Posted on 11/26/2003 5:35:02 PM PST by a_Turk
PARIS (AFP) - The vast group of languages that dominates Europe and much of Central and South Asia originated around 8,000 years ago among farmers in what is now Anatolia, Turkey.
So say a pair of New Zealand academics who have remarkably retraced the family tree of so-called Indo-European languages -- a linguistic classification that covers scores of tongues ranging from Faroese to Hindi by way of English, French, German, Gujarati, Nepalese and Russian.
Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, psychologists at the University of Auckland, built their language tree on the same principles as the theory of genetic evolution.
According to this idea, words, like genes, survive according to their fitness.
Imported words take root in a language in response to evolutionary pressures or if they answer a need, and words can also fall out of use, rather like "silent" DNA that appears to be a relic in the genome and serves no known purpose.
The languages that are spoken and written today are the result of historical layering, of addition and deletion, that can be carefully scraped away to trace their previous sources, Gray and Atkinson suggest in the British weekly scientific journal Nature.
The similarity is phylogeny -- the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of organisms.
In theory, an evolutionary biologist one can work all the way back to LUCA: the "last universal common ancestor," presumed to be a bacterium, which evolved into all life as we know it today.
Using a parallel method, Gray and Atkinson turned back the clock on 87 languages, using sophisticated software to trace the path taken by 2,449 "cognates" -- fundamental words in each language that are presumed to derive from a common ancestor.
Their study produces an estimated age-range for the very first Indo-European language of between 7,800 and 9,800 years ago, among rural communities who lived in modern-day Anatolia and for whom there is already an impressive array of archaeological evidence.
Successful pioneers in agriculture, these people migrated westwards and eastwards and the languages evolved accordingly, becoming the tongues that today are so diverse that they would seem to share no common link.
"The pattern and timing of expansion... is consistent with the Anatolian farming theory," Gray and Atkinson suggest.
"Radiocarbon analysis of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe suggests that agriculture arrived in Greece at some time during the ninth millennium BP (before the present day) and had received as far as Scotland by 5,500 BP."
About 6,000 years ago, the western branch of linguistic migration began to fork into smaller branches, according to their calculations.
The branches progressively became the Celtic languages (2,900 years ago), Romance languages (1,700 years ago) and, 1,750 years ago, the Germanic languages of northern Europe, including rudimentary English.
As for the eastern branch, the biggest fork occurred about 4,600 years ago.
It split into two groups, one of which became the languages of Central Asia today while the other eventually evolved into the major languages of the latter-day sub-continent.
The rival to the Anatolian theory is the notion that roving tribes of Kurgan horsemen expanded into Europe and the Middle East from the steppes of Asia around 6,000 years ago, sowing the linguistic seed for what would become all Indo-European languages today.
I bought vol I, put in an advance order when II came out. It's very sad he died then.
Another interesting book is Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages
Bengtson and ruhlen have complied a list of 27 etymologies that are found world-wide. One of them is "dirty":
21. *PUTI—'vulva' —— English slang poontang < French putaine 'whore' < Vulgar Latin putta 'girl' < Proto-Indo-European *puto 'cunnus' > Sanskrit putau 'buttocks', Nepali puti 'vulva' Old Icelandic fuð 'cunnus', Middle High German vut 'vulva';
Malinke butu 'vulva';
Songhai buti 'vulva';
Proto-Afro-Asiatic *pwt 'hole, anus, vulva', Hebrew pot 'vulva' ("secret parts" in the King James Version, Isaiah 3:17), Somali futo 'anus', Oromo fudji 'vulva';
Tamil puNTai 'vulva', poccu 'vulva, anus';
Malayalam pûru 'buttocks, vulva';
Kannada pucci 'vulva'; Telugu pûDa 'anus'; Tulu pûTi 'vulva';
Middle Mongolian hütü-gün 'vulva';
Old Japanese photo 'vulva' (mod. hoto);
Proto-Eskimo-Aleut *putu 'hole';
Proto-Caucasian *put‘i '(female) genitals'; Svan put‘u 'hole';
Basque poto-rro 'pubis, vulva';
Australian Aboriginal Luridya puda 'vulva';
Maori puta, Tagalog puki 'vulva';
Delaware saputti 'anus'; Mohegan sebud 'vagina'; Chinook puch 'penis'; Quechua upiti 'anus', Aymara phuthu 'hole'
I believe this is the same Glenn Morton as Morton's demon.
His conclusion:
So, I would say, that there very well may be linguistic evidence of a common root for these words throughout the world's language. This is consistent with the Biblical assertion that humanity once spoke a common language. That being said, the thing wrong with young-earth views of this is that they place Babel far too late in history.
