McWhorter, John H; Teaching Company (publ);
The Story of Human Language [Audio book]
Teaching Co, 2004
ISBN 1565859472, 9781565859470
topics: | language | history | diachronic | audio-book
We listened to these CDs over long drives in the USA - along with my sons Zagreb and Zubin. Zagreb who was then in grade ten, had his own notions about language, and didn't like some of the ideas - in particular, we had long discussions (and a few debates), e.g. about whether a language like "English" exists at all, or is it just different groups speaking overlapping or similar dialects? Or is it ultimately individual, lects? Also, relations between sound and meaning, and how languages change both in sound and in meaning. McWhorter has a good sense of humour, and he keeps you entertained. Strongly recommended.
(roughly the first chapter of "Tower of Babel":
The first language morphs into Six thousand)
6K lgs in the world.
language is more than words - may know hundreds of words and still not be able to
say "You might as well finish it" or "It happened to be on a Tuesday"
(happen is rare as a word, mostly grammaticalized).
- bee: direction of motion ==> direction
waggles its behind, frequency ==> how far
liveliness of waggle ==> how rich
- ape: Samuel Pepys on the baboon: so like a man in most things ... I am of
the mind that it might be taught to speak or make signs.
* spoken lg: 1909: chimp learned to say mama
1916, organutan learned to say papa and cup
1940s: chimp learned to say papa, mama, cup, and sometimes up
- apes and SL:
Washoe : abt 1yr old in 1966, took 3 months to make first
signs, and by age 4, had 132 signs.
could extend from open (as in door) to opening a jar and turning
on a tap.
One of the earliest and most controversial examples involved the
Gardners' chimpanzee Washoe. Washoe, who knew signs for
"water" and "bird," once signed "water bird"
when in the presence of a swan (in NYC central park). Terrace et
al. (1979) suggested
that there was "no basis for concluding that Washoe was
characterizing the swan as a `bird that inhabits water.'"
Washoe may simply have been "identifying correctly a body of
water and a bird, in that order" (p. 895).
OTHER CREATIVE NAMING: The bonobo Kanzi has requested particular
films by combining symbols on a com- puter in a creative way. For
instance, to ask for Quest for Fire, a film about early primates
discovering fire, Kanzi began to use symbols for "campfire"
and "TV" (Eckholm, 1985). The gorilla Koko, who learned
American Sign Language, has a long list of creative names to her
credit: "elephant baby" to describe a Pinocchio doll,
"finger bracelet" to describe a ring, "bottle match"
to describe a cigarette lighter, and so on (Patterson & Linden,
1981, p. 146). If Terrace's analysis of the "water bird"
example is applied to the examples just mentioned, it does not
hold.
- http://www.dianahacker.com/rules/pdf/RULE5-Shaw.pdf
Loulis: the baby chimpanzee Loulis, placed in the care of the signing
chimpanzee Washoe, mastered nearly fifty signs in American Sign
Language without help from humans. "Interestingly," wrote
researcher Fouts (1997), "Loulis did not pick up any of the
seven signs that we [humans] used around him. He learned only from
Washoe and [another chimp] Ally" (p. 244).
- http://www.dianahacker.com/rules/pdf/RULE5-Shaw.pdf
Allen and Beatrice Gardner:
(Gardner and Gardner, 1969): The training of Washoe, the chimp used
in the experiment, began when she was 11 months old and lasted 51
months. During this time she acquired 151 signs. ... they treated
Washoe as if she was a human child, she had scheduled meals, nap
times,bath time etc...(Gardner and Gardner,1980). The idea was to
immerse Washoe in the world of the deaf and ASL and to carry on
spontaneous conversations between her and her trainers. One of the
first things that the Gardners noticed was that a lot of Washoe's
signs seemed to be imitation, much like the way an infant would
imitate their parent. For instance, every night before she went to
bed Washoe would brush her teeth and the sign "toothbrush" would be
signed to her. One day Washoe went into the bathroom and signed
"toothbrush" by herself with no provocation. The Gardners feel that
this was done for the sole reason of communication, much like the
way a small child might communicate to their parent (Gardner and
Gardner, 1969). Perhaps the most significant finding of the Gardners
was that it appeared as though Washoe produced her own combinations
of words such as "dirty Roger" where dirty is used as an expletive
and "water bird" upon seeing a swan on a lake.
