Broadcast Transcript
PBS Airdate: soft March 18, 1997
ANNOUNCER: Tonight on Nova, for a stranger in a
foreign land, language can be an imposing barrier. But
there are surprising similarities among the languages
of the world. Could it be that at one time long ago, we
all spoke the same language?
JAMES MATISOFF: It's very nice to think about the
days before Babel, when everybody spoke exactly the
same way.
ANNOUNCER: Tantalizing new clues are challenging
scientists "In Search of the First Language."
PETER THOMAS: There are more than five thousand
languages spoken across the face of the earth. Could
all these languages ever be traced back to a common
starting point? Was there a time when the people of the
world spoke one tongue? This notion is vividly brought
to life in the Old Testament story of Babel. It hearkens
back to a primeval time when the people of the earth
were all of one language and of one speech.
According to biblical legend, the people of Babylon
started to build a tower reaching up to heaven. Their
ambition so offended God that he shattered the unity of
their language, creating a confusion of
incomprehensible tongues. Forever after, the tower was
called Babel, from the Hebrew word "balbail," meaning
"to confuse." This legend has inspired countless works
of art, differing interpretations of that cataclysmic event.
Like many myths, perhaps, there is a germ of truth in
the Babel story. Did a mother tongue ever exist? Can
we find it? Clues can be found by studying the world's
great language families, such as Indo-European, the
family that includes English.
MERRITT RUHLEN: The branches of this tree can
represent different language families. The leaves on
the branches, if we had leaves today, would represent
different languages. And by tracing these branches
back, one can arrive at larger branches, such as
Indo-European, and by tracing the Indo-European
branch back, one arrives at even larger branches.
Eventually, we believe that you arrive at the main trunk
of this tree into which all of the language or from which
all of the language families have derived.
PETER THOMAS: There are some obvious
connections among languages. Take Arabic and
Hebrew, for example. Listen to how people count in
each language. That was Arabic. Here's the Hebrew.
Some numbers sound almost identical. But with other
languages, it's not always so easy to spot the
connections. Radio Sunrise serves an
ethnically-diverse West London community, including
Punjabi speakers living in the midst of an English
suburb. What could these two languages -- Punjabi
and English -- have in common? In fact, English and
Punjabi, as well as other languages of northern India,
like Hindi and Gujarati, are related, something
discovered by chance two hundred years ago by a
multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.
COLIN RENFREW: He was a judge who went out to
India in 1783, but he studied languages, Oriental
languages, before he went, and when he got to India,
he became very interested and learnt Sanskrit, which is
the language of ancient India, which was first written
about 500 AD. And then he realized, he made this
great discovery, that Sanskrit resembles in some way,
has relationships with Greek and Latin and other
languages, and he gave a very famous discourse in
which he said that these were sprung from some
common source.
PETER THOMAS: Certain similarities are striking.
Take the numbers again, for example. Here are two,
three, seven, and ten in English, Latin, Greek and
Sanskrit.
two duo dúo dva
three tres treîs tráyas
seven septem heptá saptá
ten decem déka dasa
The threes are alike in all the languages,
three tres treîs tráyas
but linguists are interested in discovering regular
patterns, not isolated resemblances. So here, "t" in
English often appears as "d" in the other languages,
two duo dúo dva
ten decem déka dasa
and "h" in Greek appears as "s" in English, Latin, and
Sanskrit.
seven septem heptá saptá
By finding patterns like these, different languages can
be grouped together as members of a language
family.
DON RINGE, JR.: The question is, how can you tell that
the languages you're looking at reflect a single original
language, and therefore, form a family? The only way
you can do that is by finding systematic similarities
between these languages in every area of their
grammar, similarities in their sounds, similarities in
their inflections, similarities in the syntax of the
language, and so forth. And the similarities have to be
very precise, and they have to be interlocking for the
assertion that these languages form a family, to be
believable. You take a look at an English word like
"tooth" and see that in Hindi, it's "dant," and by itself
that doesn't mean very much, but you take a look at
English "ten" and it shows up in Hindi as "das," and you
see the same pattern emerging. You've got an initial "t"
in English and an initial "d" in Hindi. When you find that
the word "two," the numeral in English, shows up in
Hindi as "doe," and you've got, once again, an initial "t"
in English and an initial "d" in Hindi, you begin to think
that perhaps this is not an accident.
