The Origins of Language: One Mother Tongue

Hola darlings!

Well, this hypothesis just makes so much sense to me. But it's very controversial. 

I've been interested in the origins of language (and words) for a long time.  Linguistics, etymology -anyone with half a brain knows that words are power, and I believe that they can unlock the secrets of the past and reveal things about our herstory that we do not, at present, know, and perhaps may never learn of any other way. 

I have this thought that if only I could study enough, dig deeply enough, work hard enough, and dig dig dig into research, I may be able to find a key or keys to unlock the ancient mysterious origins of chess and its predecessors.  Not something I am able to do, given the realities of making a living.  Four and a half more years until retirement, if I make it that far...

Oh yeah, I know what the accepted theory is, and I think it's full of baloney.  But the Germans keep insisting, year after year, that CHESS WAS INVENTED IN INDIA, and these days most everyone tows that line.   Like they're afraid to speak out otherwise.

Why?

Alas, most everyone who has said otherwise in the recent and not so recent past, are dead: Joseph Needham (China); Ricardo Calvo (possibly Persia).  And some, like Dr. David Li (China), are drowned out by those who claim that only certain "professionals" i.e., degreed historians or archaeologists, or certain "institutes" or "groups" funded by someone with pots of money pursuing a certain agenda, are the sole legitimate sources anyone with intelligence should look to for the answers.  You can check out more alternative views on the origins of chess at Goddesschess' collection of essays and research. 

Anyway, years ago, I read a book by Merrit Ruhlen, published in 1996, that upset a lot of people (i.e., really pissed some people off):  The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. 

This is a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning more, and using common sense in looking at how languages actually work and change over time.  Hey, all you nay-sayers and Ruhlen bashers out there, bwwwwwaaaaaahhhhaaaaahhhaaaa!

Before Babel? Ancient Mother Tongue Reconstructed

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – 6 hrs ago

 

 

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as "mother," "to pull" and "man," which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

"We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age," said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Tower of Babel The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven.

But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language's roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even so, researchers recently said they had traced the roots of a common mother tongue to many Eurasian languages back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey.)

Pagel, however, wondered whether language evolution proceeds much like biological evolution. If so, the most critical words, such as the frequently used words that define our social relationships, would change much more slowly.

To find out if he could uncover those ancient words, Pagel and his colleagues in a previous study tracked how quickly words changed in modern languages. They identified the most stable words. They also mapped out how different modern languages were related.

They then reconstructed ancient words based on the frequency at which certain sounds tend to change in different languages — for instance, p's and f's often change over time in many languages, as in the change from "pater" in Latin to the more recent term "father" in English.

The researchers could predict what 23 words, including "I," "ye," "mother," "male," "fire," "hand" and "to hear" might sound like in an ancestral language dating to 15,000 years ago.

In other words, if modern-day humans could somehow encounter their Stone Age ancestors, they could say one or two very simple statements and make themselves understood, Pagel said.

Limitations of tracing language

Unfortunately, this language technique may have reached its limits in terms of how far back in history it can go.

"It's going to be very difficult to go much beyond that, even these slowly evolving words are starting to run out of steam," Pagel told LiveScience.

The study raises the possibility that researchers could combine linguistic data with archaeology and anthropology "to tell the story of human prehistory," for instance by recreating ancient migrations and contacts between people, said William Croft, a comparative linguist at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the study.

"That has been held back because most linguists say you can only go so far back in time," Croft said. "So this is an intriguing suggestion that you can go further back in time."

Linguistics Again - The Yenseic-Na Dene Connection

Prior post. I found this story at Mike Ruggeri's "The Ancient Americas Breaking News": From The Anchorage Daily News Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea Siberian culture's words have echo in North America By GEORGE BRYSONgbryson@adn.com Published: March 4th, 2008 12:41 AM Last Modified: March 4th, 2008 03:31 AM A remote population of a few hundred indigenous Siberians who live thousands of miles west of Alaska speak a language that appears to be an ancient relative of more than three dozen Native languages in North America, experts say. A panel of respected linguists who met in Anchorage on Friday are hailing new research that links the Old World language of Ket, still spoken sparingly along the Yenisei River in western Siberia, and the sprawling New World family of Na-Dene languages -- a broad grouping that encompasses the many Athabascan tribes in Alaska, along with the Tlingit and Eyak people, as well as Indian populations in western Canada and the American Southwest, including the Navajo and the Apache. Other than Siberian Yupik, a regional Eskimo dialect that straddles the Bering Strait, a connection between North American and Asian language families had never before been demonstrated. The research by University of Western Washington linguist Edward Vajda, who spent 10 years deciphering the Ket language, drew upon parallel work by three Alaskans -- Jeff Leer, Michael Krauss and James Kari, professors of linguistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks -- who independently detailed patterns in Na-Dene languages. Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics, according to participants who attended a language symposium at the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. That Interior Indian languages spoken in North America are related to languages spoken in Asia has long been assumed, since other fields of science have widely concluded that the Americas weren't populated until ice age hunters migrated across a temporary land bridge from the old world to the new some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And as early as 1923, other linguists speculated specifically about a genetic link between the Yeniseic family of languages spoken along the Yenisei River (of which Ket is now the only surviving member) and the Na-Dene family, spoken in North America. Ten years ago, American linguist Merritt Ruhlen did so again after producing a list of 36 cognates -- comparable words in two languages that sound alike and mean the same thing. But producing lists of similar-sounding words isn't sufficient evidence to establish a real genetic relationship between two languages, declared Bernard Comrie, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, speaking at the conference. That's because cognates can also occur by accident or chance -- when selective words are adopted by travelers from unrelated languages, or when words have a universal appeal. [Yeah, okay. So, what are the odds that this happened 15,000 years ago in a remote region of Siberia???] What makes the new finding so exciting, Comrie said, is that it's based on complex and verifiable morphologies that show how certain Ket words were systematically altered to create Athabascan words -- or vice versa (the research doesn't speculate on which language came first or when). Vajda began studying the Ket language firsthand in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain fell and he interviewed Ket speakers in the southwestern Siberia city of Tomsk, as well as in Germany. "There is no road and no train," Vajda said in an interview last week in Anchorage, here to address the symposium. "You have to go by steamboat or helicopter to get there." Through his research and interviews, Vajda determined that there are about 1,200 people who say they are Ket, including about 200 people who speak the language. But only about 100 speak Ket fluently, Vajda said, and nearly all of them are now older than 50. "They were the last hunters of north Asia that didn't have any domesticated animals that they used for food," he said. "They moved around, they didn't live in the same place." That came to an end when the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union forced the Ket to live in villages. Now their traditional lifestyle is nearly gone, Vajda said -- and their language is disappearing too. While trying to capture it before it vanishes altogether, Vajda gained a new understanding about the peculiarities of Ket verbs, suffixes and tonalities -- which are unlike any of the other Siberian languages to the east. Comparing what he learned with research conducted independently in Alaska, Vajda began to find words the two languages had in common. A news release issued this week by the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF concurs, noting language similarities "too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent." Among linguistic scholars elsewhere who've reviewed Vajda's paper in its draft form and reacted favorably so far is Dr. Heinrich Werner of Bonn, Germany -- a world authority in the Ket language, whose work Vajda cited and incorporated into his own, along with that of the Alaskans. Vajda thinks his research might be a door-opener for scientists in other fields, including those who work in human genetics and archaeology, to proceed with additional comparisons of the two cultures. He says it also points out the necessity and urgency to record dying languages before they disappear.

