In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

12/7/20, 14:55

In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues ofthe Ancients
By Nicholas WadeMarch 18, 2003

Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue
spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far
too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme
antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their
distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue.
They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken bypeoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, whoinclude hunters and herders.
Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double
consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth.
Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct
aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites.
Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached southern Africa from their
homeland in western Africa some 2,000 years ago have borrowed certain clicks
from the Khwe, one use being to substitute for consonants in taboo words.
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In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

12/7/20, 14:55

There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old. One isthat the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers of
the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient genetic lineage, according toanalysis of their DNA. They are called the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar
indicating a click. (''Ju|'hoansi'' is pronounced like ''ju-twansi'' except that the''tw'' is a click sound like the ''tsk, tsk'' of disapproval.)
All human groups are equally old, being descended from the same ancestral
population. But geneticists can now place ethnic groups on a family tree ofhumankind. Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones that split only recently
from earlier populations, are younger, in a genealogical sense, than those at theends of long branches. Judged by mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed
down in the female line, the Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it goesback close to the very root of the human family tree.
Most of the surviving click speakers live in southern Africa. But two small
populations, the Hadzabe and the Sandawe, live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, ineastern Africa. Two geneticists from Stanford, Dr. Alec Knight and Dr. Joanna
Mountain, recently analyzed the genetics of the Hadzabe to figure out theirrelationship to their fellow click speakers, the Ju|'hoansi.
The Hadzabe, too, have an extremely ancient lineage that also traces back close
to the root of the human family tree, the Stanford team reports today in thejournal Current Biology. But the Hadzabe lineage and that of the Ju|'hoansi
spring from opposite sides of the root. In other words, the Hadzabe and theJu|'hoansi have been separate peoples since close to the dawn of modern humanexistence.

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In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

12/7/20, 14:55

The Stanford team compared them with other extremely ancient groups like theMbuti of Zaire and the Biaka pygmies of Central African Republic and found thedivergence between the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi might be the oldest known
split in the human family tree.
Unless each group independently invented click languages at some later time,that finding implies that click languages were spoken by the very ancient
population from which the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi descended. ''The
divergence of those genetic lineages is among the oldest on earth,'' Dr. Knightsaid. ''So one could certainly make the inference that clicks were present in themother tongue.''

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Sign UpIf so, the modern humans who left Africa some 40,000 years ago and populated
the rest of the world might have been click speakers who later lost their clicks.
Australia, where the Damin click language used to be spoken, is one of the firstplaces outside Africa known to have been reached by modern humans.
But the antiquity of clicks, if they are indeed extremely ancient, raises a serious
puzzle. Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University, the great classifier of theworld's languages, put all the click languages in a group he called Khoisan. But
Sandawe and Hadzane, the language of the Hadzabe, are what linguists callisolates. They are unlike each other and every other known language. Apartfrom their clicks, they have very little in common even with the other Khoisan
languages.

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In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

12/7/20, 14:55

That the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi differ as much in their language as in theirgenetics is a reflection of the same fact. They are extremely ancient, and there
has been a long time for both their language and their genetics to diverge. Thepuzzle is why they should have retained their clicks when everything else in
their languages has changed.
Dr. Knight suggested that clicks might have survived because in the savanna,
where most click speakers live, the sounds allow hunters to coordinate activity
without disturbing prey. Whispered speech that uses just clicks sounds more likebranches creaking than human talk. Clicks make up more than 40 percent of thelanguage and suffice for hunters to convey their meanings, Dr. Knight said.
Dr. Anthony Traill, an expert on click languages at the University ofWitwatersrand in South Africa, said he did not find the hunting idea very
plausible.
''Clicks are acoustically high-impact sounds for mammalian ears,'' Dr. Traill said,''probably the worst sounds to use if you are trying to conceal your presence.''
But he agreed that it was a puzzle to understand why clicks had been retained
for so long. He has found that in the ordinary process of language change,
certain types of click can be replaced by nonclick consonants, but he has neverseen the reverse occur. ''It is highly improbable that a fully fledged click system
could arise from nonclick precursors,'' Dr. Traill said.
Because languages change so fast, it is difficult for linguists to measure theirage. Indeed, most think that languages more than a few thousand years old canrarely be dated. But if Dr. Traill is right, that clicks can be lost but not reinvented,
that implies that clicks may be a very ancient component of language.

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In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

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Dr. Bonnie Sands, a linguist at Northern Arizona University, said click sounds
were not particularly hard to make. All children can make them. Dr. Sands saw
no reason why clicks could not have been invented independently many times
and, perhaps, lost in all areas of the world except Africa.
''There is nothing to be gained by assuming that clicks must have been invented
only once,'' she said, ''or in presuming that certain types of phonological systems
are more primordial than others.''
Dr. Traill said that although a single click was not difficult, rattling off a whole
series is another matter, because they are like double consonants. ''Fluent
articulation of clicks in running speech is by any measure difficult,'' he said. ''It
requires more articulatory work, like taking two stairs at a time.''Given the laziness of the human tongue, why have clicks been retained by click
speakers while everything else changed? ''That is a major problem,'' Dr. Traillsaid. ''All the expectations would be that they would have succumbed to thepressures of change that affect all languages. I do not know the answer.''
A leading theory to explain the emergence of behaviorally modern humans
50,000 years ago is that some genetic change enabled one group of people toperfect modern speech. The new power of communication, according to anarchaeologist, Dr. Richard Klein, made possible the advanced behaviors thatbegin to be reflected in the archaeological record of the period.
The Stanford team calculated a date of 112,000 years, plus or minus 42,000 years,
for the separation of the Hadzabe and Ju|'hoansi populations. If this means thatmodern speech existed that long ago, it does not appear to fit with Dr. Klein'sthesis.

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In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients - The New York Times

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But Dr. Knight said the estimate was very approximate and added that hebelieved the new findings about click language were fully compatible with Dr.
Klein's theory. Clicks might have been part of the first fully articulate humanlanguage that appeared among some group of early humans 50,000 years ago.
Those with the language gene would have outcompeted all other groups, so that
language become universal in the surviving human population.
That would explain why the metaphorical Adam hit it off with Eve. They justclicked.
Correction: March 20, 2003

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the ancient nature of click languages
in southern Africa misspelled the given name of a linguist at Northern Arizona
University who suggested that clicks could have been invented more than once.
She is Dr. Bonny Sands, not Bonnie.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section F, Page 2 of the National edition with the headline: In Click Languages, an Echo of theTongues of the Ancients

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/in-click-languages-an-echo-of-the-tongues-of-the-ancients.html

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