Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’

Yes, yes, YES!  (Si is just yes backwards...)  See related post from May 6, 2013.

From the Washington Post online, and please check out the wonderful interactive graphic of some of the "conserved" words.

Language families studied:

Altaic

Chukchi-Kamchatkan

Dravidian

Inuit-Yupik

Indo-European

Kartvelian

Uralic

By David Brown,

May 06, 2013 07:00 PM EDT

The Washington PostPublished: May 6

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic “weathering” and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.

A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true. A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.

“We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England who headed the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But this ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other.”

In all, “proto-Eurasiatic” gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world’s important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan; several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.
That a spoken sound carrying a specific meaning could remain unchanged over 15,000 years is a controversial idea for most historical linguists.

“Their general view is pessimistic,” said William Croft, a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico who studies the evolution of language and was not involved in the study. “They basically think there’s too little evidence to even propose a family like Eurasiatic.” In Croft’s view, however, the new study supports the plausibility of an ancestral language whose audible relics cross tongues today.

Pagel and three collaborators studied “cognates,” which are words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages. Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates. Those words, however, are from languages in one family, the Indo-European. The researchers looked much further afield, examining seven language families in all.

In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others).

They make up a diverse group. Some don’t use the Roman alphabet. Some had no written form until modern times. They sound different to the untrained ear. Their speakers live thousands of miles apart. In short, they seem unlikely candidates to share cognates.

Pagel’s team used as its starting material 200 words that linguists know to be the core vocabulary of all languages.

Other researchers had searched for cognates of those words in members of each of the seven Eurasiatic language families. They looked, for example, for similar-sounding words for “fish” or “to drink” in the Altaic family of languages or in the Indo-European languages. When they found cognates, they constructed what they imagined were the cognates’ ancestral words — a task that requires knowing how sounds change between languages, such as “f” in Germanic languages becoming “p” in Romance languages.

Those made-up words are called “proto-words.” Pagel’s team compared them among language families. They made thousands of comparisons, asking such questions as: Do the proto-word for “hand” in the Inuit-Yupik language family and the proto-word for “hand” in the Indo-European language family sound similar?

Surprisingly, the answer to that question and many others was yes.

The 23 entries on the list of ultraconserved words are cognates in four or more language families. Could they sound the same purely by chance? Pagel and his colleagues think not.

Linguists have calculated the rate at which words are replaced in a language. Common ones disappear the slowest. It’s those words that Pagel’s team found were most likely to have cognates among the seven families.  In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn’t.

As a group, the ultraconserved words give a hint of what has been important to people over the millennia.

“I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. “Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.”

Of course, one has to explain the presence of “bark.”

“I have spoken to some anthropologists about that, and they say that bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers,” Pagel said. Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation and consumed as medicine. [In addition, perhaps being part of a roof/covering over a structure, a sort of primitive shingle, when "stitched" together using early sewing techniques that were in place perhaps as early as 20,000 years ago.]

“To spit” is also a surprising survivor. It may be that the sound of that word is just so expressive of the sound of the activity — what linguists call “onomatopoeia” [could they possibly have come up with a more difficult word to pronounce?] — that it simply couldn’t be improved on over 15,000 years. [Think about it:  we've probably all spit at one time or other, such as during brushing one's teeth.  The sound is distinct...]

As to the origin of the sound of the other ultraconserved words, and who made them up, that’s a question best left to the poets.[Women would probably be better sources...].

Program Reconstructes Ancient Languages

From Berkeley U news.

Scientists create automated ‘time machine’ to reconstruct ancient languages
By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | February 11, 2013

BERKELEY —
Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated “time machine,” of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how “big data” and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct “proto-languages” – the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.

 ”What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time,” said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online today (Feb. 11) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team’s computational model uses probabilistic reasoning – which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome – to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.
Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world’s proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.

“Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future,” said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.

The discovery advances UC Berkeley’s mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans’ earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the “comparative method” to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language.

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree – much like a genealogical tree - reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages.

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

“Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other,” Klein said. “It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time.”

You can find the technical paper here.

Leiden U Linguists Decipher Lydian and Phrygian Shards

13 September 2012/Coen van Beelen)
From Leiden University News Website

Linguists from Leiden decipher Phrygian and Lydian inscriptions

Linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky from Leiden University made a great discovery this summer. They deciphered a few dozen inscriptions on pot shards found in Daskyleion (North-West Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, and thus proved the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.

Sensational

Kloekhorst and Lubotsky’s find can be termed sensational. Previous excavations had already led to the supposition that Greeks and Phrygians lived in and around Daskyleion between the 6th and 3rd century BC, but now there is also proof of the presence of the Lydians. The kingdom of the Phrygians in the mid-west of the Anatolian Plateau had a rich mythology in which kings such as Gordias (of the Gordian Knot) figured. The Lydians are known as a rich people that in all probability invented coins. This means it has been proven for the first time that Daskyleion was a multi-ethnic town in that period. This is important, because we do not yet know for sure which languages were spoken in North-West Turkey before the Greeks began to settle there in about 800 BC.

