Kaya does his best to spread the (Sun) Word. Quite hilarious chap...
Which makes me wonder: is there somebody outside (and, erm, well, inside) Turkey who takes this theory seriously?

Groetjes,

Frank


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## mytwolangs

Falcons508 said:


> Thats just a bible story... Im pretty sure it is a myth.
> 
> And that's is not exactly how the story goes either.


One of many myths.
It has been many years since I heard it.


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## mplsray

COF said:


> I'm told that there was a language spoken in the Middle East that all other languages essentially came from.
> 
> Is this true, and if so, what is it
> 
> EDIT: Typo, "overs" was meant to be "others".
> 
> EDIT 2: Typo corrected.
> zebedee


 
I have read that Noah Webster believed that all languages were descended from Chaldean. But etymology was Webster's weakest point, and the very concept of one first language from which all subsequent languages descended is a controversial one.


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## übermönch

Outsider said:


> I'm not sure I understand your objection. Natural selection and spontaneous mutation are two sides of the same coin, evolution.


Well, what Mark Rosenfelden offers, is a theory that there was a huge leap through mutation creating fully functional vocal chords among Homo Sapiens and related species not that long ago.


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## Aprinsă

Perhaps you are talking about Indo-European, which theoretically spread generation by generation as the population in the Fertile Crescent grew too large?

Rosenfelder's article is indeed very interesting, suggesting that most of human intelligence was developed before language. Cool! I guess that has nothing to do with this topic, but I really have to depart now (homework!).


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## Frank06

hi,


Aprinsă said:


> Perhaps you are talking about Indo-European, which theoretically spread generation by generation as the population in the Fertile Crescent grew too large?


I fail to see the connection between Indo-European and the Fertile Crescent...

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Outsider

übermönch said:


> Well, what Mark Rosenfelden offers, is a theory that there was a *huge leap through mutation* creating fully functional vocal chords among Homo Sapiens and related species not that long ago.
> 
> [Bolded mine.]


No, that's an idea he criticizes.


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## modus.irrealis

Outsider said:


> 1. If there ever was a language which was spoken by all human beings, you can be sure that it has long become extinct.



Depends on how you define extinct -- if Proto-World did exist, you could say there are now 6 billion speakers of the various dialects of Modern Proto-World


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## Outsider

Is Latin still spoken, or would you say it's a dead language? I think most people would agree that it's a dead language, because it's not used natively anymore, and has been replaced with its daughter languages. In the same sense, I would reckon that Proto-World, if it ever existed, is now extinct, having been replaced with its many descendants.


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## modus.irrealis

I would say people call Latin a dead language but that that's just an arbitrary decision -- they could just as easily speak of the Modern Latin dialects. The relation of French to Latin is the same as Modern Greek to Ancient Greek -- I don't see why one language died but the other didn't.


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## Outsider

Because ancient Greek "gave birth" to only one modern language, whereas Latin split into several.


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## modus.irrealis

But again, whether you have one language or many is an arbitrary decision. There are dialects of Greek (Tsakonian e.g.) which could be seen as separate languages instead of dialects. Is Chinese one language or many? Even with English, many consider Scots a separate language, but we still have Old and Modern English. If the Romance langauges were considered to be dialects of a single language, would Latin then be alive?

I think the family tree metaphor for languages can only go so far.


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## Outsider

Yes, of course, there is always some subjectivity when we attempt to count languages, or to differentiate between them. But that means that the Big Question "Is the Original Language of Mankind still around?" can only have a qualified answer.


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## modus.irrealis

Alright -- I was just trying to make a silly comment.

As for crackpot theories, I suddenly recalled this one, which involves Basque and Benedictine monks of all thing. I can only hope it's not meant seriously.


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## mplsray

modus.irrealis said:


> But again, whether you have one language or many is an arbitrary decision. There are dialects of Greek (Tsakonian e.g.) which could be seen as separate languages instead of dialects. Is Chinese one language or many? Even with English, many consider Scots a separate language, but we still have Old and Modern English. If the Romance langauges were considered to be dialects of a single language, would Latin then be alive?
> 
> I think the family tree metaphor for languages can only go so far.


 
Linguist John McWhorter has said that there are no languages, only dialects.

That doesn't stop him from using _English_ or _French_ or _Russian_ as if he were speaking of a language, however.

Seeing French as a "dialect" of Latin, in anything but a historical sense--that is, in the minority sense of _dialect_ meaning a daughter language, a sense little know outside of linguistics and not used that often even there, as "French and Catalan are dialects of Latin"--seems pointless to me. What makes Latin a dead language is that there is no way of making new, fresh expressions: Clumsy circumlocutions tend to be used instead, with none of the sort of adaptations, changes made by its speakers themselves, which occur naturally in modern languages, including Modern Greek and Modern Hebrew.

The original language or languages have to be considered even deader than Latin, since not only are we able to give new items fresh new names, we can't even say a single word in these languages!


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## Outsider

Yikes! 



			
				[URL=http://www.islandnet.com/~nyland/benedict.htm]The website[/URL] said:
			
		

> The task assigned to Benedict was to train monks to go out into western Europe and create a Roman Catholic Christian presence in areas where many Gnostic Christian missionaries from Ireland had long been active.


Gnostics in Ireland? I think I'll stop reading right here.


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## modus.irrealis

> What makes Latin a dead language is that there is no way of making new, fresh expressions: Clumsy circumlocutions tend to be used instead, with none of the sort of adaptations, changes made by its speakers themselves, which occur naturally in modern languages, including Modern Greek and Modern Hebrew.


Leaving aside the fact that new Latin expressions have been constantly created since Cicero, I don't see how a new French expression is not a new Latin expression, but a new Modern Greek expression is a new Greek expression, except in a very arbitrary sense. I'm not saying we should change the common way of thinking -- I'm just trying to point out it's arbitrary.

Personally, I would like the "dead" metaphor to apply to languages which at some point in time stopped being passed on to a new generation through first language acquistion and this never occured to Latin. Unfortunately for me, I have no power over how words are used. You brought up Hebrew,  though, which fascinates me because it was a dead language (even in my sense) that has been revived.


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## Chazzwozzer

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> Oh, my favourite internet fringe linguist and pan-turkist Polat Kaya does his best to spread the (Sun) Word. Quite hilarious chap...
> Which makes me wonder: is there somebody outside (and, erm, well, inside) Turkey who takes this theory seriously?
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank


All the people I know here, including my linguist teacher, find this theory too weird and unreal. It's not taken seriously by Turks either.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Chazzwozzer said:


> All the people I know here, including my linguist teacher, find this theory too weird and unreal. What makes you say it is taken seriously by Turks?


I don't get it. I never said anything like that. 
I only happen to know a _few _Turks who take it very seriously. I simply *wondered* how widespread the belief in that Sun Language Theory is in Turkey (also among non-linguists).




> P.S: Who's Polat Kaya?


PK is one of the many internet pseudo-linguistists with a very ideosyncratic adaptation of the Sun Language Theory. He runs a few e-groups devoted to his theories and writes quite a lot of stuff. He seems to have his band of supporters...
In short, his starting pointis that Turkish (not even a Turkic language!) is _thee_ First Language from which all other languages are derived via a process he calls -- and I am not making this up -- anagrammatisation. His theories are, besides ludicrous, also anachronistic since he claims that Sumerian expressions are to be considered as annagrams of (modern) Turkish words (and expressions).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Chazzwozzer

Sorry, got it but I was too late to edit my post and you had already quoted the message.

Anyway, I still wonder if Sun Language Theory was what CFO heard and where he heard about it.


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## übermönch

Outsider said:


> No, that's an idea he criticizes.


 is it? I guess I should read it to the end


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## Aprinsă

"I fail to see the connection between Indo-European and the Fertile Crescent..."

Wouldn't it make sense for Indo --- European to be somewhere between India and Europe?

Well, in my English class, we talked about theories as to the origin of Indo-European. The theory that my English teacher finds the most convincing, and that I have no objections to at the moment, involves the Fertile Crescent. The Indo-Europeans would have been farmers in the Fertile Crescent. As their land became overpopulated, they would have moved about ten miles in either direction (toward Europe and toward India) per generation. Eventually, they would have gotten so far that they would have communicated with hunter-gatherers they had run into. The hunter-gatherers said, "Hey, these guys have a larger population than us, they're bigger and stronger than us, and they have tons of food. Let's ask them how they do it." This is supposed to explain agrarian words both in European languages and Sanskrit that have a common ancestor.

And so on.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Aprinsă said:


> Wouldn't it make sense for Indo --- European to be somewhere between India and Europe?
> Well, in my English class, we talked about theories as to the origin of Indo-European. The theory that my English teacher finds the most convincing, and that I have no objections to at the moment, involves the Fertile Crescent. The Indo-Europeans would have been farmers in the Fertile Crescent. As their land became overpopulated, they would have moved about ten miles in either direction (toward Europe and toward India) per generation. Eventually, they would have gotten so far that they would have communicated with hunter-gatherers they had run into. The hunter-gatherers said, "Hey, these guys have a larger population than us, they're bigger and stronger than us, and they have tons of food. Let's ask them how they do it." This is supposed to explain agrarian words both in European languages and Sanskrit that have a common ancestor.



Where to start ...
"This is supposed to explain agrarian words both in European languages and Sanskrit that have a common ancestor."
Well, Sanskrit _is_ one of the many IE languages, meaning that it also goes back to Proto-IE (just as English and Latvian e.a.), so it does have words in common with the other IE languages, even outside the, erm, field of farming and agriculture.

Do you have more information about what your teacher told you?

I have read a lot of theories about the homeland of the PIE speakers. Actually every square mile between Skandinavia and India has been suggested through the decades. But all of them located the alleged homeland north (or far north) [*edit*: and east, viz. India] of the Fertile Crescent. I don't know any theory which locates the PIE homeland within the FC.
A few words suggest a (kind of) contact with Semitic languages (like *septm, seven), but even that is not for sure.
Collin Renfrew, the famous archaeologist, comes quite close to the FC with his theory about Anatolia as the PIE homeland (by and large modern Turkey), but that theory hardly got accepted by historical linguists. Most critiques on that Out of Anatolia theory I am aware of are quite devastating.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Aprinsă

Frank,

Sorry, I said all that based on my horrible memory. May have even gotten two theories mixed up. **checks her notes**

This is a new theory, by the way, so it would make sense that you haven't heard of it before.

