topics: |  language | linguistics | history | diachronic

see detailed  excerpts from McWhorter's "The Story
of Human Language" (audio-book) for much that overlaps with this.

The last chapter of the book, which recounts Joseph Greenberg's attempst to
recreate the very first language ever, is an important area that is not
adequately covered in modern texts. See also Stephen Oppenheimer:
The real eve: Modern man's journey out of Africa, 2003.

blurb:
There are approximately 6000 languages on earth today, the descendants of the
tongue first spoken by homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. How did they all
develop? What happened to the first language?  In this irreverent romp
through territory too often claimed by stodgy grammarians, McWhorter ranges
across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the
fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved
from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological
evolution. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, he
reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues
that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and
hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an
ever-changing human environment.  Full of humor and imaginative insight, The
Power of Babel draws its examples from languages around the world, including
pidgins, creoles, patois and nonstandard dialects. McWhorter also discusses
current theories on what the first language might have been like, why
dialects should not be considered "bad speech" and why most of today's
languages will be extinct in 100 years.  The first book written for the
layperson about the natural history of language, Power of Babel is a dazzling
tour de force that will leave readers anything but speechless.