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Origin of every human language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5283 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes  Studies: Italian | Message 65 of 77 28 April 2011 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Of course. And I have not suggested that anyone is not free to comment. The problem is: if I direct a question at Iversen and 4 or 5 other people pile in and answer before him, then there is a fair chance that my original question will get buried and lost... But whatever... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 66 of 77 28 April 2011 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Not with Iversen, I don't think so. =)
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 67 of 77 28 April 2011 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is a very good point. I may have to reconsider my (recently formed) opinion. Thank you, Cainntear! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 68 of 77 28 April 2011 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The evolution from the most simple universally-understandable grunts and signs to basic conventions of oral communication being shared among a group is something that would have happened over a rather lengthy period of time, probably millenia. During such a long period of time, so many groups could have mixed and parted, many times over and over a relatively large area, that there is no reason to suppose the source of this evolution is very well defined geographically, although I do agree this must have happened in some part of Africa. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 69 of 77 28 April 2011 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Genetic traits can very well become wide-spread when they're not particularly harmful and happen to be present in lucky individuals. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 70 of 77 28 April 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Beware: this will be a very long post!
To Romanist: languages don't just get simpler, but there are good reasons why it may seem so. As pointed out by Cainntear, some of the most complex languages are (or were) spoken by small groups who didn't have to communicate much with the outside world - for instance the polysynthetic languages of the Inuit and the extinct languages of the Tierra del Fuego indians. A situation that put such a language under stress can lead to a simplification process, or it may even be abandoned. Actually the most likely scenario for a challenged language is to become easier to learn and teach, otherwise it may die out. Ultimately languages may be partly creolized in the process, and creoles notoriously have an extremely simple grammar. The funny thing is that the opposite also is true: an expanding language with a lot of new speakers may split into a conservative written variety and a morphologically simpler version spoken by the general population, as it happened with Latin. And forcing foreign populations to adapt your language is in itself a process that may invite those populations not only to simplify the task, but also to reuse words and structures from their former languages. So languages that become more and more complex will typically be marginalized. Those that survive are those that adapt. And adaptation tends to be a process of rationalizing fixed structures away and getting new vocabulary and idiomatic expressions instead. And as Bao points out, an apparent simplification may in itself carry the seeds for something that could be identified as latent morphology. The weak forms of the French personal pronouns are very close to becoming inflectional elements, and without the influence of the writing this might actually have happened. Well, maybe it actually has happened, but we just don't see it because the writing system deceives us. There may be some cyclicity in this, but it doesn't have to be a uniform process - a language will typically be shedding its old morphology while preparing new semi-independent elements that under the right circumstances could become endings or 'beginnings'. About the origin of languages versus the origin of MODERN languages: The notion that every language is like a twig on a branch on bigger branch on a tree is too simplistic. In the case of creoles it is patently wrong because a creole by definition is formed by combining elements from several languages. But dialectology has shown us that the simple tree model isn't enough to describe the variations even within one language. The tree diagram has had enormous success in showing the major divisions between languages: according to this theory a language community may be split into two by a sound change that only is adhered to by some of its speakers. But when we get down into the details of the linguistic landscape then the demarcation lines for 'smaller' sound changes form a crisscrossing pattern that can't be reduced to a tree diagram. So it is entirely possible that a language family - or all languages in the world - go back not to one monolitic mother language, but to a linguistic mess that never formed a true unity (especially if this happened in a society that wasn't centralized). This does not implicate that languages developed from nothing in several different places - after all, the occurrence of the Fox2 gene can in principle have happened just once, and the transition from ape vocalization to human language can have happened within a very small limited group of humanoids. But the gene could also have spread first, and then separate groups found out how to use it for something sensible. I have read that even Neanderthals have the Fox2 gene, and then it is likely that human language has been around for hundreds of thousands of years - and then the origin of language as such lies so far back that it is a separate discussion from that of a possible common ancestor for all OUR modern languages. In principle the development of language could be due to a multicentral wawe-like process, while the systematic soundshifts appeared later, i.e. at a time where languages already were fairly well organized structures. In that case it is entirely possible that the development of the language phenomenon as such was an immensely slow process, where the limits between the 'jargon' of different groups weren't as systematic as it became with our strictly codified languages - but we simply don't know. We have only tried it once, and we didn't know to keep a diary back then. If you accept the idea of a single ancestor for all our languages then its timeframe must lie so far back that all traces of it in modern languages most likely have disappeared through cycle after cycle of linguistic erosion. But in all likehood it was just as structured and complex as our own languages. Our best guess about the last common ancestor for all modern languages is the language or dialect bundle spoken by the group that counted "mitochondrial Eve" (i.e. the lady whose combination of mitochondrial genes can be found in every living human of today) - but even this is only a guess. The group could just as well have comprised several language groups, or they could have been forced to adopt the languages of surrounding groups along the way, yet managed to 'outbreed' them. And yes, this is pure speculation - we simply don't know anything about the languages of this period, which could lie around 70.000 years back where mankind allegedly went through a numeric bottleneck due to the Toba eruption. Finally to Romanist: how do you see that a language has a history behind it? Well, consider English, which as all Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs. Why should anyone invent a language with two ways of forming verbal forms? It doesn't make sense - the explanation must be that there was one kind of declension at some point in a lost ProtoprotoGermanic language or dialectbundle (plus maybe some that got lost). A number of verbal endings were lost, but left their imprint on the vowels of the relevant verbs. Much later a new set of endings were introduced, but they were never used on a number of very common verbs, only on the rarer ones. And now the Germanic speaking population are stuck with two radically different ways of declining verbs, the strong way and the weak way. This is just one way of seeing history in a language. The study of loanwords from different periods is another - some have been hit by sound shifts, others came too late. You can also deduce the history from the study of several languages, as the historical linguists from Grimm, Rask and others did it. Why should it be possible at all to make tree diagrams if the notion of successive soundshift was fundamentally flawed? Even though this theory doesn't explain everything it has been remarkably successful in systematizing the main characteristics of Modern languages, and wawe theoretical arguments explain fairly well the messy details. If languages weren't hit by successive soundshifts there wouldn't be a tree. Edited by Iversen on 28 April 2011 at 5:54pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 71 of 77 28 April 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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About language evolution, let's remember that until very recently writing was the preserve of privileged classes, and that often it was associated with liturgy. In the case of Sanskrit for instance, the exceptionally complex and exhaustive system of sandhi was possibly developed in association with religious ritual which greatly emphasized the flawless performance of speech acts, which if pronounced even slightly incorrectly would incur the wrath of the spiritual forces they attempted to harness. It is possible that the establishment of language lies with these classes, and that its subsequent simplification is a consequence of its diffusion from a specialized elite to ever wider domains.
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| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5283 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 72 of 77 28 April 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Iversen
Many thanks for your very interesting and detailed reply.
I still don't really see how/why these languages would have become so complex in the first place? People have always been thrown up against other linguistic groups, haven't they? Languages have always been (as you put it) "under stress" of one kind or another - that is part of the natural process...
This seems like a plausible hypothesis, but how much hard evidence is there for this? How do you define a 'marginalized' language'? For example, would a highy conservative language like Russian be considered a 'marginalized' language?
I see what you mean. But it seems to me that there is a certain amount of pure speculation going on here... The fact is, we have very limited documentary records. On the basis of these, linguists are unwise to make very strong claims about the early origins of language, in my opinion. (But it is just my personal opinion, and I'm not overly 'hung up' about the issue.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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