I wonder if the Exodus story is really the story of the emergence of the human race from Africa. Think about it.
Our ancestors left Africa during an ice age. The sea level, including the Red Sea, was much lower. Maybe it could be waded across, or you could go from sandbar to sandbar across.
Now the ancestors of everyone except the Semites moved away, but they stayed put, on both sides of the Red Sea. When the ice age ended, they were still telling the story of crossing it, but now it was impossible.
So they, ahem, modified, the story by throwing in Pharoah, and the plagues, and the miraculous parting, etc.
There's some evidence for it. Ruhlen's book The Origin of Language makes the case decently, but also admits that the evidence is pretty much all in--the world's modern and historic languages have been poked into the computer, the computer has crunched--and the picture is still ambiguous. Thus, we are unlikely to ever know for sure. Some information simply does not exist anymore.
Exodus as an echo of something tens of thousands of years before? Pass the bong! I like the idea that the pillar of fire and the darkness are from the explosion of Thera, which also figures to have caused the Atlantis legend.
During the Ice Age, the world's oceans were reduced in depth by 300-500 feet. The Persian Gulf was completely dry, the Red Sea was blocked off and I believe it dried up or almost dried up. I believe the 1628BC explosion of Santorini breached the 'dam' at the Red Sea and washed away the Egyptians pursuing the Jews on their Exodus.
The only reason it's tough walking from Egypt to Israel now is there's a canal, and a serious political border.
You say "tomato," I say "tomahto." You say "Santorini," I say "Thera."
For sure, the data he quotes is from Ruhlen's book.
Greenberg was, IMO, one of the greatest scientists of the last century.
but also admits that the evidence is pretty much all in--the world's modern and historic languages have been poked into the computer, the computer has crunched--and the picture is still ambiguous.
Ruhlen also says that the 27 etymologies he presents are the tip of the iceberg. I am personally optimistic that enough will be done to demonstrate monogenesis, but I don't expect to reconstruct the pronouns and declensions and so forth of "Proto-World". Maybe the phonology.
Actually, it's kinda like tracing multicellular life back to unicellulars - because lateral gene transfer is common among single-cells, there's really no tree when you go back that far. It's quite possible that there never was a single ur-speak, just a lot languages and dialects and multilingualism. But like life, there would be a single tree after that.
Part of the reason I'm optimistic is the bottleneck in human population something like 70K years ago. If they've already found cognates between Khoisan and Australian, and the Aboriginals have been there at least 40K years, how long ago was a language that contained the ancestors of the cognates spoken? Seems like we're more than 1/2 way there.
I guess I could have clicked on the link and looked.
I was pretty impressed with Ruhlen's book, but one of the criticisms of his method troubled me. It is charged that his samples across language families stretch the semantics, using here a word for "mouth" and there a word for "talk" and elsewhere a word for "tongue," etc. The lack of rigor in his method allows him to paint a misleadingly convincing picture.
However, I do suspect that language was invented only once. It's as least as easy as thinking that it happened independently in some N locations.
I was pretty impressed with Ruhlen's book, but one of the criticisms of his method troubled me. It is charged that his samples across language families stretch the semantics, using here a word for "mouth" and there a word for "talk" and elsewhere a word for "tongue," etc. The lack of rigor in his method allows him to paint a misleadingly convincing picture.
The same sort of semantic spread is seen within Indo-European, for example:
In post 103, there are clear IE cognate words that mean "vulgar term for female private parts (or the moisture therein)" in English, and "whore" in French or Spanish.
Or consider
via (Latin) = "road",
je vais, tu vas,.. (French) + "I go", You go"...
and English "wagon"
These are all cognates
Another example
agricola (Latin) = "farmer"
acre (English) (unit of measuring farmland)
And how about decem (Latin)= "ten"
Index (Latin) = "forefinger"
digit (Latin) = "finger" all of these have similar sounds (G and c are always hard in Latin), and are cognate to English "toe"
And one final one, which Ruhlen et al posit is universal: Gynos (Greek) = "woman" (as in gynecology)
cognate to English "queen" and probably cognate to English "c*nt"
A "p" sound, a "u" sound, and a "t" sound ("ch" is attested as a changed "t" sound; think of how "t" changes to "sh" in going from president to presidential), in that order, referring to female genitalia.
Yeah, it seems a stretch, to go from female genitalia to male. I don't know of any well-attested examples of that actually happening, but I wouldn't be *too* surprised. In 103, everything except this one seems reasonable to me.
Is it rigorous? No. It's a best guess.
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