Okay, here's some info from a page my teacher found. "A number of common I-E terms show that cattle breeding was the most important of occupations among Proto-Indo-European, who used horses, cattle, swine, goats. Terms connected with cultivation of land also make a rather large number. T.Gamkrelidze and V.Ivanov in their fundamental book suppose that the terrain of the homeland must have been mountainous, for all Indo-European tongues produce quite a lot of common words meaning mountains and hills. Among the names of plants, trees and animals one can meet both those which are found in Europe and those which are found only in the Middle East (trees: _birch, oak, beech, hornbeam_; animals:_ lion, bear, wolf, jackal, fox, elk, snake, mouse, beaver_; birds: _eagle, goose, crane_). Proto-Indo-Europeans according to language data were aware of the existence of the sea, and used ships to sail over it."

Yeah, I guess it wasn't Sanskrit, but Semitic languages.  I'd post the link, but I can't yet. I know there's more to it, but I don't think I took notes on that.


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## Frank06

Hi Aprinsă, all,


Aprinsă said:


> Okay, here's some info from a page my teacher found. "A number of common I-E terms show that cattle breeding was the most important of occupations among Proto-Indo-European, who used horses, cattle, swine, goats. Terms connected with cultivation of land also make a rather large number. T.Gamkrelidze and V.Ivanov in their fundamental book suppose that the terrain of the homeland must have been mountainous, for all Indo-European tongues produce quite a lot of common words meaning mountains and hills. Among the names of plants, trees and animals one can meet both those which are found in Europe and those which are found only in the Middle East (trees: _birch, oak, beech, hornbeam_; animals:_ lion, bear, wolf, jackal, fox, elk, snake, mouse, beaver_; birds: _eagle, goose, crane_). Proto-Indo-Europeans according to language data were aware of the existence of the sea, and used ships to sail over it."


Similar theories and methods have been used for a long time. But there a few things in this explanation that make the Middle East quite a _bad_ candidate. The languages spoken in the Fertile Crescent don't show any trace of (P)IE, apart maybe from the Hittite Empire (which came to rise elatively late). Though a lot depends on how you wish to define the Middle East. Apart from problems with words as 'birch' and 'sea', similar comparisons have resulted in putting the alleged PIE homeland north of the Black Sea. I'll spare you the details, but here you can read more. The text by Watkins is quite interesting, for the conclusion scroll down.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## maxiogee

Aprins? said:


> T.Gamkrelidze and V.Ivanov in their fundamental book suppose that the terrain of the homeland must have been mountainous, for all Indo-European tongues produce quite a lot of common words meaning mountains and hills.


But would not the lands they settled into, being mountainous — as most of Europe is, require words for mountains and hills?

Ireland isn't exactly renowned for towering heights and yet we have _cnoc_ (hill), sliabh (mountain), binn (peak) and they all have diminutives. The Celts surely used these words because they felt the need of them, not because they just happened to bring them with them from ancestral homelands. The binn is akin to the Scots word 'ben' as in Ben Nevis.
I don't think these words relate to any European equivalents - many of which seem to be related to each - as in mountain/montagne/montagna/montaña/montanha.


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## PocketWatch

Indo-European migrations during ancient times is what caused the spread of European languages. They started on the steppes of Asia I believe, but other languages such as Yucatan (meso-American ancient language) formed in the American area.


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## alexacohen

Hi all:
Diachronic linguistics can be used either seriously, or idiotically.
There is no way to prove all languages come from an unique first language, the same as there is no way to prove that Lucy was our one and only great-great-great-great-grandmother.
It makes a good topic for discussion, though.
Alexa


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## Frank06

Hi,





alexacohen said:


> Diachronic linguistics can be used either seriously, or idiotically. There is no way to prove all languages come from an unique first language, the same as there is no way to prove that Lucy was our one and only great-great-great-great-grandmother. It makes a good topic for discussion, though.



The major problem is that quite a lot linguists and other scientists accept the idea that "the full language capacity had evolved by 100,000 BC." (e.g. see here)
The first attestations (written language) are roughly 4/5000 years old. Some claim to have found older attestations. Anyway, that leaves us with 94.000+ years to speculate about, disregarding the sound idea that language probably started to emerge before 100.000 BC, and disregarding the possibility indeed that the monogenesis of language is not (and cannot be) proven in the first place. 
All the atempts to reconstruct 'Proto-World-Language' c.s. is the same as reconstructing a machine on the basis of a few screws and a few bolts, without having an idea whether you're reconstructing a car, a printing press, an airplane or a meccano toy, and without being sure that those screws belong to the same object.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## alexacohen

Frank06 said:


> All the atempts to reconstruct 'Proto-World-Language' c.s. is the same as reconstructing a machine on the basis of a few screws and a few bolts, without having an idea whether you're reconstructing a car, a printing press, an airplane or a meccano toy, and without being sure that those screws belong to the same object.


Yes, that's it, excatly  
Alexa


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## tvdxer

COF said:


> I'm told that there was a language spoken in the Middle East that all other languages essentially came from.
> 
> Is this true, and if so, what is it
> 
> EDIT: Typo, "overs" was meant to be "others".
> 
> EDIT 2: Typo corrected.
> zebedee



English, French, Hindi, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Russian, and several other languages spoken by about half the world's population evolved from the reconstructed hypothetical language Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which appears to have been spoken 6,000 - 8,000 years ago somewhere between southeastern Europe and the Black or Caspian sea region.  They say the PIE people had rather advanced technology for the time and were good with their horses, therefore able to spread out (over many generations, of course) as far as England and Bangladesh, supplanting native languages.  Note that although they probably contributed to the gene pool, they did not supplant native residents of the lands they entered.  

Other languages evolved from different families that we have been able to detect or reconstruct to some extent, usually prefixed with "proto-", as they left no written records and must be re-constructed through careful, methodical comparison of modern or extinct written languages.  Finnish, Hungarian, and a number of smaller languages in Russia descend from Proto-Uralic.  A broad swath of languages, from Hawaiian to Tagalog to Maori to Malagasy are descendants of Proto-Austronesian, probably spoken in Taiwan.  Arabic, Amharic, and Hebrew are ancestors of Proto-Semitic, which itself developed from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, a family that also includes Egyptian, Hausa, Berber, and other African languages.  One of the shakier hypotheses is the Altaic family, which some linguists believe to include Korean, Japanese, Turkish and Turkic languages, and Mongol.

Going beyond these families is difficult, as it involves progressing (or rather, regressing) into even deeper pre-history.  One very controversial "mega-family" is Nostratic, which encompasses the above Indo-European family, as Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian (Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, etc.).  Similar proposals have also been made, and one linguist (Joseph Greenberg, now dead) attracted a lot of criticism by trying to re-construct using "mass lexical comparison" a Proto-_World_ language that all others were descended from.


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## jonquiliser

Is it really sensible to ask for a "original language"?? I mean, it's hardly like people one day got into their heads to "invent" language! Isn't it more likely that languages themselves developed gradually, perhaps from more "primitive" expressions like "oh", "uh", "hah" and so on, to later on constitute a more extensive part of the interaction between people? And obviously, there wouldn't be a point of a "fully developed" language, that would then get split and continue to evolve into different tongues - there would be plenty of splits and re-encounters.. I'm not a linguist nor a historian, and this is quite banal stuff I'm saying. But the whole question about an "original language" just seems so counter-intuitive and counter-sensible that I wanted to say something...


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## Frank06

Hi,


jonquiliser said:


> Is it really sensible to ask for a "original language"??


Well, the question has been asked for a few 1000s of years, and oddly enough, also been 'answered' in the course of time.
- Countless mythical stories about the origins of language worldwide,
- Herodotos about the Egyptian Pharao (Phrygian),
- the _story_ about James V of Scotland (Hebrew),
- Goropius Becanus (Dutch)
- ...
Even these days, very diverse people do come up with 'answers', Greenberg (has been mentioned here already) and his acolite Ruhlen; Mozeson (Edenics, read Hebrew), Polat Kaya (Turkish), Edo Nyland (Saharan), countless jewish and christian sites (Hebrew), and many, many others...

Here you can find a fine critique on PWL.


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## alexacohen

jonquiliser said:


> .. I'm not a linguist nor a historian, and this is quite banal stuff I'm saying. But the whole question about an "original language" just seems so counter-intuitive and counter-sensible that I wanted to say something...


Nor am I, Jonquiliser, but I don't think that what you're saying is banal stuff.
From my point of view, the day the scientists prove that Lucy was really the only and one great-great-etc-grandmother of all humanity, they will have proved beyond a doubt that her language, whatever it was, was the original language of all humanity as well  ...
Alexa


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## jonquiliser

Perhaps you're right, Alexa!


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## Hutschi

If it is true that all recent people come from only one small group, and if this group spoke one language, there is a high propability, that in a special sense all languages have one ancestor. But it is possible, that nothing remained after all the changes.


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## Athaulf

Hutschi said:


> If it is true that all recent people come from only one small group, and if this group spoke one language, there is a high propability, that in a special sense all languages have one ancestor.



Unfortunately, the issue is much more complex than that. There's a very good essay about this topic here. 



> But it is possible, that nothing remained after all the changes.


I'd say it's not only possible, but quite certain. There is no way to reliably deduce relations between languages that split more than a few thousand years ago; for possible connections older than that, the signal is completely drowned in the noise.


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## Hutschi

Athaulf said:


> Unfortunately, the issue is much more complex than that. There's a very good essay about this topic here.
> 
> I'd say it's not only possible, but quite certain. There is no way to reliably deduce relations between languages that split more than a few thousand years ago; for possible connections older than that, the signal is completely drowned in the noise.


 
Thank you for the topic.
Another thing is that there is a difference between nothing remained and nothing can be or was found or deduced. The last, we can decide. The first would be almost impossible to decide.

The topic is really complex.


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## pomar

The Italian outsider linguist Semerano, who has recently died, believed also in a Sumerian origin, common to all languages. I read some of his books, and they are not science fiction at all! 
I think that even if, at a given point, all "homo sapiens" could master their vocal chords, not necessarily all of them thought to use sounds to name things, so the first who had the idea may have let the idea spread, together with already existing words.


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## Outsider

Hutschi said:


> If it is true that all recent people come from only one small group, and if this group spoke one language, there is a high propability, that in a special sense all languages have one ancestor.


