From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: The Question of Humanity's First Language
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 12:36:40 GMT


	I guess that not many of you people confront this kind of
crackpottery very often, but I'm discussing this question just as a
starter for anyone interested, and also for the fun of it :-)

	The question of humanity's oldest language has almost
certainly been around every since humanity came into existence; I'm
sure the favored solution for most of humanity's existence was the
language of one's tribe :-)

	But in historical times, there were some who tried a broader
investigation. Herodotus tells that an Egyptian king tried raising a
baby with no words spoken to it to determine humanity's first
language; its firs word was interpreted as "bekos", the Phrygian word
for bread. Thus, Phrygian was humanity's first language.

	But there were efforts that went beyond such absurdities. The
conquering Romans had an irresistable taste for Greek culture, and
some of them started noticing how similar their languages were. Here
is a sample vocabulary set:

English		Latin		Greek

one		unus		heis
two		duo		duo
three		tres		treis
four		quattuor	tessares/tettares
five		quinque		pente
six		sex		hex
seven		septem		hepta
eight		octo		okto
nine		novem		ennea
ten		decem		deka

hund-red	centum		he-katon

mother		mater		meter/mater
father		pater		pater

that		is-tud		to

I		ego		ego
me		me		eme/me

thou		tu		su
thee		te		se

cow		bos/bov-	bous/bou-
hound		can-is		kuon/kun-

heart		cor/cord-	kardia
foot		pes/ped-	pous/pod-

	[Note: Classical Latin "c" and "v" were pronounced "k" and
"w"; I have put in dashes to make some of the words clearer]

	If you are already starting to suspect that English is related
to these two, you're ahead of the game :-)

	But the Roman solution was that Latin was an offshoot of
Greek, a position that was to be discredited by modern linguistics.
This fit in with their favored belief, expressed in Virgil's _Aeneid_,
that Rome's founders were descended from some Trojan War heroes.

	Linguistics did not get much further than that until modern
times; there were those who argued about which language was spoken by
all the people of the world before God made them speak different
languages after they had tried to build the Tower of Babel. Not
surprisingly, Hebrew was the favorite candidate, though there were
others, such as Irish and Dutch(!)

	Implicit in this discussion was the hypothesis that humanity's
original language had to be around somewhere. This idea was challenged
by Sir William Jones, who proposed that Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and
probably Old Persian and the Germanic and Celtic languages all had a
common ancestor, but one which may no longer exist. Since his time,
the "Indo-European" family, which Sir William Jones had implicitly
recognized, has received an abundance of research and reconstruction
efforts, and is clear that no existing language matches the
reconstructed common ancestor.

	As a side note, it is very likely that our knowledge of the IE
ancestor will forever remain in the realm of reconstruction, since it
unlikely that it was ever written anywhere. The reasons are (1) the
most plausible archeological candidate for its speakers, the Kurgans
of South Russia 6000-5000 years ago, show no evidence of literacy,
something also true for other archeological candidates, (2) the
writing systems for the written IE languages were all borrowed or
invented separately, and (3) all the words for "writing" in the IE
languages have origins from different roots, implying that the
speakers of the ancestral IE language had no word for this activity.

	Furthermore, the ubiquity of linguistic change insures that no
existing language could possibly be humanity's original language,
since it could not have survived unchanged. The Romance languages are
noticeably distinct from Latin, Modern English looks different from
Old English, Hindi looks different from Sanskrit, etc. etc.

	Thus, we can consign any attempt to demonstrate that any
existing language is an unchanged descendant of humanity's original
language (if there is only one such language!) to the realm of
crackpottery.

	By applying the comparative-linguistic tools developed from
their Indo-European experience, linguists have been able to classify
the vast majority of recorded languages into a couple hundred families
of varying size.

	Beyond that, it is difficult to make progress. I once
collected several numeral sets from several languages, and while most
of the Indo-European ones were recognizably similar, they resembled
none of the non-IE sets. Indeed, the Conventional Wisdom of
linguistics is that the process of language change has produced too
much change to be able to reconstruct the common ancestors of the
ancestors of the well-known language families.