Grin and Bear It

When the Turkish archaeologists Kaan Iren (Mugla University) and Handan Yildizhan (Nevsehir University) found pot shards with inscriptions that they could not decipher their search soon led them to Leiden. Kloekhorst, who received a VENI grant in 2008 for his research into Hittite (a language related to Lydian), is known to be expert in the field of Anatolian languages (a sub-group of the Indo-European language family). For his part, Lubotsky is an authority in the field of the Phrygian language. At the request of the Turkish archaeologists they spent a week in Daskyleion in July deciphering the inscriptions. Kloekhorst says, ‘It was 35 degrees and there was no air-conditioning. It was certainly a case of grin and bear it.'

To Zeus

The best discovery, says Kloekhorst, is a small shard with ‘To Zeus’ scraped on it. ‘Most of the shards are very small,’ he explains. ‘The words are often broken into pieces, and you do find a whole word it is usually a name. The advantage is that Phrygian and Lydian each had their own alphabets. That is often our only guide: it’s how we know that it can’t be a Greek text.’ The discovery amounts to some thirty inscriptions. That may not seem much but for two extinct languages it is huge. Kloekhorst says, ‘In total we only have 150 Lydian fragments. That means that any new piece of text is welcome. They are the small pieces of evidence that we work with.’

New Shards

At the request of the Turkish archaeologists Kloekhorst and Lubotsky are producing a book on the joint discoveries. An article will also be published in which they will reveal the discoveries. But it probably does not end there. ‘Whilst we were in Turkey,’ says Kloekhorst, ‘every now and then a new shard with an inscription would be found. I can easily see us having to return next year.’

Etymology: Some Interesting New Research in Japan

From The New York Times
Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: May 4, 2011

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 4, 2011, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People.

Linguistics: Maybe Jason and the Argonaut's Greek Isn't Extinct After All...

Absolutely fascinating - and what a discovery!

From the independent.co.uk
Jason and the argot: land where Greek's ancient language survives
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Monday, 3 January 2011

An isolated community near the Black Sea coast in a remote part of north-eastern Turkey has been found to speak a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.

As few as 5,000 people speak the dialect but linguists believe that it is the closest, living language to ancient Greek and could provide an unprecedented insight into the language of Socrates and Plato and how it evolved.

The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus, a Greek colony that Jason and the Argonauts are supposed to have visited on their epic journey from Thessaly to recover the Golden Fleece from the land of Colchis (present-day Georgia). Pontus was also supposed to be the kingdom of the mythical Amazons, a fierce tribe of women who cut off their right breasts in order to handle their bows better in battle.

Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka's vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language.

Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in romance philology at the University of Cambridge, said: "Romeyka preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an ancient Greek flavour to the dialect's structure, traits that have been completely lost from other modern Greek varieties.

"Use of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern Greek would say 'I wasn't able that I go' instead of 'I wasn't able to go'. But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions."

The villagers who speak Romeyka, which has no written form, show other signs of geographic and cultural isolation. They rarely marry outside their own community and they play a folk music on a special instrument, called a kemenje in Turkish and Romeyka or lyra as it is called in Greek, Dr Sitaridou said. "I only know of one man who married outside his own village," she said. "The music is distinctive and cannot be mistaken for anything else. It is clearly unique to the speakers of Romeyka."

One possibility is that Romeyka speakers today are the direct descendants of ancient Greeks who lived along the Black Sea coast millennia ago – perhaps going back to the 6th or 7th centuries BC when the area was first colonised. But it is also possible that they may be the descendants of indigenous people or an immigrant tribe who were encouraged or forced to speak the language of the ancient Greek colonisers.

Romeykas-speakers today are devout Muslims, so they were allowed to stay in Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when some two million Christians and Muslims were exchanged between Greece and Turkey. Repeated waves of emigration, the dominant influence of the Turkish-speaking majority, and the complete absence of Romeyka from the public arena, have now put it on the list of the world's most endangered languages.

"With as few as 5,000 speakers left in the area, before long, Romeyka could be more of a heritage language than a living vernacular. With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity to unlock how the Greek language has evolved," said Dr Sitaridou. "Imagine if we could speak to individuals whose grammar is closer to the language of the past. Not only could we map out a new grammar of a contemporary dialect but we could also understand some forms of the language of the past. This is the opportunity that Romeyka presents us with."

Studies of the grammar of Romeyka show that it shares a startling number of similarities with Koine Greek of Hellenistic and Roman times, which was spoken at the height of Greek influence across Asia Minor between the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD.

Modern Greek, meanwhile, has undergone considerable changes from its ancient counterpart, and is thought to have emerged from the later Medieval Greek spoken between the 7th and 13th Centuries AD – so-called Byzantine Greek.

Future research will try to assess how Pontic Greek from the Black Sea coast evolved over the centuries. "We know that Greek has been continuously spoken in Pontus since ancient times and can surmise that its geographic isolation from the rest of the Greek-speaking world is an important factor in why the language is as it is today," Dr Sitaridou said. "What we don't yet know is whether Romeyka emerged in exactly the same way as other Greek dialects but later developed its own unique characteristics which just happen to resemble archaic Greek.