The Gardners are however, quick to point out that many of Washoe's
early signs were "acquired by delay imitation of the signing
behavior of her human companions but very few if any, of her early
signs were introduced by immediate imitation" (Gardner and
Gardner,1969). The most effective way they found to teach the chimp
to sign was to form her hand in the shape of the sign and use
constant repetition. They are also quick to point out that by the
time the project was finished Washoe knew more than 30 signs
including object names, using pictures of objects as well as the
actual objects. She also had the capability to form sentences with
the words that she did know, most of them involving the pronouns "I"
and "you" (Gardner and Gardner, 1969). -
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/4451/TalkWithChimps.html
Chomskyan hypothesis: language is a genetic specification located in the human
brain. Humans are programmed very specifically for lg, down to a level of
detail that includes the distinction between parts of speech, the way the
parts of speech relate to 0one another, and even parts of grammar as specific
as the reason we can say both "You did what?" and "What did you do?" -
but while what is placed in the front in sentence 2, we can't put what at
the front in (*What) Who do you think will say what?
ARGUMENTS FOR the Nativist hypothesis:
A. Speed of acquisition. Learn language within a few years, though as adults, we
know how diff this is. Don't need to work to learn lg, it "just
happens".
B. All humans learn lg. Unlike singing or being able to high jump.
C. Critical age hypothesis: language learning ability is programmed for the firsts
few years; erodes as we get older. Parallels maturational stages in
nature - ducklings programmed to fix on a large moving object as their
"mother", or caterpillars to become butterflies. Wild girl Genie - kept
in isolcation from toddler until age 13, and beaten if she tried to talk.
Never learned language well, sentences like "I like elephant eat peanut"
D. Poverty of Stimulus. language heard is fragmentary and full of false starts -
much more ungrammatical than in writing.
e.g. real college students speaking transcribed:
Yeah. It doesn't help the three but it protects, keeps the moisture in.
Uh huh. Beacause then it just soaks up moisture. It works by the water
molecules adhere to the carbon moleh, molecules that are in the ashes.
It holds it on. And the plant takes it away from there.
E. Specificity of language deficits for damage in:
Broca's area deficit: no grammar:
Yes... ah ... Monday .. ah. ... Dqad and Peter Hogan, and Dad
... ah... hospital... and ah... Wednesdqy... Wednesday nine o'clock and
Thursday ... ten o'clock ah doctors ... two...two..an doctors
and...ah..teeth..yah
Wernicke's area: loss in meaning in comprehension
Oh sure. Go ahead, any old think you want. If I could I would. Oh, I'm
taking the word the wrong way to say, all of the barbers here whenever
they stop you it's going around and around, if you know what I mean,
that is tying and tying for repucer, repuceration, well, we were trying
the best that we could...
FOXP2 gene: Myrna Gopnik and the KE-family of London - SLI: "The man fall
off", "The boys eat four cookie". Shown a picture of a bird like
creature, called a wug, Q. "Now here are two of them; there are two ...?"
they wave away the q, or reply along the line of "wugness".
A. Language = cognition : speed of language learning is but one aspect of the general learning abilities of children. It is remarkable how quickly children learn to power liquid into a container, throw a ball with aim, or jump rope, and one observes that the4 ability to learn such things erodes with age. B. SLI or mental defiscit: the KE-family was shown to have general deficits in cognition, rather than linguistic deficit per se. Geoffrey Sampson, Educating Eve: The Language Instinct Debate. 1997 C. Stimulus may not be as poor as one thinks. Refs: Calvin/Bickerton:2000 Terrence Deacon: The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain, 1977
CLICK LANGUAGE Nama (of Namibia): clicks are phonemes
hara: "swallow"
!hara: to check out
|hara: to dangle
+hara: to repulse
One click language has 48 diff click phonemes
JINGULU: ONLY THREE VERBS: COMPLEX PREDICATES
* Lgs with just three verbs, e.g. Jingulu in Australia : come, go, and do.