	Some linguists have disagreed, and have plowed forward with
the comparative method. Probably the most successful of such efforts
is the effort to work out Nostratic, a proposed family that includes
IE, Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian, with
Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut added later. However, this work
has been pursued in the Soviet Union, and it has been little-known
outside of there until recent years.

	Though their work has received a cool reception from some
linguists, some Nostraticists have gone on to find other big families,
such as Sino-Caucasian, which includes Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian,
Basque, Burushaski, Yeniseian, and Na-Dene. However, the Nostraticists
do not claim to have found humanity's original language, and some of
them do not wish to be associated with that question, with all its
overtones of crackpottery.

	Independently of the Soviet Nostratic group, the American
linguist Joseph Greenberg has been doing large-scale classifications
of his own. However, he has done so by a rather subjective method of
finding resemblances by eyeballing word lists, rather than by
searching for sound correspondences, as mainstream linguists and even
the Nostraticists prefer to do. Examples of these are apparent in my
list above, where English "th" corresponds to Latin and Greek "t", and
English and Latin initial "s" corresponds to Greek initial "h". Thus,
while his classification of the African languages into four big
families has been accepted, some of his other classifications,
especially that of the Native American languages, remain controversial.

	Be that as it may, some intrepid macro-linguists have forged
forward, comparing essentially all language groups, and hoping to
reconstruct the ancestor of them all, which they have named
"Proto-World". They claim to have found about 30 word roots for
Proto-World, mainly for body parts, fleas and lice, and other
commonplaces. This is a _very_ paltry sum compared to the hundreds
known for some of the well-studied language families. However, this
work is not likely to be taken seriously by the bulk of the linguistic
community anytime soon; it certainly will not be taken seriously
before Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian are taken seriously, to say the
least.

	And why _one_ language? There might be more than one
primordial language, for all we know. But there is an evolutionary
argument that suggests that humanity originated from a relatively
small population, which would have spoken only one language or closely
related group of languages. According to Punctuated Equilibrium, or
Punc-Eq, new species arise from rapid evolution in small offshoot
populations; large populations seem to have relatively little change
in their macroscopic features (molecular evolution, however, is a
different story). Punc-Eq was developed to explain the apparent
constancy of fossil species over time, and the extreme rarity of
transitional forms; results apparent even when fossils are
well-sampled. On the genetic side, it is apparent that genes for
variations can spread very rapidly in small populations, and can be
fixed in a relatively small amount of time; this circumstance supports
Punc-Eq. Since all of humanity is equally language-capable, to within
individual differences, one concludes that our species' ancestral
population had the same linguistic capabilities that present-day
people do. Thus even if the genetic programming that enables us to
generate and interpret language did not emerge in that population, it
was present in that population. And easy gene flow in that population
would presumably have been associated with a high degree of mutual
intelligibility for all the individuals in that population.

	I know that this is amateur paleo-anthropology; I haven't seen
this discussion elsewhere, however.

	Conclusions:

	According to Punc-Eq, humanity had a relatively small
ancestral population, which almost certainly had one language or at
most a small group of closely related languages.

	BUT,

	This language may be forever inaccessible to
linguistic-reconstruction techniques, and anything but the most
cautious claims concerning it must be regarded with suspicion.


********************************************************************************

Here are some references on some interesting recent work on
Indo-European, Nostratic, and related subjects:

Indo-European:

Scientific American, March 1990, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, "The Early
History of Indo-European Languages" [A departure from the Kurgan
hypothesis; the IE homeland was in the Kura-Araxes area. It also
presents some of their revisions of IE phonology.]

Scientific American, October 1989, Colin Renfrew, "The Origins of
Indo-European Languages" [presenting the hypothesis discussed in more
detail in his book, see below]

Mallory, J.P., 1989, _In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archeology, and Myth_ [a comprehensive discussion of the Indo-European
question, relating linguistics to historical and archeological
evidence.]