Linguistics May Aid in Study of Migration

I haven't looked at languages in quite the same manner since reading Merritt Ruhlen's book "The Origin of Language - Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" in 1999 (when I first got involved in attempting to track down the origins of chess). Here's a fascinating story: Siberian, Native American Languages Linked -- A First John Roach for National Geographic News March 26, 2008 A fast-dying language in remote central Siberia shares a mother tongue with dozens of Native American languages spoken thousands of miles away, new research confirms. The finding may allow linguists to weigh in on how the Americas were first settled, according to Edward Vajda, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Since at least 1923 researchers have suggested a connection exists between Asian and North American languages—but this is the first time a link has been demonstrated with established standards, said Vajda, who has studied the relationship for more than 15 years. Previous researchers had provided lists of similar-sounding and look-alike words, but their methods were unscientific. Such similarities, Vajda noted, are likely to be dismissed as coincidence even if they represent genuine evidence. So Vajda developed another method. "I'm providing a whole system of [similar] vocabulary and also of grammatical parallels—the way that verb prefixes are structured," he said. Dying Tongue His research links the Old World language family of Yeniseic in central Siberia with the Na-Dene family of languages in North America. The Yeniseic family includes the extinct languages Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol. Ket is the only Yeniseic language spoken today. Less than 200 speakers remain and most are over 50, according to Vajda. "Within a couple of generations, Ket will probably become extinct," he said. (Related news: "Languages Racing to Extinction in 5 Global 'Hotspots' [September 18, 2007].) The Na-Dene family includes languages spoken by the broad group of Athabaskan tribes in the U.S. and Canada as well as the Tlingit and Eyak people. The last Eyak speaker died in January. Vajda presented the findings in February at a meeting of linguists at the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks. Vajda established the Yeniseic-Na-Dene link by looking for languages with a verb-prefix system similar to those in Yeniseic languages. Such prefixes are unlike any other language in North Asia. "Only Na-Dene languages have a system of verb prefixes that very closely resemble the Yeniseic," he said. From there, Vajda found several dozen cognates—or words in different languages that sound alike and have the same meaning. The results dovetail with earlier work by Merritt Ruhlen, an anthropologist at Stanford University in California who Vajda said discovered the first genuine Na-Dene-Yeniseic cognates. Vajda also showed how these cognates have sound correspondences. "I systematically connect these structures in Yeniseic with the structures in modern Na-Dene," Vajda said. "My comparisons aren't just lists of some look-alike words … I show there is a system behind it." Johanna Nichols is a linguist at the University of California in Berkeley who attended the Alaska meeting where Vajda presented his research. With the exception of the Eskimo-Aleut family that straddles the Bering Strait and Aleutian Islands, this is "the first successful demonstration of any connection between a New World language and an Old World language," Nichols said. Mother Tongue Vajda said his research puts linguistics on the same stage as archaeology, anthropology, and genetics when it comes to studying the history of humans in North Asia and North America. However, the research has not revealed which language came first. Neither modern Ket nor Na-Dene languages in North America represent the mother tongue. For example, some words in the Na-Dene family likely represent sounds of the mother tongue more closely than their Yeniseic cognates. Other words in Yeniseic, however, are probably more archaic. Based on archaeological evidence of human migrations across the Bering land bridge, the language link may extend back at least 10,000 years. (Explore an atlas of the human journey.) If true, according to Vajda, this would be the oldest known demonstrated language link. But more research is needed to determine when the languages originated and how they became a part of various cultures before such a claim will be accepted, according to UC Berkeley linguist Nichols. "I don't think there is any reason to assume the connection is [10,000 years] old … this must surely be one late episode in a much longer and more complicated history of settlement," she said.