Many of the world's languages are disappearing as once-isolated populations become part of the global economy, with children failing to learn the language of their grandparents and instead using the dominant language of the majority population, which in this part of the world is Turkish.

"In Pontus, we have near-perfect experimental conditions to assess what may be gained and what may be lost as a result of language contact," Dr Sitaridou said. [Oh my...]

Linguistic Link Between Old and New Worlds Now Being Recognized

From The Ottawa Citizen

Words for 'canoe' point to long-lost family ties
Canwest News Service July 8, 2010

An obscure language in Siberia has similarities to languages in North America, which might reshape history, writes Randy Boswell.

A new book by leading linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada's Dene Nation is rooted in an ancient Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections -- nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures -- between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia's Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.

The newly recognized link has prompted the Yukon-based Arctic Athabaskan Council to begin forging cultural and political ties with Russia's tiny population of Ket speakers. They live 8,000 kilometres west of Whitehorse and are separated from their linguistic cousins in North America by some 10,000 years of history.

University of Alberta linguist Jack Ives writes in the essay collection that "the question of just how such a distribution arose -- with a separation between Siberia and northwestern North America involving thousands of kilometres -- is simply fascinating."

University of Alaska linguist James Kari, co-editor of the book, titled The Dene-Yeniseian Connection: Bridging Asia and North America, said the discovery could rewrite the story of when, where and how ancient Asian migrants arrived in North America at the end of the last Ice Age. He said it should also trigger new avenues of research "across several disciplines," including archeology, anthropology, paleo-ecology, biology and genetics.

In April, representatives of some of the North American nations believed to share a root language with the Ket travelled to Moscow for a "historic meeting" with their new-found linguistic kin.

Vajda, a linguistics professor at Western Washington University, told Canwest News Service in 2008 how years of research with the Ket culminated with a dramatic insight involving words associated with the canoe.

He found that the few remaining Ket speakers in Russia and the Dene, Gwich'in and other Athapaskan speakers in North America used almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as the prow and cross-piece.

"Finally, here was the beginning of a system that struck me as beyond the realm of chance," Vajda wrote at the time. "At that moment, I think I realized how an archeologist must feel who peers inside a freshly opened Egyptian tomb and witnesses what no one has seen for thousands of years."

Currently, only the Eskimo-Aleut family of aboriginal languages spoken by the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia straddle the hemispheric divide between Asia and the Americas. Those connections aren't surprising, given the relatively recent arrival of the Inuit to North America.

But linguists had never definitively linked any ancient, Old World language to those spoken by the Indian nations of North and South America. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia to the New World -- across what was then a dried-up Bering Strait -- at least 13,000 years ago.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

See also February 12, April 9 and April 20, 2010 press releases by the Athabascan Council from earlier this year. 

Last Speaker of Ancient Bo Language Has Died

This is a very sad story (in more ways than one) from a few days ago - here are two reports (many more reports online).

Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News
February 4, 2010

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.
Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.  The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

'Infectious'

Professor Abbi - who runs the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (Voga) website - explained: "After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years.

"She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious."

She said that Boa Sr's death was a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost "a vital piece of the jigsaw".

"It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times," Professor Abbi said. "The Andamanese are believed to be among our earliest ancestors."

Boa Sr's case has also been highlighted by the Survival International (SI) campaign group. "The extinction of the Bo language means that a unique part of human society is now just a memory," SI Director Stephen Corry said.

'Imported illnesses'

She said that two languages in the Andamans had now died out over the last three months and that this was a major cause for concern.

Academics have divided Andamanese tribes into four major groups, the Great Andamanese, the Jarawa, the Onge and the Sentinelese. Professor Abbi says that all apart from the Sentinelese have come into contact with "mainlanders" from India and have suffered from "imported illnesses".

She says that the Great Andamanese are about 50 in number - mostly children - and live in Strait Island, near the capital Port Blair.

Boa Sr was part of this community, which is made up of 10 "sub-tribes" speaking at least four different languages.

The Jarawa have about 250 members and live in the thick forests of the Middle Andaman. The Onge community is also believed to number only a few hundred.

"No human contact has been established with the Sentinelese and so far they resist all outside intervention," Professor Abbi said.

It is the fate of the Great Andamanese which most worries academics, because they depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter - and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Another article, this one from The Independent:

With the death of Boa Sr, her people and their songs fall silent forever
Final survivor of ancient tribe spoke of the sadness of having no one left to talk to
By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent
Friday, 5 February 2010

When Boa Sr sang in her own language, the result was gently hypnotic. "The earth is shaking as the tree falls, with a great thud," she sang, on a recording captured by linguists.

But the grey-haired, 85-year-old woman will not be heard again. And neither will her native tongue – Bo – aside from the recordings that have already been made. Campaigners revealed yesterday that the recent death of Boa Sr on India's remote Andaman Islands marked the end of the Bo tribe and the loss of a language.

"With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory," said Stephen Corry, director of the group Survival International. "Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands."