Renfrew, Colin, 1988 _Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of
Indo-European Origins_ [an alternative proposal: a much earlier
departure from the Indo-European homeland than the standard (Kurgan)
picture would allow. I personally think that the evidence he presents
most likely fits an earlier, pre-Indo-European, dispersal; the "Old
Europeans" of Marija Gimbutas. His knowledge of linguistics also seems
rather weak.]

The American Heritage Dictionary [a good intro: it includes about 1500
Indo-European roots (about all those that are ancestral to English words
listed in it) and a guide to what can be reconstructed of the culture of
the Indo-European speakers, judging from what they had words for, such as
their worship of a god named "Father Sky".].

Baldi, Philip, _An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages_ [a
good comparative discussion of the older members of the various
Indo-European subfamilies.]

Gimbutas, Marija, _The Journal of Indo-European Studies_ (several
articles over the years) and _The Civilization of the Goddess_ [An
abundance of work on the archeology of the Kurgans, whom she proposes
as Proto-Indo-European, as well as reconstructions of their culture;
she has also done reconstructions of the culture of the pre-IE
Europeans, the "Old Europeans".]


Macro-linguistics: Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Proto-World, and related
subjects.

Proposed members of Nostratic:

Indo-European
Kartvelian (S Caucasian)
Afro-Asiatic
  Semitic
  Egyptian
  Berber
  Cushitic
  Chadic
Uralic (with Yukaghir)
Dravidian (with Elamite)
Altaic
  Turkic
  Mongolian
  Manchu-Tungus
  Korean
  Ryukyu
  Japanese
Chukchi-Kamchatkan
Eskimo-Aleut

Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic includes all of Nostratic except
Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, and Dravidian, but includes:

Ainu
Gilyak a.k.a. Nivkh

NOTE: Afro-Asiatic could well be a group comparable to the rest of
Nostratic and to Sino-Caucasian, as some Nostraticists are starting to
conclude. Discrepancies in proposed schemes like this are probably not
fatal; similar problems have existed for years in well-known language
families.

Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian):

North Caucasian
  NE Caucasian (incl. Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan)
  Abkhazo-Adyghian (incl. Hattic)
Sino-Tibetan
Yeniseian
Burushaski
Basque
Sumerian
Na-Dene
Some other Native American languages (?)

There are other big groupings proposed, such as Amerind (most Native
American languages), Austric (Austro-Thai and Austro-Asiatic), and
Congo-Saharan (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian, and Nilo-Saharan).

	The ultimate in large-scale groupings is all of humanity's
languages, whose hypothetical ancestor has been named Proto-World.
However, this last subject has been a natural magnet for an assortment
of enthusiasts and crackpots, and some Nostraticists would prefer not
to make too big an issue out of Proto-World for that very reason.
Although any current or historically attested language can confidently
be ruled out, due to the inevitability of linguistic change, proposed
candidates in the past have included

	Phrygian, Hebrew, Arabic, Irish, Dutch, Sanskrit, Japanese,
and Turkish.


The New York Times, November 24, 1987, p. C1, "Linguists Dig Deeper
into the Origins of Language"

Natural History, March 1987, The First Americans series: "Voices from
the Past", by Merritt Ruhlen

Joseph Greenberg, 1987(?), _Language in the Americas_ [His controversial
work on Native American language classification; it also contains
attempts to justify his methodology by doing some Indo-European
examples.]

I.M. Diakonov and S.A. Starostin, 1986, _Hurro_Urartian as an Eastern
Caucasian language_ [peripherally mentions other such comparisons, for
example, with Hattic, Etruscan, and the non-Indo-European component of
the Greek vocabulary].

Brown, R.A., 1985, _Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from Greek Alphabetic
Sources_ [attempt to find features of (a) pre-Indo-European
language(s) there, using borrowings in Greek, Cretan place names, and
Eteo-Cretan inscriptions. Etruscan and various borrowings elsewhere
are also discussed in it; the author proposes an "Aegeo-Asianic"
family, which survived in the languages discussed.]

