h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Greeting.
I have been away from this site for a while. When I first registered I posted this query in a forum I thought would get some action. It didn't. Someone suggested I post it in "AskH2g2" so here goes:

First of all, I am by no means knowledgable about this. Any scholarship I may be able to claim lies entirely within the physical sciences. I am however very interested. I hope that this forum might be a means by which people who know more about the subject than I do can share their knowledge. That said, here's the topic.

People speak languages. I think it is pretty well established (and if it isn't, I believe it anyway) that people are predisposed to speak genetically. As Lewis Thomas said (I think), "people make words the way bees make honey". So, when did it start? I suppose that the first humans who migrated out of Africa were already speaking 1 or more languages, but maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe language erupted in human society during the Ice Age (1 of them). What I know is that once written language was developed, archeologists can more clearly track the evolution and migration of language and correlate it to the migration of people.

Even without written language we can trace, linguistically, the very late migration of the Athabascan people from Mongolia to Alaska and the subsequent settlement of the Navajos and Apaches in Arizona, speaking all a similar language. So we can deduce that there must have been some Mongolians speaking a similar language. Do they still? If so, did that Mongolian language derive from some earlier Mongolian that was carried in an earlier migration and became Aztec?

Some of this must be known by somebody. I would very much like to know where to find a synopsis of this field without having to go back to school and start all over (I'm rather too old for that now, in any case).

Hi Alitnil. Unfortunately for you, languages change over time, so after about 5,000, there are no traces of the original language left. Since the Mongolian invasion of America happened about 10,000 years ago, there are no remaining links between the American Indian languages and the Asian ones.

*subscribes cause she likes the study of language*

I don't know much about it, though.

My current, pet theory is that speech developed from music. Humans communicated by forms of pitch shifting, using rhythm, different sounds. Gradually the sounds (ie vowels etc) became more important than the pitch. It survives in the intonation of the voice, raising the voice when asking a question? for example.

It's not the only theory out there at the moment, but I like it.

Well, we do know a lot about some language groups (Indo-European, Fino-Ugric, Athabascan - and that's just the ones I know about; I assume a real linguist would know more). From archeological evidence we can correlate the linguistic dispersion with other migratory evidence. I'm just curious as to what is known.

Take the Indo-European languages. Is it known where the "protolanguage" was spoken (Baluchistan?) and when? Was that language a derivative of some other? Were those people a derivative of others? What other derivatives did those precursor people have?

Best bet on the original home of protoIndoEuropean is around the north or east of the Black Sea in the fourth millenium BC. Early language groups may well have been more numerous and more localised than modern ones (Papua New Guinea has more than half of the current language families of the world because of its isolation and the difficulties of travel), and most have effectively disappeared, so precursors of the precursors are virtually impossible to study.

Noggin

Languages always fascinated me. More so once I heard one theory about the motivation for the development of language (once we could breathe voluntarily), being the ability to persuade someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't.

If you do a google search on Merritt Ruhlen or Proto-World language, you'll find some interesting speculation on the "original" language of humans. A number of Russian scholars have also claimed to be able to derive root languages deep in the past from comparisons of modern languages. Speaking as a scholar of ancient languages (which I am, really), it's pretty much all bunk: making comparisons of single words (which is what most of this stuff is based on) will produce parallels because there are only so many phonemes available; startling coincidences are bound to happen. For every startling coincidence there are thousands of words that just don't show a parallel. Proto-Indo-European is about as far back as you can draw reasonable conclusions, and those conclusions are always mildly suspect. As for the original "homeland" of Indo-European, I've heard pursuasive arguments of from the submerged Black Sea coast, through the Caucasus, to the Baltic, to Eastern Europe, to Central Asia. It's pretty much all speculation with some pretty convincing guess work.
As has been suggested, it would probably be impossible to trace an actual geneology linking Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, to any modern Asiatic language. It's difficult enough to find a geneology linking up Native American languages to each other. In all, it's a Grimm task.

Horizon did a program a few years back which they called "before babel".

in this they showed that by taking languages as a whole, and working at the whole language level, they could take language back 100,000 years, and produce a limited vocabulary of a small number of words, and what they must have sounded like.

they checked the migration patterns to see how they matched the latest genetic research results, and they seemed to match.

while what you say about tracing a small nuber of languages back to produce the single original human language is almost impossible, they were not working at this level.

they took hundreds of families, organised them into groupings with only minor differences in the individual words over the group, and used a few dozen languages, combined with the standard methods to move back to the prototype for that group.

they also had to correct for language drift where the same word evolved into multiple words with related meanings, and it was very difficult to do.

while I have seen some episodes of horizon that have left me sceptical as to their conclusions, this was not one of them. the methods they used were all in current usage, and are currently being applied to language reconstruction.

boy, I feel stupid. I almost posted the following to the "right to keep and bear weapons of mass destruction" thread. What would they have thought?