"go a dive", "do a sleep".
Agglutinative:
Yupik (Eskimo lg):
He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer:
Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq
Tuntu- ssur- qatar- ni- ksaite- ngqiggte- uq
reindeer hunt will say not again he
LANGUAGE CHANGE:
Opening lines of beowulf:
hwaet we gardena in gear-dagum tHeod-cyninga tHrym
what we spear-Danes' in yore-days tribe-kings glory
ge-frunon hu Da aetHelingas ellen fremedon
heard how the leaders courage accomplished
(NOTE: character for tH and for D are same as in icelandic)
Yet this language is continuously relatable to what is today's spoken English
A. ASSIMILATION: can be said to be a result of "sloppy speaking" early Latin: inpossibilis ==> LL: impossibilit. n changes to m e.g. "and": "Texas A an+M"; "elves an+trolls" B. CONSONANT WEAKENING: Latin: maturus = ripe Old Spanish, maduro (t weakened to d, s vanished) ==> in today's (Castiiian) Spanish: mathuro, (but written maduro, like it was pron earlier) Old French: mathur ==> modern French: m\^ur k==>g : aqua ==> agua C. VOWEL WEAKENING english "name" - why the extra e? because it was orig pron nAme (NOTE cognate to Skt nAmah) D. SOUND SHIFT: vowels org by mouth openings: vowel shift ==> i u e o A ==> sounds move upwards in this grid food ==> was orig long "o" - pron. "fode", but pron of o moved up to "u" in the grid. semilarly, feed, was pron "fade" ==> moved up to "i" nAme ==> A moved to "e", and last e was dropped. made ==> was pron mAduh Process is on today: accents: e.g. calif accents: raw - rA, law -> lA, etc.
Mandarin: m'a : hemp m`a : scold m\~a: horse m\_a: mother Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has six; "fan" can mean "share", "powder" "advise" "divide" "excited" or "grave" How tones emerge: consider pa, pak and pas when you say pak, voice tends to go up a bit, whereas when you say pas, it tends to go down a bit. Slowly, k and s are lost ==> tonal differnces with pa. In synchronic terms, linguists find tones! REFS: Bill Bryson: Mother tongue: English and how it got that way 1990 (see excerpts) Anthony Burgess: A mouthful of air: Language, languages, esp English, 1992 David Crystal: Cambr Enc of the Engl Lg: Ch 3-4 OE / MiddleE
"light" words, as opp to "concrete" words. Il ne marche pas: the "pas" is redundant - where does it come from? the meaning of pas = step survives in constructs like pas-de-deux (duet=steps for two). [JESPERSEN CYCLE: that negation cycles through small and long phonetic symbols - also called "negative concord", rel to double negation] "pas" initially used as emphasis: I cant walk "a step", "can't eat a crumb", and "pas" was gradually generalized to all negations as emphatic. Then the degree of emphasis was diluted, finally dropped. - Colourful phrases - enter, dilute, and disappear, e.g. 60s phrase, "lame", "awesome" in 80s, etc. So in French, can't eat a crumb etc. dropped off, but pas stayed on, but ne marche pas lost the emphatic power, and began diluted into a normal negation. By the 1500s, pas: started to seem as if it were a way of saying negation, used w all verbs. Today, colloq french, often use only "pas" for negation
future suffixes in Italean amare habeo / habes ==> amero / amera
{like male anglerfish - became pimples)
Latin future tense orig used the auxiliary habere: (to have)
- amabo "I will love" <=- from "AmAre hAbeo" I will love
- amabis "You will love" <=- "amare habes"
- amabit <=- amare habet
Over time, the habere forms begain wearing down ==> like male anglerfish,
became pimples.