Boa Sr was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, an indigenous group of the Andamans, a cluster of islands 700 miles east of the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal. The Great Andamanese once numbered more than 5,000 and were made up of 10 distinct groups each with their own language.

The Bo are believed to have lived on the islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them one of the oldest surviving human cultures. But today, after more than 150 years of contact with colonisers, the diseases they brought with them, and the disastrous impact of alcohol, the Great Andamanese number just 52.

Professor Anvita Abbi, a linguist at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, spent many years speaking with Boa Sr, usually in a version of Hindi spoken on Great Andaman. Her greatest sadness, said Professor Abbi, was that as the last of her kind she could not speak to anyone in her own language. "Boa was the last of the Bo tribe. That is what was so sad – that she had no one," she said.

According to Survival, when British colonial forces failed to pacify the tribes through violence in the 19th century, they sought to "civilise" them by capturing many and keeping them in an institution. But of some 150 children born in the so-called Andaman Home, none lived beyond the age of two.

Boa Sr, known for an infectious laugh, survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004. She told linguists: "We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us 'the Earth would part, don't run away or move'. The elders told us, that's how we know."

The Great Andamanese are not alone in struggling for their survival. Another of the islands' tribes, the Onge, number no more than 100 after eight of their number died in late 2008 after drinking from bottles that had washed ashore.

The Jarawa tribe are threatened by a recently completed road that has joined several of the islands and brought in settlers, poachers and alcohol. Perhaps the most secure are the Sentinelese, who live on the island of North Sentinel and resist all efforts at communication by the outside world. In the aftermath of the tsunami, one of the tribe was famously photographed aiming a bow and arrow at an emergency helicopter. The Indian government's policy is to make no further contact with them.

Professor Abbi said that Boa Sr often told her how she envied the fact that the Jarawa and the Sentinelese had managed to avoid contact with outsiders. She recalled: "She used to say they were better off in the jungle."

"At Sixes and Sevens"

[Moses cartoon from BAR] Mr. Don pointed out these intriguing letters in Biblical Archaeology issues for January/February, 2009 and May/June, 2009 -- I have yet to read either magazine! He found both of them in my stack of reading material piled on the kitchen counter: January/February 2009 (p. 68) Queries & Comments AT SIXES AND SEVENS I'm the mad linguist who wrote a caption to the hilarious cartoon showing Moses with the two tables numbered in roman numbers (see Strata, p. 22 of this issue for winning entries). It cracked me up. Here's Moses fresh from speaking with the Almighty in the form of the Burning Bush and jotting down the most important document for all humankind - and in stone, no less - but he's gone and put Roman numerals on his rocks, of all the silly things. of course the romans hadn't even been thought of yet, much less started writing numerals. Let me explain why I was so keen on those numbers. I had just been doing research on number words around the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. It seems rather astonishing that the words for "six" and "seven" are so similar, not only in Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Akkadian and Assyrian) but also in Indo-European languages (like Latin, Greek, Hittie and Luwian). This is especially strange because none of the other number words are anything alike. Even etruscan, which isn't related to anything else, seems to share those two words. Just think about it: Six and seven in Hebrew are shisha and shiva; Akkadian, shishshu and sebe; Assyrian, shishshu and siba; Latin, sex and septum; Greek, hex and hepta; Sanskrit, shash and sapta. Even in Etruscan seven is semph, and six is either sa or huth (I vote for sa). Very odd, isn't it? I think this is no coincidence. I think somebody borrowed from somebody. I believe it was because all those Sea Peoples, like the Phillistines, were wandering around at the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 B.C.). Diana Gainer Via e-mail Ed: Does anyone out there have a better explanation? May/June 2009 (p. 10-11) Queries & Comments "AT SIXES AND SEVENS" Egyptian Sixes and Sevens In the January/February issue Diana Gainer finds that six and seven are represented by similar words in many languages (Q&C, "At Sixes and Sevens"). I also noticed this someyears ago. My primary field of interest is Egyptology. In ancient Egyptian, six is ses and seven is sefekh. There are many other words that sound similar in many ancient languages, such as words for "Mother." It's mysterious, but that's how I like it. Bonnie Long Phoenix, Arizona Hungarian Sixes and Sevens Diana Gainer comments on the similarity of the names of the numberals six and seven in several languages, including English, Latin and Greek, among many others. I may add to this list my native Hungarian in which six is written hat and seven is written he't. This is probably a coincidence though, as Hungarian is not even an Indo-European language, but rather belongs to the Finno-Ugric group that includes Finnish and Estonian besides Hungarian. I don't speak either of the last two, but perhaps a reader who does could confirm (or deny) that in those also the six-seven similarity persists. Andrew Lenard Blomington, Indiana Spanish Sixes and Sevens Diana Gainer surmises that since there was such similarity in the numbers six and seven for such diverse peoples that there must have been an interaction at some point. I fully agree. One might add seis and siete, Spanish six and seven and the Italian and Portuguese equivalents to her list. This may be but one of quiete a number of similarites between civilizations that popped up all over the globe at roughly the same time several thousand years ago. Dale Carter Fellsmere, Florida