That does make some sense, though I can see two problems with it:

1) Maybe that group, though small, did speak several languages already.

2) We're talking about events that took place so long ago that one can ask whether what those people used to communicate could be called a "language" at all. Maybe language as we know it only developed fully at a later time.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


pomar said:


> The Italian outsider linguist Semerano, who has recently died, believed also in a Sumerian origin, common to all languages. I read some of his books, and they are not science fiction at all!


I couldn't find a lot about Semerano, but if he indeed claims these things about Sumerian, then there is a very good reason to call him an outsider, but not an "outsider _linguist_".  Somebody who claims that Sumerian is the Proto-Language shouldn't be called a linguist, nor should he call himself as such. A theory like that might not be science fiction, it surely isn't science either. 

*[edit]* I searched for more information on Semerano. If I may believe the Wiki-article on him, then the 'philologist' rejected the "Indo-European theory". And that is quite different from what you wrote, Pomar. 
It is interesting that the Wiki-article mentions that "_t is no accident that are no linguists among [the supporters of Semerano], with the partial exception of Canfora".

Groetjes,

Frank_


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Outsider said:


> 1. If there ever was a language which was spoken by all human beings, you can be sure that it has long become extinct.
> 
> 2. There are many theories about such a primordial language, some of them serious, most just ignorant, but none has come up with enough evidence to convince linguists that it's true.
> 
> Read more here.



"Extinct" probably, but perhaps there is a language that is the "most conservative" of the world's languages, retaining most of the features of the primordial language.


----------



## pomar

To be a supporter of science you seem to need very little of evidence to reject a theory you don't know. Do you believe wikipedia to be scientific? I don't know how things are in other countries Universities, but I suppose there is a problem of established power to defend somewhere else besides Italy. I came to know Semerano by reading some about him by Italian philosophers Severino and Galimberti, who quite appreciated it. (I don't know if you can find them on wikipedia, but they are not outsiders)


----------



## Outsider

john_riemann_soong said:


> "Extinct" probably, but perhaps there is a language that is the "most conservative" of the world's languages, retaining most of the features of the primordial language.


I find that very doubtful. All languages seem to have a natural tendency to drift (a bit like genes, curiously). Comparing the Romance languages, for example, each language is closer to Latin than the others in some things, but father apart in others. It all depends strongly on the criterion or set of criteria that you choose to compare.


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


john_riemann_soong said:


> "Extinct" probably, but perhaps there is a language that is the "most conservative" of the world's languages, retaining most of the features of the primordial language.


And how would we know that? That 'primordial language' is not attested, not written down and it is at least *94,000 years* older than the first attested languages. IF and only if there was something as a primordial language (or Proto-World language).

What would you consider to be a feature of 'the primordial language' and on which basis?

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## Outsider

I think John was just thinking aloud. 
But I agree with you, Frank: everything we know about human language only covers 6% of human existence! Can we really presume to extrapolate the other 94% based on the little we know?...


----------



## Frank06

Hi


pomar said:


> To be a supporter of science you seem to need very little of evidence to reject a theory you don't know. Do you believe wikipedia to be scientific?


I spotted a difference between what is written in the wiki-article (and other non-wiki articles on the 'philologist') and what you wrote: there is a *huge* difference between on the one hand saying that Sumerian (plus other languages) lies at the basis of the languages spoken in Europe (viz. those which linguists would call the Indo-European languages, via Etruscan) and on the other hand "a Sumerian origin, _common to all languages_", as you wrote [my stress]. I hope you see the difference between those two statements. 
Either way, none of those two proposals hold water.



> I don't know how things are in other countries Universities, but I suppose there is a problem of established power to defend somewhere else besides Italy.


Most linguistic departments at universities deal with scientific, peer reviewed linguistic theories which are open for falsification. Falsification should not be confused, though, with fabrication.



> I came to know Semerano by reading some about him by Italian philosophers Severino and Galimberti, who quite appreciated it. (I don't know if you can find them on wikipedia, but they are not outsiders)


Wikipedia could provide me quickly with basic information. But I believe you for the full 100% when you say that Severino and Galimberti are not linguists.

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## Whodunit

Outsider said:


> I think John was just thinking aloud.
> But I agree with you, Frank: everything we know about human language only covers 6% of human existence! Can we really presume to extrapolate the other 94% based on the little we know?...


 
Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the first human beings were able to articulate more than just some animal sound. Physically speaking, man is able to articulate all sounds one could possibly think of, even animal sounds, if I remember correctly. I haven't had behavioral biology yet, so maybe can confirm or correct this thesis.

That we don't know much about earlier languages of man is because they hadn't developed any writing system until some thousand years ago! We can only conjecture about the first languages, as we can do with animal and possible "plant" languages (if plants are really able to converse).


----------



## jonquiliser

Hmm.. I keep wondering, isn't this a 'pseudo-question', akin to questions such as "which came first, the hen or the egg"? That is, the difficulty of the question is not determining or discovering the language humans in this or that age spoke. The difficulty of determining/discovering a "original language" is, I'd guess, that a language didn't just pop out like that. Language is probably something that has gradually crept into human life (and in that process the human life form has in itself been modified and conditioned by the possibilities of language). Whatever was uttered, linguists today may not even count as language (and that's something one can think whatever about, it's just worth remembering that the term is not a phenomenon in the sense gravity is so, but I way we -let's say, for want of a better word- categorise part of our world). And that issue isn't something that can be resolved (anymore than the egg-and-hen question can), asking where along the line humans had mustered up a 'fully-fledged language'. The question perhaps has no answer because the question itself is flawed. Does this make any sense?


----------



## mplsray

jonquiliser said:


> Hmm.. I keep wondering, isn't this a 'pseudo-question', akin to questions such as "which came first, the hen or the egg"? That is, the difficulty of the question is not determining or discovering the language humans in this or that age spoke. The difficulty of determining/discovering a "original language" is, I'd guess, that a language didn't just pop out like that. Language is probably something that has gradually crept into human life (and in that process the human life form has in itself been modified and conditioned by the possibilities of language). Whatever was uttered, linguists today may not even count as language (and that's something one can think whatever about, it's just worth remembering that the term is not a phenomenon in the sense gravity is so, but I way we -let's say, for want of a better word- categorise part of our world). And that issue isn't something that can be resolved (anymore than the egg-and-hen question can), asking where along the line humans had mustered up a 'fully-fledged language'. The question perhaps has no answer because the question itself is flawed. Does this make any sense?


 
But _can_ language have really occurred gradually? Defective languages such as pidgins and family sign systems have turned into "fully-fledged languages" such as creoles and sign languages in a very short time indeed--at least one creole was observed coming into being by modern observers, Nicaraguan Sign Language. It seems that with a sufficiently developed brain, along with a society (deaf individuals isolated from other deaf people don't develop their own complete sign languages), full languages come together quickly. So the question becomes why humans existed for so many millions of years with societies and with essentially the same brain without language having developed.

I said that deaf individuals isolated from other deaf people don't develop their own complete sign languages. But Steven Pinker mentioned an interesting case in his book _The Language Instinct_ in which a deaf child born to parents who had learned sign language as adults--and thus spoke it ungrammatically--learned to say grammatically what his parents said ungrammatically, at least on one particular usage, even though he had not met speakers who spoke his parents' sign language as a mother tongue.

To sum up: The matter is full of controversy and is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. 

Additional information: The case of the deaf child is from a study by psycholinguists Jenny Singleton and Elissa Newport of a nine-year-old boy to whom they gave the pseudonym Simon. Among the conclusions given, "Simon must somehow have shut out his parents' ungrammatical 'noise.'" Pinker goes on to say, "Simon's superiority to his parents is an example of creolization by a single living child."


----------



## jonquiliser

To avoid any misunderstandings, let me clarify that I put 'fully-fledged language' in quotation marks for a reason: I don't think any language is inherently "more developed" or "better" than any other (this includes so-called dialects). DIfferent languages may, to a larger or smaller extent, simply be illustrative of different ways of living. I hesitate to talk about defectiveness in relation to language. What I meant was more 'language as we know it' (that is, what constitutes a language according to linguistics and to general opinion on the matter).

That so-called pidgins "turn into fully-fledged languages in a very short time" is probably a result of how speakers of these live: they live pretty much with the same ideas, thoughts, conceptions, patterns, procedures, routines, rituals etc. as people around them. Language already "is" in the sense that whether what you speak is some pidgin language, Gibberish or English, you're immersed in a life that is inherently linguistic. I'd hesitate to say this is true for humans at any point in history (this is obviously related to the difficulty of speaking about humans as a group with a precisely determined time of existance) - which is to say, whatever you point at, it will have a history... So the question pops up again, what are the origins? 

So to make sense of the question, I'd say it's important to make it both more general and more precise: more general in the sense of not expecting a specific answer (for example, a reconstruction of a supposed original language_, the_ language all others evolved from. And more specific in looking in detail at what may be discovered as historical developments - although there might not be one model that reflects an original language, there may be different features of linguistic practices that shed light on previous lingustic practices (and if I'm not wrong, this is what many linguists engage in, tracing the history of language ).


----------



## Joannes

mplsray said:


> So the question becomes why humans existed for so many millions of years with societies and with essentially the same brain without language having developed.


Did they? Then I have to ask what you consider 'a human' and what you consider 'a language'. I think these are important preliminaries for the whole of this discussion.


----------



## Whodunit

mplsray said:


> So the question becomes why humans existed for so many millions of years with societies and with essentially the same brain without language having developed.


 
That's not a good question. The more interesting question would be when we will finally find some evidence for the first language ever. I think even Adam and Eve (no matter whether or not they had ever existed!) had some language to converse, but it might not have been in such a high gear as it is the case today. Many linguistics assume there had been a language like Proto-Nostratic, which could have been spoken more than 25,000 years ago. Why we can't go back further (and even those proto-languages are only reconstructed, assumed, and controversial!) is because there's not any evidence for them. The oldest writing system - if I remember correctly - should be the hieroglyphs or some cuneiform in Ancient Egypt not more than 4,000 years ago!


----------



## pomar

Franck, you are right about my using inexact words, I have simplified too much.
OK, let's call Semerano a philologist (not a linguist) and OK, he didn' say that the Sumerian language was the mother of ALL languages. It's more complex.
In facts, he just spoke of Western languages descending from a common origin (via Sumerian, via Acadian, etc.)
What made an outsider of Semerano was at first his position about Etruscans. During fascist period, the theory of the Italian origin of Etruscans was preferred for nationalist political reason, but Semerano  didn't agree with that theory. The "scholars" who agreed with the "italianity" of Etruscans consolidated their power and that theory was the dominant one in Italy, until about ten, fifteen years ago. 