Overall "any prefixes and suffixes you find in a language most likely began as
separate words"
[Q. what is "separate word"? separate "frequent sound cluster"?]
SUFFIX:
nibble / dribble / jiggle / dabble ==> nip / drib / jig / dab
-ibble ==> continuous, faster - nip many times, rapidly; drib, jig, dab xmany
cackle ==> can't cack any more, but -ikle has the same meaning.
laughle - not a word - though we can guess what it might mean.
The origin of -ibble is a word that is now irrecoverable - which used to be
attached to the end.
Tonal Languages:
tones ==> semantic differences
sa ==> eat; s' sA ==> make them eat; the latter changed the tone.
later, the s' prefix dropped, and only the tone change remained.
pas / pad / pat ==> involves diff tonalities
word boundaries appear to be shifted
"Gladly the Cross I'd bear" ==> mother heard as "gladly, the
cross-eyed bear" [p. 28-29]
==> similarly: American national anthem, spanish dancers
nickname: an+ecke+name (ecke - corner, little name) ==> nickname p. 28
apron <=- napron <=- Fr. naperon, napkin,
orange <=- HINDI narangi, a narangi ==> an orange;
[in spanish, still naranja] p. 28
mine: pron. "meen" ==> meen Ed,
sounds like Mee Ned: mine Ed ==> mi Ned; Mine Ellie ==> Nellie
hamburger: origin is from "hamburg"; hamburger-steak. Today, we have
fishburger, chicken
burger etc. Now "ham" is also a meat, so hamburger can be thought of as
being made from ham.
lone: comes from "alone", one thinks of it as afire, aflutter. But actually
it comes from "all one", so alone is very diff from aflutter. Thus, we can
re-bracket alone as a+lone, and then we can start to use "lone" on its own.
[Bracketing:wikipedia]
In linguistics, particularly linguistic morphology, bracketing refers to how
an utterance can be represented as a hierarchical tree of constituent
parts. Analysis techniques based on bracketing are used at different levels
of grammar, but are particularly associated with morphologically complex
words.
To give an example of bracketing in English, consider the word
uneventful. This word is made of three parts, the prefix un-, the root event,
and the suffix -ful. An English speaker should have no trouble parsing this
word as "lacking in significant events" [1]. However, imagine a foreign
linguist with access to a dictionary of English roots and affixes, but only a
superficial understanding of English grammar. Conceivably, he or she could
understand uneventful as one of:
* "not eventful", where eventful in turn means "full of events"
: [ [un-] ", for example, "min Ed". Over time, the pronoun shifted from
min to mi[3] and children learning the language rebracketed the utterance
/mined/ from the original "min Ed" 5. HOW LANGUAGE CHANGES - MEANING and ORDER
Jack Benny show:
randy man is talking to his wife: "admit it, no body makes love as good as
me" 1940s - diff m3eaning
Phrase "make love" is attested from 1580 in the sense
"pay amorous attention to;"
1935 movie: Top Hat, Ginger Roberts about Fred Astaire: "He made love to me"
==> he kissed me. p.31
as a euphemism for "have sex," it is attested
from c.1950.
"silly" ==> blessed (related to Germanic "selig" ==> blessed).
2 gentlemen of Verona
Valentine: provided that you do no outrages on silly women or poor passengers
silly: ==> women who deserve help
Semantic narrowing:
more specific than what they started out with
meat: in OE: met all food; could be sweet (sweetmeat), etc.