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dondelion and I discussed this earlier this morning. I'll let him speak for himself (if and when he gets around to posting here). In the meantime, I was curious about the origins of the phrase "at sixes and sevens," so I did a little quick research and found some interesting information: From The Phrase Finder: Meaning A state of total confusion and disorder, or of disagreement between parties. Origin The derivation of this phrase is rather difficult to trace, not least because it has changed in both form and meaning over the nine centuries or so that it has been in use. The phrase was originally to set on six and seven and is thought to have derived in the 14th century from the game of dice. The meaning then was to carelessly risk one's entire fortune. The earliest citation in print is Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 1374: "Lat nat this wrechched wo thyn herte gnawe, But manly set the world on sexe and seuene." The dice game from which the phrase "set on six and seven" is thought to have originated is hazard (an old dice game), which itself has an interesting derivation: ...hazard first came into the language to refer to the dice game (via the Old French hasard and the Spanish azar from the Arabic az-zahr “luck, chance”, based on an Arabic or Turkish word for dice), and only later took on the meaning of danger or risk, or as a verb, to venture something, because the dice game was so risky to bet on. The modern game called craps is a simplified form of hazard. (World Wide Words) None of this, of course, answers the intriguing question as to why "six and seven" show similarities in so many languages belonging to entirely different language families!

Linguistics: Viking Loan Words

From Science Daily: Viking Legacy On English: What Language Tells Us About Immigration And Integration (Apr. 22, 2009) — They’re a firm part of our language and even speak to us of our national culture — but some words aren’t quite as English as we think. Terms such as ‘law’, ‘ugly’, ‘want’ and ‘take’ are all loanwords from Old Norse, brought to these shores by the Vikings, whose attacks on England started in AD 793. In the centuries following it wasn’t just warfare and trade that the invaders gave England. Their settlement and subsequent assimilation into the country’s culture brought along the introduction of something much more permanent than the silk, spices and furs that weighed down their longboats — words. Dr. Sara Pons-Sanz in the School of English is examining these Scandinavian loanwords as part of a British Academy-funded research project — from terms that moved from Old Norse to Old English and disappeared without trace, to the words that still trip off our tongues on a daily basis. By examining these words in context, tracking when and where they appear in surviving texts from the Old English period, Dr. Pons-Sanz can research the socio-linguistic relationship between the invading and invaded cultures. The loanwords which appear in English — such as ‘husband’ — suggest that the invaders quickly integrated with their new culture. The English language soon adopted day-to-day terms, suggesting that the cultures lived side-by-side and were soon on intimate terms. This is in marked contrast to French loanwords. Though there are many more of these terms present in the standard English language — around 1,000 Scandinavian to more than 10,000 French — they tend to refer to high culture, law, government and hunting. French continued to be the language of the Royal Court for centuries after the invasion in 1066. In contrast, Old Norse had probably completely died out in England by the 12th century, indicating total cultural assimilation by the Scandinavian invaders. Another clear indicator of this is the type of loanwords seen in English. The majority of loanwords tend to nouns, words and adjectives, open-ended categories which are easily adapted into a language. But one of the most commonly-seen loanwords in English today is ‘they’ — a pronoun with its origins in Old Norse. Pronouns are a closed category, far more difficult to adapt into a new language, which again indicates a closeness between the two languages and cultures not present in previous or subsequent invading forces. Dr. Pons-Sanz has ‘cleaned up’ the list of loanwords thought to have come to English from Old Norse by painstakingly tracking the origins of each word. Her original texts include legal codes, homilies, charters, literary texts and inscriptions. By comparing the texts chronologically and dialectally, the introduction and integration of words can be tracked. For example, the word ‘fellow’ — which came from an Old Norse word originally meaning ‘business partner’— is first attested in East Anglia. Dr. Pons-Sanz said: “Language is constantly evolving; loanwords are being assimilated into English — and other languages — all the time. By examining the types of words that are adopted, we can gain insight into the relationships between different cultures.” Adapted from materials provided by University of Nottingham.