Coming back to the starting point, I don't believe in myths, but I think that they may refer to something that really happened (the Iliad as well as Gilgamesh and the Bible). In many ancient myths the "Word" is considered sacred (see Apocalypse, but not only). Might it refer to a time when only some "mutants" could  articulate words and they were seen as sacred person? (I know that it is only a conjecture, based on almost nothing, but I like it  .)
Ciao a tutti
pomar


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Well, if you want to talk about "language evolving gradually", it certainly wasn't recent because humans have an innate biological capacity for sophisticated language. All the natural languages of the world are sophisticated, even the languages of the pygmies of the jungle and Piraha an whatnot. The only time you get unsophisticated language if you have abnormal child development, brain damage, etc.  

Even a sentence like, "Me no wanna juice the apple, me wanna grape" is fairly sophisticated; though ungrammatical, it has an abundance of deep structures. A child who uses this construction still has a fair bit to learn, but you note the language is capable of being very specific. Contrast something someone who has Broca's asphasia:

" Thursday .... mother ... broccoli [makes disgusted look] ... Friday ... eggs .... [clap clap]."

(As opposed to, "yesterday mother made broccoli -- ugh, I hate it! Today is much better, she made eggs.") 

You note that all the person is doing is listing nouns -- associations he has heard while doing these things, rather than language which translates symbolic thought. Fairly simple verb usage, even giving simple opinions like, "I hate" and "I love", as well as  adjective usages such as "good" and "bad" actually requires some high-level sophistication. That is, the opinions may not be sophisticated -- e.g. babies love and hate things all the time -- but the expression mechanism is. 



> Why we can't go back further (and even those proto-languages are only reconstructed, assumed, and controversial!) is because there's not any evidence for them.


There's plenty of evidence that sophisticated language was spoken in prehistory, because the history of human migrations goes back to 130,000 years in the past and all the natural languages of the world are sophisticated.


----------



## mplsray

Joannes said:


> Did they? Then I have to ask what you consider 'a human' and what you consider 'a language'. I think these are important preliminaries for the whole of this discussion.


 
for the purposes of this discussion, I had in mind _Homo sapiens sapiens. _This would put us past such major mutations as the doubling of the size of the brain and changes to those parts of the mouth and throat which are given as one reason that Neanderthal may not have been capable of language (or at least spoken language). So make the time involved "a couple of hundred thousand years."

As for what I meant by language in my post, I had in mind a "fully-fledged language," which we can define as a communication system having the qualities which linguists recognize as distinguishing a creole language from a pidgin, or a natural sign language from either (1) a sign system which encodes a spoken language (such as Exact Signed English, ESE) or (2) such limited gestural communication as is used, for example, in military operations. Whatever controversies there may be in linguistics, linguists seem to be in tight agreement on this distinction between current human languages and other forms of communication, including pidgin languages.

(The problem with "languages" such as ESE is that to the deaf it does not seem a natural way of communicating. It's rather as if we were to communicate with each other by first consulting a code book.)


----------



## john_riemann_soong

mplsray said:


> So the question becomes why humans existed for so many millions of years with societies and with essentially the same brain without language having developed.



Not essentially the same brain. How language developed among primates might be an interesting line of study. 

IIRC, with studies done with chimps, chimps seem to be capable of  rudimentary English grammar. Of course, whether this is a rote thing, etc. comes in too.


----------



## Joannes

mplsray said:


> for the purposes of this discussion, I had in mind _Homo sapiens sapiens. _This would put us past such major mutations as the doubling of the size of the brain and changes to those parts of the mouth and throat which are given as one reason that Neanderthal may not have been capable of language (or at least spoken language). So make the time involved "a couple of hundred thousand years."
> 
> As for what I meant by language in my post, I had in mind a "fully-fledged language," which we can define as a communication system having the qualities which linguists recognize as distinguishing a creole language from a pidgin, or a natural sign language from either (1) a sign system which encodes a spoken language (such as Exact Signed English, ESE) or (2) such limited gestural communication as is used, for example, in military operations. Whatever controversies there may be in linguistics, linguists seem to be in tight agreement on this distinction between current human languages and other forms of communication, including pidgin languages.
> 
> (The problem with "languages" such as ESE is that to the deaf it does not seem a natural way of communicating. It's rather as if we were to communicate with each other by first consulting a code book.)


 
About Homo sapiens neanderthalensis: you're very right, they didn't have a lowered larynx, which is important for complicated speech. Still, Neanderthals should’ve been able to produce at least some distinguishable sounds, more than some primates can do now. Tests with primates in which other language models were used to overcome the problem of speech, showed that they could only deal with some primitive language, certainly not fully-fledged. Their brains simply can’t handle it, but Neanderthals’ brains should’ve been able, though! (Looked it up: Homo erectus: 1000cc; Homo sapiens neanderthalensis: 1300cc; Homo sapiens sapiens 1400cc; Chimp 400cc.) Admittedly, Neanderthals' phonemic inventory would not be large, but some present-day languages also have only a very basic phonology with few phonemes and easy C-V syllables (Māori coming to mind now, but I’m sure there’s others). Glad you mention sign languages, by the way, because I think we shouldn’t forget about the possible importance of gestures in the evolution of language. Gestures could’ve been a more important part of communication at some point than they are now (and many will agree with me that they are still very important). It’s no evidence but it’s interesting to note that children acquiring language often use gestures with the same symbolic value as words. It’s only when it becomes clear to the child that speech is so much more effective, that those gestures disappear. Anyway, just to say that it isn’t that obvious that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis couldn’t have developed a fully-fledged language, but let’s assume that they didn’t.

Homo sapiens sapiens emerged only 250 000 years ago (Wikipedia), so your reduced “a couple of hundred thousand years” is at most literally a couple. I agree with you that the transition from a basic communication structure to a fully-fledged language structure could have happened in a very short time indeed. However, I don’t believe that it would have taken a long time to develop a fully-fledged language once all requirements were fulfilled, so to me the emergence of ‘language’ should approximately have coincided with the emergence of ‘human’.


----------



## ayupshiplad

mytwolangs said:


> One theory said this -
> At some time, they were building a tower up to heaven. They got so high, could not believe what they saw, and all of them spoke a different language. They could not understand each other and no one else could. The Tower of babble? Something they were building in Babylon.
> This is one story I heard years ago before the Web.
> 
> It makes for a good story, but who knows. Sounds silly to me.


 
Ah you got that story almost correct! 

As the biblical story goes, everyone spoke one language. Then one day, they decided to build a tower to heaven, to see god. God however, became so angry that he smashed the tower (The Tower of Bable) and as a punishment different nations could no longer understand each other.

That is the biblical account for languages at any rate!


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


ayupshiplad said:


> As the biblical story goes, everyone spoke one language. Then one day, they decided to build a tower to heaven, to see god. God however, became so angry that he smashed the tower (The Tower of Bable) and as a punishment different nations could no longer understand each other.
> That is the biblical account for languages at any rate!



No, it isn't. I mean, it's not *the* biblical story concerning languages, but only one of them, and undoubtedly the best known. Gen 11:1: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one           speech", Gen 11:6-9 tells about the tower and ends with "the LORD did there          confound the language of all the earth".
However, in Gen 10:5 we read "*y these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their           lands, every one after his tongue". Gen 10:20 and 10:31 also speak of "[t]hese are the sons of Ham / Shem, after their families, after           their tongues."

Groetjes,

Frank*


----------



## Whodunit

Joannes said:


> Tests with primates in which other language models were used to overcome the problem of speech, showed that they could only deal with some primitive language, certainly not fully-fledged.


 
What exactly do you mean by _primitive language_? Are you referring to modern spoken languages or some extinct ones, languages with simple phonology or few inflections?


----------



## john_riemann_soong

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> 
> No, it isn't. I mean, it's not *the* biblical story concerning languages, but only one of them, and undoubtedly the best known. Gen 11:1: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one           speech", Gen 11:6-9 tells about the tower and ends with "the LORD did there          confound the language of all the earth".
> However, in Gen 10:5 we read "*y these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their           lands, every one after his tongue". Gen 10:20 and 10:31 also speak of "[t]hese are the sons of Ham / Shem, after their families, after           their tongues."
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank*


*


Dialect continuum?*


----------



## Hutschi

Hi, would it be possible, that they also used a kind of sign language?


----------



## Joannes

Whodunit said:


> What exactly do you mean by _primitive language_? Are you referring to modern spoken languages or some extinct ones, languages with simple phonology or few inflections?


Neither, any human language would be too hard. Afaicr, the language models involved used pictures or buttons as lexemes. Basic sentences like GIVE - BANANA - ME will have worked, but chimps were not able to grasp the highly symbolic and difficult referential value of some lexemes (I can imagine things like (S)HE - NOT - PAST, but even a lexeme like WANT, to be too hard), and neither did they show a more or less structured grammar; BANANA - ME - GIVE or ME - GIVE - BANANA could have been used to mean the same thing: 'give me a banana'. More structured utterances with complicated meanings like in 'what do I care about human language?! just give me a banana, stupid researcher.' were out of the question. Chimps' cognition is just too little.



john_riemann_soong said:


> Dialect continuum?






Hutschi said:


> Hi, would it be possible, that they also used a kind of sign language?


Sure. Who?


----------



## john_riemann_soong

> some extinct ones, languages with simple phonology or few inflections?



Heh, that alone does not make a primitive language. Inflections (or the absence of them) do not really affect complexity per se. "I go yesterday" is just as complex as  "I have already went", where one sort of information complexity is exchanged for another.


----------



## jfm

Joannes said:


> ... neither did they show a more or less structured grammar; BANANA - ME - GIVE or ME - GIVE - BANANA could have been used to mean the same thing: 'give me a banana'.



The linear ordering is irrelevant. Plenty of languages allow a flexible word order. The important thing is that both BANANA ME GIVE or ME GIVE BANANA show signs of syntactic sophistication (to a degree). Both sentences have a verb, a direct object as well as an indirect object. there are clear syntactic relationships between each item. The utterances do not mean "give me to the banana".