Semantic broadening
bird <=- OE "brid" only referred to young birds, the word for bird was "fugel"
(cogn to Germ. vogel); bird broadened to include all birds, while
fugo ==> fowl (today, mainly game bird)
Proto-IE:
*bher (bear): meant both to carry; and also to "give birth"
bearden - what one bears ==> burden
birth <=- bearth (carried)
BEAR (V.) :: O.E. beran "bear, bring, wear" (class IV strong verb; past tense
bær, pp. boren), from P.Gmc. *beranan (cf. O.H.G. beran, O.N. bera,
Goth. bairan "to carry"), from PIE root *bher- meaning both "give birth"
(though only Eng. and Ger. strongly retain this sense) and "carry a burden,
bring" (cf. Gk. pheró "I carry," L. ferre "to carry," O.Ir. beru/berim "I
catch, I bring forth," Skt. bharati "carries," O.C.S. bïrati "to
take"). Many senses are from notion of "move onward by pressure." O.E. past
tense bær became M.E. bare; alternative bore began to appear c.1400, but
bare remained the literary form till after 1600. Past participle distinction
of borne for "carried" and born for "given birth" is 1775. Ball bearings
"bear" the friction; bearing "way of carrying oneself" is in M.E.
enk: to reach, carry to get it somewhere.
bear+enk ==> (pron. "bear enk" ==> bring; PIE *bhrengk)
http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/roots/zzb02200.html
Compound root *bhrenk-, to bring (< *bher- + *enk-, to reach; see nek-2 in
Indo-European roots).
bear ==> L. ferre
Transfer / prefer < ferre
fertile <=- can bear a child
Gk: bear ==> pherein - amphori (carry things in bottles), pheronome, etc.
SVO ==>
SOV: Turkish: hassan the ox brought
VSO: Welsh, Celtic etc. Polynesian lgs, e.g. Tongan
Was thought that OVS would never be found - but there is a language in S. Am -
Hixkariyana
word order changes:
OE: SOV: He had the boy seen (as in German)
Hebrew: biblical hebrew: Verb first; modern hebrew: SVO
no word order at all: e.g. Warlpiri (austr lg)
the small child is chasing the dog:
maliki KA wajilipi-nyi kurdu wita-ngku
dog is chase child small
wajilipi-nyi KA maliki kurdu wita-ngku
wajilipi-nyi KA kurdu wita-ngku maliki
kurdu wita-ngku KA maliki wajilipi-nyi
kurdu wajilipi-nyi KA wita-ngku maliki
("small" sep from child; how does it disambiguate? note: dog is at end)
maliki KA kurdu wita-ngku wajilipi-nyi
6. LANGUAGE CHANGE: Many directions
"soft th" ([th]ing) ==> fragile. can go in many directions
Brooklynese: Dem Tings
When people move, diff groups take diff directions. PIE ==> how it spread
across Asia / Europe
e.g. Latin: language of the Roman empire - moved around a lot more than most lgs.
imposing their language on others was a part of the concern of the Roman Empire.
(not typical - e.g. Persian empire - Greece to West Pakistan.
Latin spoken in Gaul - quite diff from Latin in Italy or Spain
now known as Romance lgs: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian
WORD SOUNDS
L. word for grass "herba" (source for engl "herb"):
In general, "h" is fragile, here it has been dropped in all the lgs, though
it is retained in the spellings for FR and SP:
FR herbe air-b drops the inital cons,as well as the final vowel
IT erba ERE-bah closest to original, only h is dropped
SP hierba YARE-bah "e" ==> ye
PT herva ERE-vah bah ==> vah, "b" ==> "v" is common, also in many
spanish dialects
RM iarb\(a YAR-buh /e/ ==> ia, and final A becomes shorter "uh" like
Romanian is always bizarre in the way it changes from Latin
GRAMMAR
I gave it to the woman
Feminae id dedi (but also can be "id feminae dedi" etc)
woman-to it I gave
FR Je l'ai donn\'e la femme
SP Se lo di a la mujer
IT L'ho datto alla donna
PT O dei \`a mulher
RM Am dat-o femeii
L had flexible word order, no longer true for most lgs, e.g. SP:
"Se la mujer lo di a" !
the past tense marker, "dedi" in L (irregular v) - is somewhat retained in SP
and PT, but is changed in FR IT etc. jai donn\'e ==> new structure that arose
as FR developed.