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What about that Old Norse loan word 'husband?' Here's some interesting information from Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets: "One bonded to the house (hus)" - a steward or majordomo chosen to tend a woman's property, under the old Saxon matriarchate when property rights were matrilineal. A husband was not considered an integral part of the maternal clan but remained a "stranger" in the house, as in early Greece where the men's god Zeus was "god of strangers."(1) Pre-Islamic Arabian husbands didn't even have names in the matrilineal clan until they begot children; then a man could call himself abu, "father of ..." So-and-so. This part of an Arab's name is still considered the most important part.(2) In southeast India, a husband was regarded as a more or less permanent guest int he wife's home, constrained to remain on his good behavior according to the rules governing guests. In archaic Japan, husbands were not residents in the wife's home at all, but only visitiors. The old word for "marriage' meant "to slip into the house by night."(3) Patrilocal marriage was unknown in Japan until 14000 A.D.(4) The position of a husband in the ancient world was often temporary, subject to summary divorce. An Arabian wife could dismiss her husband by turning her tent to face the west for three nights in succession.(5) After the introduction of Islamic patriarchy, the system was reversed in favor of men. A husband could turn his wife out of her home simply by saying "I divorce thee" three times. [What Isis calls "The old switcheroo."] Early Latin tribes followed the same rules as Arabians; a woman could divorce her husband by shutting hm out of her house for three consecutive nights.(6) Even in imperial times, a Roman wife could maintain her own property free of husbandly claims by passing three nights of eahc year away form his residence.(7) Ancient Egypt had several varieties of marriage existing side by side. Some, probably the oldest, were governed by premarital agreements that spelled out the wife's property rights and the husband's comparative powerlessness under the law. For example: I bow before thy rights as a wife. From this day on, I shall never oppose thy claims with a single word. I recognize thee before all others as my wife, though I do not have the right to say thought must be my wife. Only I am thy husband and mate. Thou alone hast the right of departure. From this day on that I have become thy husband, I cannot oppose thy wish, wherever thou desirest to go ... I have no power to interfere in any of thy transactions. I hereby cede to thee any rights deeded to me in any document that has been made out in my favor. Thou keepest me obligated to recognize all these cessions.(8) Egyptian priests advised husbands to remain in their wives' good graces, much as Christian priests later advised wives to make themselves subservient to husbands: Keep thy house, love thy wife, and do not dispute with her. She will withdraw herself before violence. Feed her, adorn her, massage her. Caress her and make her heart to rejoice as long as thou livest ... Attend to that which is her desire and to that which occupies her mind. For in such manner thou persuadest her to remain with thee. If thou opposest her, it will be thy ruin.(9) An Egyptian husband was counseled to make glad his wife's heart "during the time that thou hast," which might have meant a lifetime on earth, or else a shorter period implying a temporary marriage.(10) In the matrilocal household, husands often entered a period of trial servitude to win their brides, as did the biblical Jacob to win the hand of Rachel (Genesis 29). Hence Sophocle's remark that "Egyptian men sit indoors all day long, weaving; the women go out and attend to business."(11)[See also my comments appended to Note 8]. Similarly among Anglo-Saxon tribes, "husbandry" meant farm work - as it still does - because a husband wa usually bonded to work on his wife's land. Such an agricultural matriarchate is still found in some areas. Among the Zuni, husbands worked in the fields, but the land and its harvest belonged to their wives.(12) The old custom of providing work in compensation for marriage gave rise to the word bridegroom, literally "the bride's servant." The Koran tells mean, "your wives are your tillage," because by ancient Arabian law a wifeless man was also landless.(13) See Matrilineal Inheritance. Tantric sages considered "husbandship" (bhavanan) essential for still another reason: it was indispensible to a man's spiritual development. The same notion was found among Aryan Celts. The ancient Irish said a true bard could have power over poetry and magic only if he had "purity of husbandship," that is, fidelity to his wife.(14) Notes: (1) J.E. Harrison, 519. (2) Briffault 2, 90-91. (3) Hartley, 147, 159. (4) Briffault 1, 369. (5) de Riencourt, 187. (6) Briffault 2, 348. (7) Hartley, 232. (8) Diner, 212. [Cf. this famous passage from the admittedly patriarchal Hebrew Old Testament, King James Version which, in light of the above information, appears to be a prayer to Goddess for a merciful wife: Proverbs 31:10: Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. (11) The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. (12) She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. (13) She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with herhands. (14) She is like the merchants' ships, she bringeth her food from afar. (15) She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. (16) She considereth a field, and buyeth it [because it's her money, and she does what she wants with it]; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. (17) She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengthenth her arms [I find it surprising that this archaic description of a strong, independent female survived to be incorporated into the Book, in terms which were, after the patriarchal overthrow of the Goddess, generally reserved for males.] (18) She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out at night. (19) She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. (20) She stretcheth out her hand to the poor, yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. (21) She is not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet [that is, the best and finest and warmest wool clothing, dyed scarlet, the most expensive of dyes because of the difficulty in manufacturing the color. That is why it was reserved for royalty. In later times it was called "purple" and was the color of monarchs.] (22) She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. (23) Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. [In other words, he doesn't do anything all day but sit around with the other husband dudes at the gates of the city, making idle commentary on the merchants passing in and out, probably drinking too much, gambling with sheeps' knuckles and perhaps chasing after prostitutes.] (24) She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. (25) Strength and honour are her clothing, and she shall rejoice in time to come. (26) She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. (27) She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. (28)Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. [He's just hoping he doesn't get divorced for sitting around at the gates of the city with the other dudes all day, drinking, gambling and chasing after unvirtuous women.] (9) Diner, 218; Budge, D.N., 26. (10) Hartley, 196. Cf. the Scottish custom of "hand-fast" and the contemporary custom in some Islamic societies of trial marriage or "Mu' tah" or "Mutah," a subject on which I previously posted. Hmmm - it just occurred to me - is "Mu' tah" somehow related to the ancient rites of the Mother Goddess Mu or Ma, Mah, Maat, etc.? (11) Bachofen, 180. (12) Farh, M.R.C., 81-83. (13) Fielding, 83. (14) Joyce, I., 463.

