Mother of Language Discovered?

Fraggle Rocker

04-15-11, 09:51 AM

This is the Holy Grail of Linguistics. Linguists have been searching for evidence that all languages are descended from a single ancestor, perhaps since the study of linguistics congealed into a science in the 19th century. This research appears to add to that evidence.

Since I’m not a “real” professional linguist I don’t have access to the original papers from which these articles were abstracted. These articles were written by laymen, so they are full of annoying imprecision and even plain old garble.

After reading all of them, my opinion is what I stated in my first paragraph: This research appears to add to the evidence supporting the hypothesis that all languages are descended from a single ancestor. The way it is presented here, it is not convincing. That may be the fault of the journalists who wrote the articles, but on the other hand at least one “fact” that was clearly provided by a professional is dead wrong: the language family with the oldest known pedigree is Dene-Yeniseian at 15,000 years, not Indo-European. Here are my comments.
The Mother of all Mother Tongues is known as Khoisan, a family of the Kalahari Bushmen click language.[BTW, this sentence is nearly incoherent. The apparent failure to enforce line-editing does not speak well for this website and I would be skeptical of any “scholarship” found there.]

Cavalli-Sforza’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalli-Sforza) DNA analysis has already shown that the San or “Bushmen” are the ancestors of all non-African people. Since, as is hypothesized further down, the technology of language may have been the key resource that allowed our ancestors to make the first successful migration out of Africa, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether all of our non-African languages are descended from an early version of theirs. In addition, since it was indeed the San who made that migration, it’s also not unreasonable to wonder whether they were the first people to invent the technology, which would then have spread throughout Africa as well. All technologies consist primarily of ideas rather than artifacts, allowing them to spread very rapidly, but language is 100% ideas so it may have spread to all of Africa in a few generations, as each clan encountered other clans whose odd habit of producing sounds appeared to give them a tremendous survival advantage.
Some of the click-using languages of Africa had more than 100 phonemes, while Hawaii, New Zealand Maori and other Polynesian languages had only 13.[Another sentence that somebody banged out in the middle of the night and got it "published" without submitting it to an editor. Is this simply the state of "scholarship" in the internet era? All of humanity's written records are reduced to the quality of a blog? As an editor I can't help discounting the authority of crap like this.]

Some of these well-known facts have already been researched and explained satisfactorily. At various junctures in their history, each Polynesian tribe went through a period in which they spent a considerable portion of their time on long sea voyages on Stone Age-technology rafts. The phonetics of their languages were streamlined so they could understand each other when shouting from one boat to another. The Hawaiians had the longest journey and Hawaiian has the most parsimonious set of phonemes of all languages: AEHIKLMNOPUW, and the glottal stop usually transcribed as an apostrophe. Only voiceless stops (and not even a complete set, there’s no T), cardinal vowels, one semivowel and one liquid. No voiced consonants, no fricatives, no similar sounds that could be confused with each other. This is a language that could be shouted between boats bobbing in a storm without being misunderstood. For example: The name of the island of Tahiti is Kahiki in Hawaiian; Samoan salofa becomes aloha, and Fijian tabu becomes kapu.

I don’t know much about the other languages that have lost their phonetic diversity, but I’m not persuaded that the only explanation is that they’re all descendants of Proto-San that have been simplified over sixty millennia.
Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.As I mentioned above, this is false. Since linguists first began studying the Native American languages, they have been looking for a relationship between one or more of them and one or more of the Old World languages. In this century, that effort was rewarded when the language of the Yenisei people of Siberia was found to be related to the Na-Dene family that covers much of North America and includes major languages such as Navajo, Apache and Tlingit. The new, larger family has been named Dene-Yeniseian. Since the ancestors of the Native Americans arrived ca. 15KYA (excepting the Eskimo-Aleut people, who came much later), this proves that at least one proto-language is at least that old. This is not to say that Indo-European may not be related to the Uralic, Mongolic or Afro-Asiatic families and be just as old, but so far there is no evidence to support that hypothesis so it remains a conjecture.