Note: L. has no articles - only 1/5th lgs have "the" and "a" - most European lgs
Many lgs don't have any article (e.g. Indo-Aryan; Russian)
"The" originated with the word for "that"
==> "that" child eroded to "the" child.
There are no lgs that don't have the demonstrative this and that.
Latin words for that shortened and changed their meanings from the concrete
to the grammatical.
PROTO GERMANIC:
German, Dutch, Yiddish
CHINESE ==> 7 Chinese lgs
note: NOT dialects - are not mutually comprehensible
All arose from what may be called "Middle Chinese": (?Han?)
daughter-in-law: shuk
Mandarin : chi (rising)
Cantonese : sAm
Min (Taiwanese/Fujianese) : sIn
Wu (Shanghainese) : sung
Hakka : sIm
Gan : chIn
Xiang : chi (rising)
Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Lg, 1944
Anthony Burgess : A mouthful of Air 1992
Mario Pei: The story of Lg, 1949
7. HOW LANGUAGE CHANGES: MODERN ENGLISH
Instead of looking at English from OE/MidE, look at current lgs around us.
Eg. from Shakespeare's time:
We don't understand Shakespeare's plays. Someone said, only time he really
understood Shakespeare, was when he saw the play in France, where it was
transl into modern French.
Wherefore are thou Romeo? [R&J ii.ii.33]
[with a gesture of looking for her lover: as if she is looking for him. But
he is right below her. Next line is "deny thy love...]
at the time, Wherefore = Why, so the q was: "Why are you Romeo? Deny your
father, become someone else, and I too will no longer be a Capulet."
Viola, in 12th night iii.i.67-70:
A fellow wise enough to play the fool, requires a kind of wit:
WIT here is not a kind of jocularity, but knowledge.
e.g. "keep your wits around you"
Polonius in Hamlet: Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
does not mean: take criticism, but do not object.
Here "censure" is not criticism; What it was is an
idiom, "take x's censure" = to size x up".
Change in GRAMMAR and pronun
Jane Austen, early 1800s
- So you are come at last
- ... and much was ate
- It would quite shock you... would not it?
- She was small of her age
William Cobbett: book on Grammar
- I bended the book (bent was also an option)
- I sunk down to the bottom
- A person got shotten
late 1800s:
- A house is currently building on Mott St
(to Abr Lincoln, A house is being built on M St would have sounded
pedantic, grammar books discouraged the above use)
PRON:
dismay: diZ-may , not diss-may
dismiss: diZ-miss, not diss-miss
balcony: bal-COH-nee
cement: SEE-ment, not se-ment
- John Walker, Pron dictionary 1774
MEANING CHANGE:
- few people distinguish "disinterested" (unbiased) from "uninterested"
(finding nothing of interest)
- English used to hither/thither/whither , for to- here,there,where,
(dative?). German has this distinction: Ich bin hier; "Come here" - Komm
her. Maybe sometime back Timmy said come here and his mother said, it shd
be "come hither" - but then mommy died, and Timmy kept saying come here,
and his children never knew...
- earlier, you was pl, and thou was singular. Thou lookest, ye look ("hear ye");
I see thee, I see you.
"you all" ==> disparaged; but these people are trying to be more logical
- the use of -ing in the progressive was emerging at the same time that
hither and thou were being lost. "I am sitting in the chair" - can't be
said in German or French, where "I build a house" is also
I am building a house. (present progressive)
In Shakespeare's time, it would be "Right now, I sit on the chair".
[German speakers who are otherwise very good with English often have
difficulty with this]
[NOTE: "hopefully" in OED article http://www.ft.com/cms/s/96ffa490-c92e-11db-9f7b-000b5df10621.html]
8. INDO-EUROPEAN
William Jones in his Third Anniversary
Discourse to the Asiatic Society (2 February 1786):
The Sanskrit language, Whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more
exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger
affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could
possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no
philologer, could examine them all three, without believing them to have
sprung form some common source.