Something I forgot to mention in my last post is the virtually untestable theory that language in humans (or perhaps earlier hominids) began as sign language rather than spoken language. I find this theory very attractive (possibly because I have experience with special needs children who had trouble with spoken language before being taught to sign.) The theory opens the possibility that true language goes way back (millions of years). But, of course, it's hard to conceive of a means of testing the theory.

As to the Horizon programme, I've not seen it (we don't get a lot of British TV in Canada, except Fawlty Towers, Coronation Street, and Monty Python. Sad, isn't it?) I have heard of similar work, including the work Anthony Burgess did for the film Quest for Fire. With the proviso that I can't judge without having seen, it seems to me to be unlikely to be possible, no matter how broad the base of languages, to be conclusive about a reconstruction. Such a reconstruction may be 100% accurate, but there is little means to test that accuracy. The reconstruction of Indo-European is based on theories derived from one group of languages and tested on another, over the course of a great many small steps. Your description of the Horizon programme suggests that pretty much everything was thrown into the pot for derivation, leaving nothing behind to act as a control. I'm probably misunderstanding "Before Babel", but those are my thoughts.

(I sort of feel like posting this to the other thread anyway.)

Hey, I think I just found a transcript of Beyond Babel at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html

let me know if it's the same one

Hey, do a google search on "Nostratic" for the Russian stuff.

I just finished reading that transcript and I found it pretty much came to the same conclusion I did in my original post. There's a wall in the past beyond which it is probably not possible to reconstruct root languages. Some say 10,000 years ago, some say 15,000 years ago. And a couple of lonely voices say there's no wall.

it's sleep time

What is the concensus on who did language start with, i.e. which species?

Is there any evidence that Neanderthals has spoken language?

My understanding is that the consensus for spoken language would have been somewhere in species Homo, probably Homo Sapiens. The theory I mentioned before about signing being the first language would push it back who knows how far, but the signing theory is very far from being accepted.
The fight about Neandertals seems to be ongoing. I've seen some evidence that their vocal tract wouldn't have supported much articulation and other evidence that it was pretty much like ours. The jury seems to still be out on that one.

At least, that's my understanding.

What about the ability to control breathing by Neanderthals? My understanding is that the ability to control breathing was the key evolutionary change that enabled the development of spoken languages.

I think somebody advanced the theory that there's a region in the human brain responsible for the ability to speak or use language called Broca's something or other. This presumably was deduced from people losing the ability to speak as the result of damage to the region. I'm not sure how much of it really depends on the vocal tract or whatever.

Indo-european seems to be one of the most comprehensively studied language groups probably because linquists have predominantly spoken languages from that group, notably English. I think there might therefore be a certain bias that might reveal itself in the subsequent theories or conclusions about languages in general.

English speakers trying to learn Nahuatl for example often complain that it makes no sense to them and they usually have to be told to stop trying to analyse it in English or Indo-european terms and just go with the flow. Nahuatl doesn't even have words in the conventional sense, more like elements or roots to which are attached prefixes and suffixes that modify the meaning of the root to define what you might call a complete thought.

Nahuatl is thought to be a member of a group of languages called Uto-Aztecan of which my people's language, Newe, is also a member. It's a rather large and widespread group extending geographically more or less from the Valley of Mexico to the Snake River Plain. Newe is considered to belong to a subgroup called Numic or Shoshonean.

My roommate, who is Lakota, frequently complains about English speakers who try to speak or write Lakota using English syntax or grammar. She thinks it's really weird when they do that. She's also deaf so she tends to favor the gesture theory of language origins.

There's a fairly ubiquitous tradition among many indian people of a time when people and other animals could converse routinely with each other and she thinks this lends support for her notion because other animals often appear to use body language or signing as much or more than vocalizations.

I think the word "appears" should be noted because we are after all trying to interpret all this stuff in anthropocentric terms which may confuse things as much as it reveals.

I remember seeing a research film that depicted a group of male chimpanzees hunting monkeys who got into an altercation with a monkey mother they couldn't quite handle. One attempted to enlist the help of an additional male who was just sort of sitting on the sidelines so to speak. The gestures and vocalizations he used to do this appeared uncannily similar to what you might see baseball managers do when confronting a player having a bad day or an umpire having just made what in the manager's opinion is the most incredibly stupid call of his career.

It's possible then there just might be something resembling a universal gesture or body language that we could explore if we weren't so into talking with our mouths.

Anyways, just a few thoughts to see how much I can muddy the intellectual pond here for whatever they're worth.

If anyone has read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, it goes into some interesting theories on language developement. Its a fiction but it tells a lot of fact...

But basically theres two schools on language, one is that languages diverge, and the other is that languages converge. And neither school has more proof than the other...

OK. What if, instead of tracing language "artifacts" we assume that language migrated along with the other attributes of human behavior. What do scholars think about when language began? I think I read somewhere that Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated out and into Europe and Asia, more or less, following the earlier migration of the Neanderthals. Were they speaking?

There's an Australian linguist (cannot remember his name) talked a lot about "punctuated equilibrium": i.e. langueges merge over long periods of time and then abruptly diverge.

Here's a site that describes from a paleontology point of view:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html