This is yet another flaw that makes me suspicious of this entire body of scholarship. Is there not one account of this in a more respectable publication that has an editorial staff? How much credence does a glorified blog merit???
The world's 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests. . . .Only humans have the biological capacity to communicate with a rich language based on symbols and rules, enabling us to pass on cultural ideas to future generations.I think the people who have taught American Sign Language to other species of apes, specifically chimpanzees, arguably our closest relatives, and gorillas, might argue that point. One of the gorillas taught her own child to sign. Humans are the only ape species with a region in our brain dedicated to processing vocal communication, but there’s no good reason that would stop another species from communicating in another manner. In addition, we have not yet deciphered dolphin communication, so it’s presumptuous to assume that they’re not “talking.” They have individual names for themselves and each pod has a phrase that may be something like a fraternity song or a battle cry.
It has been known for a while that the less widely spoken a language is, the fewer the phonemes it has. So, as groups of people ventured ever farther from their African homeland, their phonemic repertoires should have dwindled, just as their genetic ones did. . . . That fits nicely with the idea that being able to speak and be spoken to is a specific adaptation—a virtual organ, if you like—that is humanity’s killer app in the struggle for biological dominance. Once it arose, Homo sapiens really could go forth and multiply and fill the Earth.As a journeyman linguist of course I favor the hypothesis that language was the technology that allowed a few intrepid members of the San tribe to make the first successful migration out of Africa. Language made a quantum improvement in our ability to communicate, to plan, to organize, and to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next. All of these abilities would surely be critical in adapting to a new home with unfamiliar weather, dangers, and sources of food and water.

Cavalli-Sforza also picks the invention of language as a watershed in human development. He says that the migration out of Africa represented a new way of thinking: humans were able to imagine themselves living in a different place, in a different manner.

But we had already used our imagination to triumph over nature many times. Our earliest ancestors were grazers, like gorillas, subsisting on a primarily vegetarian diet. Like all grazers they occasionally swallowed a worm or other invertebrate that came as a garnish on one the leaves. Like other primates they imagined themselves not waiting to find a worm, but actively looking for them. The invertebrate garnish was expanded to include small, hapless vertebrates like frogs and lizards. But they watched the predators eat, and imagined themselves carefully sidling over to the remains of one of their kills and using their more efficient herbivorous teeth to scavenge the meat off the bones that carnivorous teeth leave behind.

Then someone found a flint stone that had been shattered in an avalanche, and discovered that some of the pieces were very sharp. He imagined himself using that tool to scrape a whole lot more of the meat off of those bones than he could do with his teeth. Eventually a descendant imagined himself attaching that blade to a long stick and using it to kill a large animal, just as the predators do with their sharp claws and teeth.

The transition of the early pre-humans from grazers to scavengers, and then from scavengers to predators, was a key sequence in our evolution. Meat provides much more protein than plant tissue, and since the maintenance of brain tissue requires an enormous portion of protein in the daily diet, this new carnivorous diet allowed pre-humans with a mutation for a larger brain to survive and evolve into new species.

It can be argued that imagination was one of the key attributes that makes our species possible! Imagining ourselves living on a different continent is merely one step in this process, not necessarily a singular step. After all, when the first wave of those San people migrated out of Africa in 60KYA (there were two waves) the planet was in the depths of an ice age, the decrease in rainfall caused a drought in Africa, and finding a place with more food became not just an interesting adventure, but a matter of survival.
The maths in question is called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. As its name suggests, this spins the software equivalent of a roulette wheel to generate a random tree, then examines how snugly the branches of that tree fit the modern foliage.
This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.This quote and the preceeding one need to be taken with a healthy skepticism. Statistical modeling is a useful technique, but I think its results need to be correlated with other evidence before being taken as fact.25 years ago a team of scientists from several disciplines used blood types, dental charts and linguistics to study the relationships among the various Native American tribes. They got the Eskimo-Aleut right, which is kind of a no-brainer because they only go back about 4,000 years, but they divided the rest of the New World peoples into two groups, one concentrated primarily in northwestern Mexico, the western USA and Canada, which they said arrived around 6000BCE (forgive me if my memory is a little imprecise on these dates, it’s not important enough to rummage through my old paper files), and the main body of migrants who arrived around 12000BCE. It turns out they were wrong. They didn’t have today’s cheap, fast DNA analysis, which shows that all the sub-arctic New World peoples are the descendants of a single wave of migration, which established colonies all the way down to the tip of South America in just one millennium. 15 years ago another team of scientists used massively-parallel computing power to analyze words from a large number of languages. They came up with a list of fifty words that were common to all languages, and had merely been transformed by a set of phonetic shifts that the software neatly defined. This was the first “proof” that all languages are descended from a single ancestor and the linguists' community began to take it seriously. However, the power of technology doubles every 18 months as the price halves, and within a few years cheaper and faster processing discovered that all of those similarities--in the context of tens of thousands of dissimilar words--were well within the bounds of random chance!So it’s wise to be cautious before accepting the validity of an assertion that is supported primarily by statistics.

In aggregate, this post explains my non-professional opinion on this assertion. It may be right, but there are some important weaknesses in it so it needs more study and more evidence.