Lost Languages

Book review from The Times Online. The image is from the article, and I find it totally fascinating - notice the representations of "white," "brown," and "black" people, and the checkered game board with a little game piece on it - looks like a little dude waving his arms in the air - being carried by the white guy (he's got the gold links dangling from his elbow). From The Sunday Times March 8, 2009 Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie The writings left on tombs and tablets by the great civilisations of the ancient past have mostly now been read. This intriguing book on the strange art of “decipherment” focuses on those scripts that remain mysterious. It is a potent mix of academic esoterica, codecracking and controversy — the same giddy cocktail that made The Da Vinci Code such a success, but with much greater scholarship. (And splendid illustrations: the pages crawl with jaguar heads, ox’s feet and curlicues.) [Okay, quit dissing The Da Vinci Code - it got millions of people around the world reading, and wondering - quite a feat!] Andrew Robinson begins with the stories of the three great decipherments: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B and the weird glyphs of the Maya. Hieroglyphs famously resisted decipherment for centuries, and were cracked only after a squad of Napoleon’s troops in 1799 came across the bilingual Greek/Egyptian Rosetta stone, set into an old wall in the Egyptian desert. Linear B was discovered in the 1900s, when clay tablets etched with scratchy letters started turning up on Minoan digs. It took 50 years, though, for the 3,500-year-old alphabet to fall to the logical assault of the architect Michael Ventris, who devised a brilliant system of frequency analysis to work out which letters occurred where, and what parts of speech they might represent. Even then, the final conquest only came when Ventris began guessing at ancient Cretan place names. This “leap in the dark” paid off when he realised the underlying language was none other than Greek. Linear B, unfortunately, turned out to do little more than list names and goods. This is the great peril of decipherment: you might spend years working out how to read a shopping list. The impact of the Mayan glyphs, Robinson shows, was very different. When they were cracked in the 1970s, they allowed a new world civilisation to speak for itself, rather than through the mouths of priests and conquistadors. The Mayan glyphs look impossibly outlandish: cartoon-like animal figures squashed into geometric shapes and piled up like totems. Their decipherment owes much to the 16th-century Franciscan friar Diego de Landa who, despite torturing Maya and immolating their “diabolical codices”, bothered to quiz a nobleman about his writing system and jotted down some phonetic equivalents in Spanish. The resulting key wasn’t entirely reliable — one transcription was revealed to be the Mayan phrase for “I don’t want to say” — but it would help unlock the script four centuries later. The decipherment of the Mayans’ glyphs meant that their civilisation could be studied as seriously as that of ancient Egypt or Greece. Such a potential reward explains the allure of other, still undeciphered scripts; Robinson devotes a chapter each to eight of the most significant. The Nubian or “Black Pharaohs” of Kush, for instance, ruled Egypt during the 7th century BC, but the language of their texts (dubbed Meroitic, after the place of discovery) is unknown. If a modern linguistic descendant could be traced, it might not only fill a gap in the history of Egypt but could help restore to black African history the dignity of serious antiquity. The intractability of Etruscan writings, similarly, is a matter of the unknown language, not the alphabet (the Etruscans used a variant of Greek characters). When bilingual Etruscan-Phoenician gold plaques were discovered in 1964, there was great excitement — among those who could read Phoenician, at any rate. But with awful bathos, Robinson confesses that only one identifiable Etruscan word emerged from the find: ci, meaning “three”. Yet with ingenuity, decipherers have put even this to use. With the help of a precious set of Etruscan ivory dice, whose numbers were written out in words rather than numerals, and with the knowledge that opposite faces on ancient dice add up to seven, this gave scholars the Etruscan words for one through to six. But reading the longest Etruscan texts — including one discovered, bizarrely, printed on the linen bandages of a mummy bought in Egypt by a 19th-century Croatian tourist — is still a long way off. To solve Etruscan or Meroitic (or Linear A or proto-Elamite) will probably require a new Rosetta stone. Lucky finds do happen, though. The hugely significant La Mojarra stela — one of only two important examples of the Isthmian script, which died out in Central America about AD500 — was stumbled upon by a group of barefoot Mexican fishermen laying log piles for a jetty. Before the new enthusiast for decipherment thinks of “having a go” him- or herself, Robinson’s analysis of expert attempts should serve as a warning. Decipherment requires not only a rare blend of flair and diligence but a deep understanding of frequency-analysis modelling and a firm grasp of, say, Middle Nilotic of central Africa or perhaps Mixe-Zoquean from Mexico. Not to mention an appreciation of the niceties of reverse boustrophedon. Robinson’s technical terms, his allographs and ligatures, only occasionally risk blending into a murky hieroglyphic soup, but this is surely the most recondite of terms. It is a technique used in the Rongorongo script of Easter Island — a script as baffling as the island’s better-known giant sculptures. For the record, boustrophedon means writing left-right and right-left on alternate lines, as if ploughing a field; reverse boustrophedon also requires the text to be flipped through 180 degrees after each line. Robinson closes his book with the notorious Phaistos disc, a rather lovely clay artefact that today lies in Crete’s Heraklion museum in lonely splendour, the only example of a language that is otherwise totally unknown. It makes an excellent coda, as an object that has drawn the most outrageous speculations as to its use and meaning yet remains maddeningly mute. Its very silence helps explain decipherment’s appeal. It is not just about puzzle-solving or history-making, but about the beauty of writing. Telling the story of Linear B, Robinson describes how the “mute signs” were suddenly “compelled to speak after more than three millenniums of silence”. He makes it sound as if Ventris’s solution were a spell — as if writing were some kind of magic. Which, this book elegantly reminds us, it is. Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered ScriptsThames & Hudson £16.95 pp352 Available at the BooksFirst price of £15.26 (including p&p) on 0845 271 2135 ******************************************************************** [Not mentioned: The Indus script. Of course, there is dispute as to whether it is "writing" in the usual sense of the word! And there is that elusive Southwest Script I recently posted about - until I read that article I did not know it existed. What a fascinating subject. Perhaps when I retire I shall go back to school and pursue the study of linguistics.]