The one thing that chimp languages normally lack is so-called embedding, e.g. clauses within clauses. 

---
jfm


----------



## jfm

john_riemann_soong said:


> Heh, that alone does not make a primitive language. Inflections (or the absence of them) do not really affect complexity per se. "I go yesterday" is just as complex as  "I have already went", where one sort of information complexity is exchanged for another.



The latter is certainly more complex in structural terms. The express (almost) the same thing semantically. From a semantic or functional perspective they can be said to be equal. But structurally they are not equally complex.

---
jfm


----------



## Joannes

jfm said:


> The linear ordering is irrelevant. Plenty of languages allow a flexible word order. The important thing is that both BANANA ME GIVE or ME GIVE BANANA show signs of syntactic sophistication (to a degree). Both sentences have a verb, a direct object as well as an indirect object. there are clear syntactic relationships between each item. The utterances do not mean "give me to the banana".


You're right of course; intrinsically they definitely don't. But that's what they actually could mean if word order was used as a grammatical means to indicate grammatical functions / semantic roles in the language model that was offered to the chimps, which they then weren't able to adopt. But I have no idea if this was the case. In fact, I don't know at all to what extent the chimps were offered 'language'.

Anyway, the point was that chimps are not capable of any human language, both because of its semantics and its structures. Although the examples given were probably not the best (since my own), you do seem to subscribe to that.


----------



## jfm

From what I remember reading about the ape language experiments...

They do show a syntax, sort of, but it's normally very simple, like the examples you gave. There's seldom a subject, but there's often a verb/predicate and a complement (one or two objects). More often, however, their utterances are just one word sentences.

They lack complicated syntactic structures such as relative clauses, and function words like coordinating conjunctions.

They also normally talk of things here-and-now, e.g. "give me (that)" and pointing at something within eye-sight, or "give me banana" when actualy being hungry or having been reminded of bananas. They don't speak of past events, unless it involves a present emotional state, like hurting from a wound inflicted by a fellowa ape.

They apparently do know how to lie and/or make jokes, however. One example (a bit anecdotal) involves an ape pretending to be hurt or tired, and demanding his care-taker to carry him, which he promtplyy does. Having climbed on to the back of the care-taker, the ape pees on him, jumps off in a euphoric frenzy, pointing at the care-taker and calling him stupid.

They can also be very rude, calling their care-taker and fellow apes all kinds of dirty things.

Fascinating creatures.

---
jfm


----------



## john_riemann_soong

jfm said:


> The latter is certainly more complex in structural terms. The express (almost) the same thing semantically. From a semantic or functional perspective they can be said to be equal. But structurally they are not equally complex.
> 
> ---
> jfm



The relationship between "yesterday" (as an adverb, etc.) and "I go" can be just as complex as the relationship between "have" and "went". "I go yesterday (already / 'liao')" is an example of a Singlish sentence. 

If I had put "yesterday" first, ("yesterday I go lor") the mood is at least slightly different (to me, as a Singlish speaker. I think this is because "yesterday" is now functioning as the primary topic of the sentence.) Then there's also pro-drop, which is not necessarily less complex either ("yesterday go liao") 

Whereas, you cannot have "I went have already", etc. 

Anyhow, the main thing is that the past-information contained in tense has simply been transferred to a particle (like yesterday). The perfect aspect can also be similarly expressed with "liao" (which I forgot to include initially). IIRC, from what little I have read, the relationship between these free-hanging particles and the other parts of a sentence can be just as complex (in deep structure at least? I don't actually know much of this, I'm just a Singlish speaker) as a sentence with inflections.


----------



## john_riemann_soong

jfm said:


> From what I remember reading about the ape language experiments...
> 
> They do show a syntax, sort of, but it's normally very simple, like the examples you gave. There's seldom a subject, but there's often a verb/predicate and a complement (one or two objects). More often, however, their utterances are just one word sentences.
> 
> They lack complicated syntactic structures such as relative clauses, and function words like coordinating conjunctions.
> 
> They also normally talk of things here-and-now, e.g. "give me (that)" and pointing at something within eye-sight, or "give me banana" when actualy being hungry or having been reminded of bananas. They don't speak of past events, unless it involves a present emotional state, like hurting from a wound inflicted by a fellowa ape.
> 
> They apparently do know how to lie and/or make jokes, however. One example (a bit anecdotal) involves an ape pretending to be hurt or tired, and demanding his care-taker to carry him, which he promtplyy does. Having climbed on to the back of the care-taker, the ape pees on him, jumps off in a euphoric frenzy, pointing at the care-taker and calling him stupid.
> 
> They can also be very rude, calling their care-taker and fellow apes all kinds of dirty things.
> 
> Fascinating creatures.
> 
> ---
> jfm



I wonder if the first language would have explicitly marked clauses? Partially curious, because Chinese doesn't have a word for "that" (in the sense of French "que") whereas it seems that a lot of IE languages do (at least sometimes). An explicit marker is almost always compulsory every time a new clause appears in French. ("After I ..." => "apres que je ..."; "I think he left" => "je crois qu'il est parti") 

Sometimes these markers seems unnecessary (in English it only seems to be used optionally to prevent confusion between clauses), perhaps as a relic of a time (long long long ago) where such explicit marking would have been much more helpful?


----------



## zweibarren

Outsider said:


> 1. If there ever was a language which was spoken by all human beings, you can be sure that it has long become extinct.
> 
> 2. There are many theories about such a primordial language, some of them serious, most just ignorant, but none has come up with enough evidence to convince linguists that it's true.
> This is not my post.
> I attempted to quote this in my own post.
> I'm sure that you can't be sure that all languages are unrelated.


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## zweibarren

Greenberg changed the paradigm for African and American languages.

Now that we're aware that past family lines aren't formally 'in-line',we  can look at other relationships that are not obvious.

Beyond Greenberg's consolidation of African and New World languages,there is still the instance of the  2 S. American languages-formerly believed to be in 2 distinct families- to be related through 'absurd' phonemic changes.(Chicago Linguistic Society ca.2002) ... by the way, that discovery was made by the non-linguist roommate of a linguist.


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## Sepia

Joannes said:


> About Homo sapiens neanderthalensis: you're very right, they didn't have a lowered larynx, which is important for complicated speech. Still, Neanderthals should’ve been able to produce at least some distinguishable sounds, more than some primates can do now. Tests with primates in which other language models were used to overcome the problem of speech, showed that they could only deal with some primitive language, certainly not fully-fledged. Their brains simply can’t handle it, but Neanderthals’ brains should’ve been able, though! ...


 

Brains not being able to ...  on what is this conclusion based? Gorillas are known to be able to handle pretty complex sign-language - not just single singn-words but a real language with sytactic structures. why should sound-language require more complex brain-structures The structure of the brains of various species has been terribly misinterpreted in several cases


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## Outsider

zweibarren said:


> I'm sure that you can't be sure that all languages are unrelated.


Sure, no one can ever prove a negative.

On the other hand, the evidence in favour of the opposite proposition is scant, not to say nonexistent. I think there's great wisdom in Carl Sagan's saying "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".


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## Kevin Beach

I've been fascinated reading this thread today - and it started so long ago too!

As I understand it, there are theories about when homo sapiens sapiens first appeared, and about when humans began to speak, but nothing approaching proof. Would that we could travel back and witness the first time that one of our ancestors made a vocal sound that another understood as more than an emotional ejaculation!

Here's an idea. It's not as grand as a theory. It's more of a "what if?" Imagine that, at some place and at some time, a small group of humans had developed a system of communicating by sounds. Their vocabulary was very small: maybe only a few dozen different sounds - grunts and mutterings. We couldn't call it a language. It wasn't even used consistently.

Then, some of them went away and took that handful of sounds with them. Both groups bred. In time, both developed different sounds and changed those that they used to have in common.

Some generations later, their descendants met. They found that they had a few noises still in common, but the few sounds of each group were mutually unintelligible, even though we would still not call them languages.

They parted again and made new tribes and societies. The sounds of each group grew and eventually became recognisable as words with structured meanings. By the time that we would call them languages, they were completely different with no discernible cognates, one for the other. We would therefore say that two separate languages began in two different places and with no common origins, Yet deep in the recesses the grunts had been the same.....


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## john_riemann_soong

I think grammar must have developed pre-homo-sapiens, but it's possible by the time homo sapiens developed, multiple languages were already in play.

But note also that biological and mtDNA evidence supports a "single origin" theory, rather than co-evolution of all the regions. Regardless, gene flow was always highly fluid.

And there is strong evidence that grammar is biological (and not merely a human construct).

PNAS is a subscription-only journal, but there's this fascinating article on a mathematical model for the evolution of protogrammar. (Just as a sophisticated yet elegant framework to put future empirical data into perspective.)   But the "evolution of grunts and noises" must have developed pre-homo-sapiens. Depending on your institution, you may or may not have access to it. PM me if you want to read it but don't have subscription.

Another linguistic parallel to look at is bird song, which exhibits features of grammar -- albeit something that's only clear when you view their songs as spectrographs, where you can see equivalents of phrases and words. Bird song is acquired and learnt, but it is also grounded in inherent biology -- take a bird of one species and raise it in the nest of another and that bird will learn the foster parents' song imperfectly. There's evidence of creolisation and "natural grammar"  just like in human language, because if you raise a songbird without contact from any other birds, it will sing a very deformed song (think of it as remaining in the "babbling" stage), but its descendants will modify the song, generation by generation, until the complexity of the song resembles that of the wild type species. 

This is not to suggest that human language and bird song are homologous (for they probably evolved for different reasons -- human language may have evolved as a byproduct of cognition while bird song is generally for reproduction), but if grammar is meant to create reliability in an inherently unreliable communication medium, then bird song and human language may display common traits that are the result of convergent evolution.


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## Arrius

Given the possession of adequate and versatile vocal chords, it seems very likely, at least to me. that man, who like all vocal animals, still spontaneously utters different sounds in response to the stimuli of sensations and emotions (Aïe!/ ugh!/ mmmm/ aah/ eee!/phew!) gradually elaborated these until they became a recognisable system but in a different way from those tribes and families he was isolated from or an enemy of.  Some scientists even postulate a bi- or multi-focal origin of true man, and even more probable is a multi-focal development of language. So it seems to me as futile a task to seek a universal _Ursprache_ as to search for the Holy Grail.