Sorin Paliga 1989 and Martin Huld 1990, _The Journal of Indo-European
Studies_ [two articles on attempts to reconstruct some
pre-Indo-European roots from European languages.]

Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell 1991, _Sprung from some Common
Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Language_ [Papers for
the 200th anniversary of that famous statement by Sir William Jones
about the Indo-European languages; topics include his career as a
linguist, Indo-European religious vocabulary and possible connections
with other language families, the question of the relatedness of the
Altaic languages, Japanese, and Korean, and mathematical methods for
constructing family trees and for long-distance comparison.]

Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 1988, Mark Kaiser and Vitaly
Shevoroshkin, "Nostratic" [A detailed discussion of the results of the
Soviet Nostratic school; it includes some vocabulary and a lot of
sound correspondences.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin and T.L. Markey, eds., 1986, _Typology,
Relationship, and Time; A Collection of Papers on Language Change and
Relationship by Soviet Linguists_ [A rather technical collection, but
it does feature an interesting statistical study by Dolgopolsky of
what words are least replaced in languages over time.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin and M. Kaiser, late 1980's, _The Journal of
Indo-European Studies_ (The Journal of Indo-European Studies:
v13, n3/4, p377, 1985 and v14, n3/4, p365, 1986) [Some discussions of
Indo-European phonology in the light of Nostratic comparisons.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1988, _Reconstructing Languages and
Cultures_ [Several papers on Nostratic and other such protolanguages,
including Proto-World, most by known advocates. It includes 600
Nostratic roots.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1989, _Explorations in Language
Macrofamilies_ [More such papers; though mostly on details of
comparison.]

Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., 1990, _Proto-Languages and Proto-Cultures_
[Still more such papers; presents the hypotheses that Sumerian and
Etruscan belong in the Sino-Caucasian group, and also Joseph
Greenberg's discussion of "Eurasiatic"]

The Sciences (NY Academy of Sciences), May-June 1990, Vitaly
Shevoroshkin, "The Mother Tongue". [A good introduction to Nostratic
and Proto-World, from the point of view of an advocate.]

Scientific American, April 1991 [A rather brief discussion of the
controversy that Nostratic and Proto-World have started.]

The Atlantic, April 1991 [A more detailed discussion of this controversy.]


	Here is a poem in reconstructed Nostratic composed by the late
Nostraticist Vladislav Illich-Svitych:

K'elHa"		wet'e-i		`aK'u-n		ka"hla
Tongue		time-of		water-of	path/ford

k'ala-i		palhV-k'V	na		wete
gone-of		dwelling-to	us		lead(s)

s'a da		'a-k'V		'ejV		'a"la"
he but		there-to	come(s)		no(t)

ja-k'o		pele		t'uba		wete
which-who	fear(s)		deep		water


Language is a ford through the river of time
It leads us to the dwelling of the ancestors
But he does not arrive there
Who is afraid of deep water

Note: V is an uncertain vowel, K is k/q, a" is a with " on top, and s'
is s with ' on top. The ' after a stop consonant (t, k, etc.) denotes
a glottalized consonant (with a stricture in the throat).

Several of these words have Indo-European cognates; I give them both
in the traditional transcription and a modified one closer to
Nostratic due to Shevoroshkin et al, following a /, when it is
different. I will give only the more common offshoots; the Latin and
Greek words should be familiar from borrowings. You may have fun
looking for other offshoot words.

`aK'u	IE akwa- / akwha-	Latin: aqua, "water"
palhV	IE pelH- / phelH-	Greek: polis, "city"
na	IE nes, nos		English: us; Latin: nos
wete	IE wedh- / wed(h)-	English: wed
k'o	IE kw(o/i)- / kwh(o/i)-	English: who, what, other wh's; Latin: qu-
t'uba	IE dheub- / d(h)eup-	English: deep
wete	IE wed- / wet-		English: water, wet;
					Greek: hudor, hudr-, "water";
					Russian: voda, "water"