Saving Dying Languages

Lo and Behold! That old synchronicity at work again... An NPR report on "The Linguists" (see posts from earlier today and yesterday) from their February 22, 2009 show: Saving Dying Languages In 'The Linguists' February 21, 2009 · There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and if statistics hold, two weeks from now, there will be one less. That's the rate at which languages disappear. And each time a language disappears, a part of history — a subtle way of thinking — vanishes too. A new documentary called The Linguists, airing Thursday on PBS, follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they race to document endangered languages in some of the most remote corners of the world. From the plains of Siberia to the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal lands of India, Harrison and Anderson have hopscotched the globe, but they sat down for a moment with NPR's Scott Simon to discuss their race to capture the world's endangered languages. Harrison, a linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, specializes in sounds and words; Anderson, who directs Oregon's Living Tongues Institute, is the verb expert. Together, they speak 25 languages. Languages are rich in the history and taxonomy of a place, says Anderson, reflecting subtleties that can be lost in translation. When the last keepers of a language die off, so does the fluent understanding of that particular environment. "The people who live there are the experts on the environment they live in, whether it's Siberia or the Bolivian Andes," he says. "They know more about the ecosystem, the plants and animals, than scientists typically do. And it's not just a list of things they know; it's a hierarchy of knowledge, how things fit together." Harrison and Anderson say they have encountered some strange languages in their travels, including an East Indian dialect called Birhor — which, in English, sounds a lot like "beer whore." "But all languages are strange from a certain point of view," says Harrison. "English is pretty strange." The Linguists follows Harrison and Anderson on their "adventure science" expeditions — and finds them in some unexpected situations. "We do encounter inconveniences," says Harrison, laughing. "Getting to a very remote place, finding people and convincing them to talk to you on a camera. There are roadblocks, both literal and figurative." And surprises, like the wedding they were called to dance at in a remote village in India. The film also offers context on the question of why languages die out. "The big umbrella term is globalization, but you need to break that down. There are economic forces, ideology, social attitudes," says Harrison. "Many people have been presented with a false choice, that they have to give up their native language in order to succeed, and [speak] a global language like English or Spanish exclusively. But more people are realizing that you can be bilingual, that you have access to more knowledge by being bilingual. There are these pressures as we get increasingly urbanized, but people are successfully pushing back."

Friday Night Miscellany

Hola darlings! A landmark of sorts - we have passed 2,200 posts at our blog! When I awoke this morning it was to a world covered in ice. After taking a look out the front door and venturing a step off the front stoop, I did not even fetch my morning newspaper, and so my allowed cup of coffee per day (except when the investment club meets at Meyer's Restaurant) was drunk without the benefit of my usual reading material. I read an old decorating magazine instead :) Not venturing down the drive to fetch the paper at the road, needless to say I did not venture the 3/4 mile walk to the bus stop to go to the office today. Later, the sun came out and although the temperature stayed below freezing all day, the sun was strong enough to melt the ice off the driveway - not sure when that happened. When I checked around 4:30 p.m. the driveway was mostly ice-free, so I was able to fetch both newspaper and mail. In the meantime, I patched the nail holes and areas in the upstairs bath where the wallpaper border pulled away the paint, exposing coverless drywall. I sanded later. What a chore, yech! Tomorrow I shall prime, and do taping and drop cloths. I expect to get at least a couple of walls painted. But first, I must give everything one last go-over with broom and dust cloth to get up what sanding residue I missed today, etc. etc. Some items I found of interest: I read this article in the newspaper yesterday (today?) I can't say I'm surprised, but why were the scientists surprised by the findings? - what gives with those dudes anyway? Evidently they have very little active imagination! The Arctic and Antarctic regions are warming faster than previously thought, raising world sea levels and making drastic global climate change more likely than ever, international scientists said on Wednesday. More baloney from the evolutionists - world's oldest human footprint. Well, if it's human and it's 1.7 million years old, why are you still drawing mankind that old as apes? Wow! I'm watching this program right now on PBS - "The Linguists" - and it's fascinating. Wish I was 20 years younger with that energy, I'd go back to school in a flash and take up this as a calling. "What Happens When a Language Dies?" "Why You Might Not Realize You Are Dead" - hmmmm...okay...

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.