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## john_riemann_soong

> Some scientists even postulate a bi- or multi-focal origin of true man,


Eh, I thought this fell out of favour in the 1990s, especially with mitochondrial DNA research.

It seems more likely that language is a byproduct of cognition. Many languages may in fact not have an ultimate ancestor, or even ultimate ancestors. If you place a bunch of children with no spoken language contact (but care for their welfare), they will spontaneously generate a language themselves, and creolisation will make this full-fledged. It doesn't take 200,000 years of human evolution to generate a full-fledged language. 

In so far as we are making hypotheses I think we should make falsifiable hypotheses, so they will be useful. The idea that language evolved from a system of utterances that grew more complex must be tested in some way. What is the null hypothesis? That languages evolved spontaneously, that a faculty for grammar is ingrained; and the data noting how children create full-fledged grammatical systems within the span of one generation, I think, casts into doubt the idea that languages evolved merely from a system of grunts and utterances.

The new proposal I believe, is that language may not have initially originated from a need for communication at all. Looking at how language is tied to cognition I suspect this may actually be the one we will discover to be true in the long run. Man needed to process pre-mathematics, think about abstract ideas, infer, imagine -- in short, do acts of symbolic thought, and language was a byproduct of the evolution of symbolic thought, and grammar, so dependent on agreement, relationships, inflection, location and order between language elements, seems quite highly linked to high-level reasoning. 

I'm just drawing from existing linguistic data. Looking at current means of language acquisition and language generation, we see that languages can be spontaneously generated in certain conditions and that the phenomenon of developing grammar is ingrained. And this is present throughout all humans. Language almost appears as a direct consequence of higher thought, and not merely "I have a thought to say but my culture hasn't yet developed a system of grunts to express it." It is almost certain that full-fledged language must have already been present 40,000, even 160,000 years ago.


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## Arrius

Early homo sapiens was able to express mathematical concepts non-verbally with his fingers, and his toes too if he was too dim to think of raising his fingers more than once: not for nothing do we still talk of _digits _in this connection. More subtle concepts he may have worked out, at least for himself, by scratching diagrams in the
sand with a stick as Archimedes was still doing when the Roman invader dispatched him. No, I strongly feel that basic communication was the initial stimulus in the creation of language. The desire to acquire a nubile mate in a manner more acceptable and elegant than clubbing her and dragging her off, and a request for someone to pass the haunch of roasted mammoth, or the need to organize the hunting party that successfully hunted the aforesaid mammoth, obviously must have come long before the desire to speculate with friends around the fire, whether the stars are holes in a vast black tent or the shining spirits of lost comrades. And this order of priority is still in vigour with the great majority of mankind.
The evolution of complex grammatical systems and vast vocabularies from a few basic grunts and squeals is wondrous indeed, but no more so than the evolution of many animals whose "tricks" and habits seem often so ingenious that they are almost incredible. The Prime Mover paints with a wide brush and takes plenty of time about it till He (She) gets it right. Of course, He/She has taken much longer over perfecting the animals than Man has taken to hone his languages.
À propos,* john riemann*, I hope you will not think me patronising when I say that I am greatly impressed by the apparent breadth of your learning at age 18 (or even age 30). The only youth in the same category I have met on these fora was the multi-linguist and polymath *Whodunit*, whom I haven't seen around for ages and who is greatly missed.
As you were: I hadn't realised how many posts preceded mine and just noticed that *Whodunit *has participated in this very discussion.  Sei gegrüßt, lieber Neffe! It would be a good idea for you two to get into contact , as a sort of  Oriental-Occidental junior Brains Trust.


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## Athaulf

Sepia said:


> Gorillas are known to be able to handle pretty complex sign-language - not just single singn-words but a real language with sytactic structures.



Do you have any serious references for this claim? I have never heard of a single documented example of an animal capable of uttering anything in either spoken or sign language that could be considered to have a sensible and regular syntax, even with the most generous reasonable interpretation. Examples that are occasionally given media attention are either obvious fraud (e.g. Koko the gorilla) or journalists' wild sensationalist exaggerations (e.g. the recent story about a grandiloquent parrot aired by the BBC).


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## Athaulf

jfm said:


> From what I remember reading about the ape language experiments...
> 
> They do show a syntax, sort of, but it's normally very simple, like the examples you gave. There's seldom a subject, but there's often a verb/predicate and a complement (one or two objects). More often, however, their utterances are just one word sentences.
> 
> They lack complicated syntactic structures such as relative clauses, and function words like coordinating conjunctions.



Frankly, I think even this account of apes' linguistic abilities is exaggerated. For example, here you can find a transcript of a "conversation" with Koko, the famous gorilla that supposedly mastered a fair bit of human sign language. This transcript is coming as a piece of propaganda from the people running the experiment, so we have every reason to believe that it presents Koko's abilities in the very best possible light. Still, it's plainly obvious to anyone but self-deluding true believers that these utterances lack any syntactic structure whatsoever, and that their topics are just coming randomly out of the blue, without any apparent awareness of what's going on on part of the ape. 

Of course, the human "interpreter" is making every effort to give some reasonable interpretation to these random strings of symbols coming from the gorilla, but with that level of stretching and bending, one might as well draw equally "reasonable" interpretations from a completely random sequence of words. There are occasional instances where the ape manages to utter a single word whose meaning matches what's going on right in front of its nose at the moment (e.g. when it utters "pink" while holding the interpreter's pink shirt), but that's about it. I could easily write a computer program of a few dozen lines of C or Java with which you could have a conversation more sensible than this one. From what I've read about other ape language experiments, their results have been the same.


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## john_riemann_soong

Arrius: thanks so much for your compliments! I do not have many peers with a similar passion for linguistics but that is one thing I hope to change in the future -- at least for the generation that comes after me. Anyway, I wish to state that one must take into account existing mechanisms for language acquisition, historical linguistics as it stands, and the evolution of the human brain. Speculation is good when you can determine on what conditions would you find the speculation false, such that after repeated results against the null hypothesis can we start to accept the speculation as true.

Language evolved from the simple to the more complex, there is no doubt about that. But what is the exact mechanism? There is danger of both extrapolating too much from our current situation when speculating about the past, and too little. 

Let's look at how a baby acquires language. The most primitive elements *tend* to come first (not always, but there is a clear trend -- just look at the human embryo, strongly reminiscent of the first boneless chordates, and how a baby itself doesn't fully calcify its bones until the end of early childhood). Embryonic development often parallels evolutionary development so much that it's often at least useful enough to give us a rough picture. Babies play with vowels first, generally with /a/ coming first. Vowels are characterised as "high-energy resonant frequencies [formants] over a narrow band" -- well at least for monophthongs anyway. Sometime later they get to consonants, /m/ generally first, then /p/ and /b/ usually following. It's why "mama" and "papa" (and phonological derivatives) are so universal, even across language families -- it is the one of the simpler phoneme streams to generate. This hints that bilabial consonants were probably the first type of consonants to form, which makes sense as pre-humans with less developed tongues would have found it easier to manipulate the lips instead. Then you get dental consonants, fricatives, and so on. Babies learn to distinguish different heights of vowels (/a/ against /i/ is the most basic contrast), then backness, and occasionally in some languages, minimal pairs involving lip-roundedness. There are always consonants that seem to us as more recent or more "advanced" -- take the "sh" sound of English, and the way they are often represented with digraphs hints at their common tendency to be derived from sequences for other phonemes. For this reason, palatal and retroflex consonants have always seemed to me more recent than say, dental or velar consonants. (The pattern for affricates, palatal and retroflex consonants to be the product of pragmatic evolution from other phonemes seems to be fairly universal: just look at how Peking became Beijing through sound change).

But anyway, looking at how babies do not do grunts and oomphs at least implies that any such evolution from a system of grunts must have really happened a long time ago. Definitely not within the last 200,000 years. Looking at the vast amounts of places of articulations we have, what I imagine is that prelanguage would have consisted of vowel sounds, punctuated by bilabial and nasal sounds. Then later stops came along -- the first obstruents. With the change of structure in the human head came the change of structure of the oral cavity. Velar consonants, guttural consonants, and with change in the voicebox, contrasts of voicing/unvoiced. (My main evidence for such a proposal is making inferences from children's language acquisition, but I imagine as we discover various vestigial features in our DNA and our brains, and maybe historical evidence from other places, we will discover data that will either support or disprove such a proposal. It seems to be the proposal that most agrees with the data at this current moment.) 

Then there is the whole issue of cognition. One issue that I had with your proposal, is that you didn't really specify how man's cognitive ability evolved with his language faculties. There's a whole fascinating (infant)field of coursework on the evolution of language, and among the several papers that I've read, it suggests that prehuman societies were becoming quite complex socially -- lots of politics. Just imagine how difficult it is to keep up with the love icosahedrons  in a typical soap opera! One paper proposes this was the pathway from which symbolic thought: the demands of the brain to groom a female you have an eye on, not upset her grandfather the Alpha Male, charm others into allying against another rival, or better, play off your rivals against one another and yet not destroy the  tribe's ability to resist external threats with your feuding, would have placed evolutionary pressure to expand the capacity for advanced reasoning, and not so much as make advanced tools, for as you imagine 40,000 years ago (modern man by evolutionary standards), human tools were still quite primitive, maybe with an array of ranged weapons (a powerful tool, but probably not sufficient to expand the current human brain for), and I suspect it is Political Man that separated man from the animals. (Chimpanzees have politics too, but to a lesser degree.) One thing to remember is that features often don't evolve from direct pressure -- they "piggyback" on other pressures. And here I stress cognition again -- what was the state of mind of the first prehumans who started carving a system from grunts and squeals? Could they speak to themselves in their head ("I want to do X"), just not to others?

Moreover it's the whole premise that really bugs me. Too much of the idea of merely an improvised system (that became "official") seems to me based on assumptions on what two cavemen would do to create a common communication system if they had no mutual language, without taking into account the feedback influences of language co-evolving with cognition. And many things bug me: that there is strong evidence for a single universal grammar underlying all human languages, that despite hundreds of thousands of years of separate language evolution as is proposed, children have no difficulty being born into another culture (save discrimination) and learning that culture's language. No delays, no time differences. Each language has just about the same complexity as the other. If for example you are worried about your baby being deaf, there are universal linguistic milestones to look out for, regardless of the language you speak. And if language development was just about developing a common communication system, it would seem to be that there would have been no evolutionary pressure to develop mechanisms of creolisation, or the magic of children's language acquisition as it stands.