Also grammar. e.g. even case endings on nouns are related.
Skt Grk Latin
nominative dAn odon dens
genitive datAs odOn dentis
dative datE odOnti dentI
accusative dAntam odOnta dentem
tooth dent dente zahn tand zup zab dant dhondi dami dandAn dA~t
Engl Fr It Germ Swd Russ Pol Welsh Grk Alb Pers Hindi
9. Tracing IE
Armenian Skt Russ OE Latin Grk Alb
nu snushA snokhA snoru nurus nuOs nuse
what could have been the Proto-IE root?
A. sn vs n at the start. S is more fragile ==> starts with sn
B. was the first vowel an o or a u? choose u, because u is more likely to
change to o than vice versa
C. second consonant - is it s, or r, or kh? In Russian, kh often traces back
to s in earlier Slavic. Hence more s's, so "snus-"
D. ending: feminine concept, and -o may be masculine (Sp/It), but Armenian Gk
and Latin have o/u endings. Prob this was the orig and other lgs shifted
to the fem ending later.
Hence PIE word: *snusos
11. LANGUAGE FAMILIES: CLUES TO THE PAST
AUSTRONESIAN: Almost 1K lgs, relatively similar, though spread out across
Philippines, Malaysia, South Seas. Malagasy is also austonesian ==> people
sailed and settled there.
Tagalog Malay Fijian Samoan Malagasy
stone bato batu vatu fatu vato
eye mata mata mata mata maso
The most diff austronesian lgs are spoken in taiwan.
4 subfamilies, but 3 of them only in Taiwan, in a dozen lgs. Such
contrast / diversity ==> evidence that the family originated in Taiwan.
BANTU: 500 lgs, south of Sahara. Best known is Swahili. mostly quite
similar, varying about as much as romance lgs. Cameroon and E Nigeria: lgs
here vary much more from one another.
Khoi-San (click lgs) - mostly in SW Africa. But two Khoi-San lgs spoken in
Tanzania. Probably khoi-san was much more prevalent, but later Bantu
speakers overran these regions, leaving two pockets of Khoi-San. Fossil
skulls of bushemn have also been found in Bantu areas. Some Bantu lgs spoken
near Khoi-San have also adopted clicks.
Perhaps Khoi-San is older ==> unlikely that clicks were added, more likely it
started with clicks, and then they eroded.
Khoi-San lgs ==> vary a lot - some bristle with case endings, some are more
naked like Chinese, and very few common words. Also the click lgs of
Tanzania are very different.
Possibly early Homo Sapiens fossils with smaller heads emerged in Africa.
Possible that they originally spoke in clicks - may be descendants of
earliest lgs.
BASQUE: May be remnant of older group. IE speakers then came and replaced
this group. Genetic markers are also indicative.
NATIVE AMERICAN LGS: 400 in N. Am; 670 in S.Am;
If people came in from NE, wd expect more variety in
Alaska / NE. But in fact,
more diversity in S. Am, less in N ==> in the ice age,
N was depopulated, and then it was repopulated after the thaw. This can be
said from linguistic evidence alone (and is corraborated).
DRAVIDIAN: mostly in S of India, but a few scattered further N. Suggests
that the language groups were initially more widespread, and were replaced by
I-Aryan speakers.
Language history Timeline
150K-80K ya: time when human language zrose
4K BC : Probable origin of Proto-IE
3.5K : First attested writing
3K BC: Probable origin of Semitic
2K BC: Bantu speakers begin migrations S and E
AD
450-480: First attestation of English
787: Scandinavian invasions of England
mid-1300s: Beginning of the standardization of English
1400: Beginning of Great Vowel Shift in English
1564: Birth of William Shakespeare
c.1680: origin of Saramaccan creole
1786: Sir William Jones: First account of Proto-IE
1887: Ludwig Zamenhof creates Esparanto
c.1900: birth of Hawaiian Creole English
1916: Discovery of Hittite (p.59)
amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at] gmail.com)
17 Feb 2009