But a lot of things start to make sense if you take politics into account. If there were multiple classes and groups of power even with the same society, it would make sense for speakers to be capable of speaking several languages that may be competing with each other even in the same society, and in any society's language there are registers that often have throughout history diverged into "classical / high class" and "vernacular / low-class" forms. If groups regularly merged and broke up, if there were a need to  maintain separate codes of communication with different classes, yet these classes were fluid enough to be frequently created and destroyed, a lot of the funny characteristics of human language acquisition start to make sense. Note the fact that parents' admonishments of "do not say X, it is wrong/erroneous" generally never work when young children are playing with grammatical structure; children acquire grammar spontaneously, not through parental instruction, children have frequently created full-fledged languages with each other with their own grammatical systems. Why would evolution treat the role of parents in language acquisition in such a weird way? But if language also developed out of politics, and if children were sometimes born into different power arrangements from that of their parents ...


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## Kanes

Would of been something like Khoisan, maybe 60,000 years ago, spoken therough Africa and maybe midle east. There sure were other languages in other populations elsewhere but they were replaced by the modern language fammilies. There are couple dozen base words shared by most world languages. "puti" for example =D


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## Whodunit

Arrius said:


> The only youth in the same category I have met on these fora was the multi-linguist and polymath *Whodunit*, whom I haven't seen around for ages and who is greatly missed.
> As you were: I hadn't realised how many posts preceded mine and just noticed that *Whodunit *has participated in this very discussion.  Sei gegrüßt, lieber Neffe! It would be a good idea for you two to get into contact , as a sort of  Oriental-Occidental junior Brains Trust.





Hiho! What a coincidence that I happened to stumple upon this old thread while I'm so rarely in the forums (sorry that I insist on using the English plural for forum, but it sounds better to me this way ) ... if you want to get into contact with me, just send me a PM.

In order not to drift off-topic or to chat or to break any other of the forum rules, let me just mention that I think that the "first language theory" cannot be proven with any technology. We can only guess or do research in order to reconstruct a common ancestor. Of course, there must have been something before the Proto-Indo-European language, but that's just a hypothesis. I support the theory that PIE, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Altaic must have had the same ancestor. I would include Basque, too, but I don't have time to try to prove it now. Of course, there are some similarities, but this topic is so controversially discussed that I don't dare to utter any further paragraph on this matter. 

Best regards and good luck with your stabs in the dark.


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## john_riemann_soong

I think the immediate assumption that all languages have a common ancestor is problematic. It may be true, but it could also be possible that ultimate ancestors many of the languages of the world were the product of a sort of creolisation at one point n their history, or rather, language generation. This could be reason why some families look ultimately unrelated -- it's not just the effects of time, perhaps they *are* unrelated. But at the same time, we know that many different-looking languages are related, and there is some pretty convincing evidence to link the ancestors of Old Chinese and Proto-Indo-European together (at least by contact, if not genetically). 

I think we can attack the problem biologically and through studying child language acquisition. Ultimately I think we're not trying to reconstruct the first language ever -- we're trying to find out the nature of all languages, the state of human language at different points in time. The question of human evolution is harder because we don't have any recent extant cousins. Chimps are really far up the evolutionary tree. But I suspect that advancements in neuroscience and genetics will actually give us a pretty good idea. Something interesting to consider is the idea of vestigial features in language.


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## aleCcowaN

Some isolated thoughts:


I read about Nostratic years ago. Not impressed.
I read about finger-fist-five theory involving many relating different families. I think is pretty obvious, and similar to what we discussed in the thread mother. In that thread (post #20) I gave my opinion, and forgot to say I think the repeating vowels are the seeds of the concept of word; I mean "ma" is just a sound a baby babbles, and "mama" is a word. Then, it sounds logical to me mamá-papá, matara-pitara, mama-tata.
All human beings are brothers and sisters -or at least cousins-. No need to find a common language from which half of actual languages evolved. Mitochondrial DNA shows a small group of humans surviving the Tob'a eruption about 75,000 years ago. 25,000 years later homo sapiens was spread all around the Eastern Hemisphere and competing with Neanderthal and Homo florensis, later extincted. Human tribes were 15,000 Km. apart when art (and presumably modern language) started.
Today "we" can explain the evolution of many languages departing from written documents and toponyms. We have paleowords for some families that go back 3,000 to 5,000 years, no more. But "we" also know that writing stabilizes the languages, and more people learn to read and write, more rich and complex, wide in geographical terms a language becomes. Modern European languages stabilized with printing. Most of us can read a XVI century text but have more or less troubles to read a text from XII or XIII century.
Today languages seems to evolve quickly and indeed they do. There are two causes that didn't exist in earlier times: globalization plus media, and fashion replacing tradition, that is, people increasingly stop imitating their ancestors to copy their contemporaries. No matter this two huge developments in the human adventure, we could understand almost perfectly a person from 1880 speaking our language. Written language makes it extremely stable.
Surely much of ancient times' written records got lost, and there are a few scriptings using phonemes that we can't understand yet. But we seem not being able to find them because they didn't existed. And a language without written records  evolves quickly and diverges in many dialects.
Then, what's the use of the chase of the secret valley where they spoke our ancestral common language? There surely were lots of interactions between people, one way or another, along thousand of years that propagated through the land, but we are mostly to find the way language is hard-wired in our brain than the language they spoke before Babel confusion happened.


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## john_riemann_soong

I contest the raw assertion that writing stabilises languages, along with the other things about stability. It _may_ be true, but if we don't isolate factors we risk jumping to conclusions. I have often been struck with the idea that a text from 1600 is intelligible, but a text from 1400 is not really intelligible and 1200 not.

The relationship between intelligibility and age of a text is non-linear. But we should also not risk thinking that the rate of evolution and rate of intelligibility decrease is also linearly proportional. Suppose there's a language whose rate of evolution is fairly constant. Does this mean that the intelligibility decrease may be constant? That itself is an assumption that needs to be proven. 

Hangman or other fill-in-the-blank games gives us good warnings about why we should refrain from jumping to conclusions. I'm not sure if all of you have received that chain e-mail that seems to propose a radical, but "common sense" English reform that then makes more and more even recommendations until you end up with an email that sounds like a nearly unintelligible English spoken by a German immigrant. The thing is, the rate of grapheme change was constant, but the rate of how radical the spelling started to look was not. 

Let's look at how "habere" became "avoir". Phonologically /habere/ is not that different from /haber/. We process it as elision. A person who does H-dropping (and H-insertion hypercorrection) is pretty intelligible. Do 'urricanes hever 'appen in linguistics? Metaphorically, at least? Well now we have /aber/. /b/ <--> /v/ is a common sound change, and is indistinguishable for many non-Europeann speakers. /aver/

 /e/ -> /oj/ isn't that radical of a sound change -- it's just diphthongised /e/. Compare the difference between say, "I crave crayfish" and "I croyve croyfish" -- there's an accent but it's intelligible. /avojr/. /o/ is a rounded back vowel that tends to trigger labialisation, so you get /av^wojr/, the back vowel /o/ in the presence of /r/ mutates into /a/ (not difficult, just look at the lack of distinction between "caught" and "cot" for many Americans). Elide the yod, mutate the /r/ (which may have been an alveolar trill originally in Latin) into /R/ and tada, "avoir"  as /avwaR/, very different from /habere/ it descended from.

The thing is that all these mutation events can be argued to follow a constant schedule. The /oj/ -> /wa/ sound change (actually a sequence of small changes) in French didn't occur until around a millenium after the proto-Romance dialects broke away from Latin. And the actual dialectical development of this radical sound change (when viewed as one change) was slow and gradual -- it's only that it didn't touch the French courts until much later. And we can look at synchronic analogues in the form of dialect continua.

Let's take a string of dialects A to Z that all belong to one dialect continuum. A may in fact be able to sustain a decent conversation with say, H. But reach J and suddenly comprehensibility drops dramatically. M is totally unintelligible. (Substitute various dialect continua divided by distance for my example.) This begins to hint at the idea that decrease in intelligibility is not necessarily linearly proportional in rate of evolution. 

It does make sense. Look at a sentence like, "I love linguistics." Now, what if you make the "I" super-yodded like the Scots (/ai/ rather than /aɪ/). A small yet profound change in perception. Nevertheless, comprehensibility remains. Convert all /ɪ/ to /i/. (ahyee love leengweesteeks.) Now let's convert /ʌ/ into /ʊ/ (reverse one of the sound changes after the Great Vowel Split). ahyee loov leengweesteeks. Suppose /ks/ became some new affricate. ahyee loov leengweesteejch. Despite all these changes, it's still intelligible, no? But the workload has increased! Now lose the /a/ in the /ai/ -- "yee loov lingweesteejch". It takes a bit of work to realise that "yee" came from "I" and not "ye" but intelligibility is still there. Turn the /s/ before the /t/ into the "sh" sound (/st/ -> /ʃt/. "Yee loov leengweeshteejch". Now with one change, comprehensibility has severely dropped. You may be able to parse it as "I love linguistics". But note if you had done that single change by itself ("I  love linguishtics"), it would have been very comprehensible! 

Now let's get some sandhi changes. Let's concoct some sound change where, terminal /v/ gets turned into /w/ (the reverse of a common sound change that happened in Europe). And in the presence of a w-influenced diphthong, the following /l/ gets elided (the reason why "à + le" is "au" today in French). yee loo weengweeshteejch. Add a sound change /ŋw/ -> /ŋko/ to finalise things: yee loo weenkoysteejch. Bet if someone said that to you randomly you would never understand ...

But see, the phrase even after the majority of the sound changes I applied was comprehensible! And at each stage, if you applied the sound change itself, the meaning wouldn't have been affected. (If I said, "I love lingkoystics," or "I luh winguistics," you would know what I was saying, although you would  be curious why I said it that way.) So a radical change in perception may not be the same as a radical change in evolution.

Furthermore, many changes are tied to political events. The dissolution of the Roman Empire and widespread changes to the class system were pretty major. In contrast, advancements in society stagnated during the Middle Ages. I doubt writing has stabilised anything that significantly -- now, it may have a significant effect on spoken language, but first I would like to see some data that is reasonably controlled that compares spoken language acquisition of an illiterate person and a literate person. Does reading have an influence the mental concepts that set the basis for sound changes that spoken languages wouldn't have? I'm curious about the idea myself, but I consider the statement "writing has stabilised language" pretty premature. The printing press stabilised orthography -- but to assert that it stabilised entire dialect continua, caused dialect continua to be more discrete, or set spoken conventions in "stone," I think, is premature.


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## john_riemann_soong

Also, the printing press didn't prevent the Great Vowel Shift, a major chain shift which totally changed how English sounded when the change is assessed as a whole. It was one that occurred gradually over the course of a century -- the length of time it took, and how subsequent sound changes affected only some products of the Great Vowel Shift but not others [why "blood" and "foot" have different vowels even though had the same vowel historically] is evidence for lexical diffusion.

The Great Vowel Shift I note, seems to be a member of a category of chain shifts that tend to occur when a highly-inflected language is gradually becoming more analytic. A phonology that discriminates vowel length is often an inflected feature, whereas a phonology that relies more on vowel quality correlates with languages that are more analytic. (Standard Arabic for example, has a pretty exotic inflection system, discriminates vowel length, but doesn't discriminate many vowel qualities. But its less-inflected dialects on the other hand...) In fact, the Great Vowel Shift bears many similarities (in nature) to many previous historic sound changes, even though they occur on opposite sides of the "Printing Press Implementation Event" in the timeline!

If you read Shakespeare with Elizabethan English phonology I bet you would really really have a hard time understanding it. The printing press  may have changed how language evolved, but whether it has made language more "stable," is something we must be careful of asserting.


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## aleCcowaN

john_riemann_soong said:


> I contest the raw assertion that writing stabilises languages, along with the other things about stability.


Hey, hey, hey! Hold your horses, my dear friend! Gee! Do you contest isolated thoughts?

You're enthusiastic about linguistics, obviously skilled at it, even gifted, but this is not the place to set the state of the truth about anything, though you may cite references to academic sources.

What I know about this subject came from my general knowledge, as concerning languages I only seem to be pretty unable to learn them, even mine -which is not English, obviously-. But my general knowledge includes a few strokes about things like Grimm's law (then I could follow a bit what you posted yesterday and I think I understand your point). But my general knowledge includes strokes on many subjects other than linguistics.

About "stabilizing" I didn't mean languages becoming crystallized, just becoming more stable than the way they were before. I find hard to believe you might propose that the rate of change -not development, not enrichment, just change- in a certain language stay still when the society that speak it abandon total illiteracy and get alphabetized, plenty of libraries, acquiring a culture of written language; least of all in pre-1914 societies where tradition has played a major role. Then I suppose there's some kind of misunderstanding here.


john_riemann_soong said:


> Does reading have an influence the mental concepts that set the basis for sound changes that spoken languages wouldn't have? I'm curious about the idea myself, but I consider the statement "writing has stabilised language" pretty premature. The printing press stabilised orthography -- but to assert that it stabilised entire dialect continua, caused dialect continua to be more discrete, or set spoken conventions in "stone," I think, is premature.


Maybe I was thinking in my language, Spanish, and Western languages in general, with a phonetic alphabet (Latin). Of course, with languages like English, which speakers say "apples" and write "bananas", such a loosely typed language, so to speak,  it doesn't surprise me that blood and food have different vowels though they used to have the same vowel. About other languages like Chinese, with a logographic script, surely I understand why you said printing press stabilized orthography. In Spanish this means that it stabilizes the language, as we have no spelling contests like English schools nor consider calligraphists to be a special form of art like many places in East Asia: Letters are just raw and systematic means to read and write sounds.

But, on the specific subject of this topic "The first language that all others evolved from..." I'm sure linguistics has a part and only a part of the answer. Why? Because all the language families evolved from a bunch of people who had a particular set of cultural abilities and chance, enough to impose over their neighbors, absorb them or extinct them (for example, original people of Amu Daria and Sir Daria valleys). This is true for Indo-European, Bantu,  Tupian-Guarani or whichever. The cultural advantages may include language, but surely it is not the sole cause. In fact, I found hard to believe that the extremely complex case system of Indo-European languages could be an advantage.

I found kind of a proof of this that we can follow the evolution within a family but there seem to be kind a stone wall when we try to compare two families. It amazes me that I can recognize elements in "nu BREAD-an ezateni watar-na ekuteni" (something like "we eat the bread and drink the water") being it something spoken 3,500 years ago and now extinct -Hittite or Luvian, I don't remember-, but yet "family" with Spanish, and I am not able to understand the simplest thing of Semitic languages.

It also seems very probable to me that the tribe that acted like the seed of a language family first amalgamated the language of regional tribes, and I see no reason for people speaking completely different languages if they lived 500 Km. apart, the same way it happens today. The fact that Spanish is spoken without interruption from Tierra del Fuego to Los Angeles o Russian from Kalliningrad to Vladivostok, it's a matter of historical developments, not something natural to human language.

So, to avoid being so verbose, today, my opinion is: there is no such thing like THE original language. I expect investigations probably finding some interactions between families, and in the end, how language is hardwired in our brains.


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## Athaulf

john_riemann_soong said:


> I contest the raw assertion that writing stabilises languages, along with the other things about stability.



Writing itself obviously doesn't stabilize languages if literacy is limited to a small intellectual elite. In such cases, the written language can remain stable for a long time, but only as a fossilized idiom limited to scholarly use, while the vernacular continues changing and splitting into ever more distant dialects. I don't think I even need to name any examples.

On the other hand, mass literacy and everyday use of written word by the whole population is a relatively recent phenomenon, and we don't yet know how it might influence things in the long run. An even more interesting question is how things will be influenced by the audio recording technology, which has been around for only a few decades so far. Will constant exposure to old, but evergreen movies and songs influence the new generations' speech to the extent that it slows down language change? We still can't know the answer.


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## john_riemann_soong

> Will constant exposure to old, but evergreen movies and songs influence the new generations' speech to the extent that it slows down language change?


Old movies piqued me linguistically -- watch all those movies from the 1930s and 1940s, then watch some from the 50s and 60s, and so forth and watch how the actors' talking styles evolve up to the present day. Then look at how your grandparents talk . (Prosody is the most salient change, but idiomatic changes as well as subtle changes to syntax and diction are present too.)

I have reason to believe that technology, even "carve in stone" technology like audio and writing, sometimes even speeds up language change.

Mass literacy has been attained in China and Singapore (the country I was born in) but the processes of language change don't appear to be slowing down. In Hong Kong, various sound changes are being implemented by youths (including the elision of the initial velar nasal in the first person singular pronoun) as we speak. One form of language change -- creolisation -- appears to be sped up by technology.

There are some emerging models for language change, and if you look at the essential question, "Why does language change?" I think you may see several reasons why writing might not even significantly slow down language change. Writing has an effect -- I know this because as an immigrant learner of standard English, it was through reading that I sometimes pronounce the /l/ (especially in sandhi) in words like "talk", "walk", "should". That is, I was given an idiosyncratic idea, and it persisted despite reinforcement to the contrary, even at a young age, even though I now have native-level fluency in English. 

I have sometimes reason to suspect language change transmission is the transmission of an idiosyncrasy that one speaker initially generated. In highly-pressured  communities like say -- prisons -- even codes mutate fairly spontaneously and very rapidly. No one gang boss says, "these are to be the implemented code changes..." the secretive code just tends to change, and the communities "flows with it". 

In fact, the language change of a society seems more dependent on the pressures on said society rather than say, whether the society writes or not. Language upheaval is the most rapid whenever one nation subjugates the other (1066 anyone?), two peoples cross-migrate into each other's territories, and so forth. With recent archaeological evidence in India, some researchers have reason to believe widespread literacy may have been present in Tamil society as early as 1800 years ago. 

On top of this, why should all speakers of a language uniformly perceive their language in the same way? Perceptions of similarity can differ between speakers, especially between generations, and this is partially why I believe processes like creolisation occur. My parents' generation and my grandparents' generation speak a common form of Singlish with my generation, but whereas my generation tends to perceive grammar in Singlish, my parents' generation et al. do not. (Notably this is probably because my parents' generation were the ones who helped pioneer Singlish as a pidgin, but we as their children took it up and unconsciously gave the new tongue grammar.) Such a generation gap in perception has led to a fierce fight in my birth country over just what exactly should be done about the rampant use of Singlish in society and whether it is to be lauded or suppressed.


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## clevermizo

I was looking through various threads and happened upon this one. I just wanted to comment that there's positively no reason to discount the possibility that language developed independently in different groups of migrating _Homo sapiens_._H. erectus_ had a hyoid bone but did not leave behind symbolic culture, which we typically correlate in anthropology to be coincident with language use (though we have no way of knowing). The hardware was probably there long before it was used for complex speech. The commonness of the [a,i,u] or [a,i,u,e,o] vowel system for example, is not so much a testament to relatedness of languages but rather to the limits of human vocal capacity. 

Simple changes in genetics can lead to dramatic changes in morphology, as we know quite well from _Drosophila_ which can grow legs on its head via a single mutation in the antennapedia gene. For natural selection to act however, the heritable morphological changes must confer some selective advantage. If _H. erectus_ did not yet exploit the capacity for complex speech, we can imagine that its physiology was advantageous in other ways. If _H. sapiens_ inherited this physiology along with larger brain capacity, it is no great leap to think that this animal would use it new ways. Furthermore, as the recent documentary about cave paintings by Werner Herzog demonstrates, our species has been passing on symbolic knowledge in a cultural way for tens of thousands of years, changing it and evolving it into new and complex ways.

All it would take for a few individuals in a few places to develop complex speech and then pass it on culturally, the evolution of which can exhibit a much more rapid pace than biological evolution. We think of this like it's some miraculous, probabilistically implausible event but really, anatomically, it's not any different from me realizing I can do any new skill with my hands. Coupled with my intelligence, I bet you I will do something new and useful with my hands today that might be quite complicated and if it is really useful, I might teach it to someone else. Then before you know it, everyone in America will be doing it. 

Having Proto-World is nice and plays well with our mythology, but it is unsupported except by a very large stretch by linguistic data and is not necessarily a convenient or parsimonious way to think about human evolution. Furthermore, if there was one single language that everyone spoke way back in paleolithic times, this is a *completely and utterly unknowable * thing.


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## LilianaB

I personally have doubts about one universal language existing as the source for other languages. I even have doubts about certain proto-language families. I would be more inclined to think that languages developed instantaneously in several different places on our globe.


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## berndf

Thread closed.


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