PETER THOMAS: Using this comparative method,
linguists have been able to establish the connections
among a group of languages which stretch from
Iceland to India. This group of about one hundred
languages is called the Indo-European Family of
Languages. Each of these languages can be traced
to one of ten individual branches, represented here by
distinct colors. The lines which do not extend all the way
are the languages which have gone extinct. The
subgroups, or daughter families, that survive today, are
Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic. Also, Albanian,
Hellenic, Armenian, and finally, Indo-Iranian. By looking
closely at the Germanic family, we can see how it has
evolved over time into different languages, until we
reach the ones we recognize today, such as Swedish,
Danish, English, and Dutch. By studying all the
languages in this wide-ranging group, linguists have
been able to reconstruct a hypothetical ancestral
tongue called Proto-Indo-European, believed to have
been spoken five to six thousand years ago.
JAMES MATISOFF: What historical linguists do, the
task they set themselves, is to look at the current state
of the language, try and find other languages that are
related to it, that descend from the same ancestor, and
by this act of comparison, try and trace back through
time, what earlier stages of the language might have
been like, what the words used to mean, how the words
used to be pronounced, how words used to be put
together in sentences. And this is a very fascinating
endeavor, because languages can change in very
unpredictable ways, and what linguists love to do is to
look beneath the surface diversity and find the ultimate
proto-unity that the languages had before they split off
from each other.
PETER THOMAS: But recognizing this "ultimate
proto-unity" is not easy. Take an example from English.
Here is the Lord's Prayer as it would have sounded
spoken in Old English, twelve hundred years ago. Now
listen to Middle English, spoken eight hundred years
ago. It's more intelligible, but still not familiar. Over the
course of twelve hundred years, English has changed
so dramatically that Old English sounds to us like a
foreign language. But, English is relatively easy for
linguists to study because of its long written history. This
phenomenon is true for many of the Indo-European
languages, making this the most studied and
well-researched language family in the world. The one
hundred languages that comprise the Indo-European
family are spoken by half the world's people. Another
important language family is Sino-Tibetan, spoken by
one-quarter of the world's population. Linguists
estimate this family includes about two hundred fifty to
three hundred languages. Apart from Chinese,
Tibetan, and Burmese, the majority of languages in
this family were not written down until this century. At the
University of California, Berkeley, James Matisoff and
his students have spent the last eight years figuring out
which languages belong to this family by mapping out
the details of their relationships. Their goal is to
produce the definitive historical thesaurus of the
Sino-Tibetan language family.
JAMES MATISOFF: This is one of the great language
families of the world, over a billion speakers, and it's
very much understudied, compared to other languages
families, like Indo-European or Semitic or Bantu, so it's
long overdue that this family receive the attention it
deserves from the linguistic world in general. And it's
called a thesaurus because the organizational principle
is by semantic field, not just by alphabetical order. So,
the first field we're dealing with is body parts. We've
been working on them for several years. After that, we'll
do animal names, kinship terms, verbs of motion, other
areas of the vocabulary by their meaning, not just by
their sound. How do we collect this data? Well, first of
all, we use published sources, dictionaries, as many
dictionaries as we can get our hands on, on one or
another language in the family. And we go through
them to extract the body part terms. So, somebody has
to go through manually and check all the words which
have to do with parts of the body, and then we input
them into the computer and get them ready for
etymological analysis. And then comes the really hard
part, and the interesting part, and that is to sort out
these forms according to how they're related to each
other.
PETER THOMAS: As they discover common roots in a
wide range of languages, patterns of sound and
meaning start to emerge.
JAMES MATISOFF: OK. Why don't we call up the
words for "eye" from the database?
J.B. LOWE: All right. That's pretty straightforward.
JAMES MATISOFF: OK. You see, we have hundreds
and hundreds of forms meaning "eye" in the various
Sino-Tibetan languages. And now's the time to try and
analyze them, do something with them. We notice lots
of these words have the shape "mik" or something
similar, sometimes "smik" or "myak," so one of the next
steps is to put them all in one place and examine them
together. So, why don't we call up all -- all of the words
which have the shape "mik"? All right. And we see we
have several screens full of words with that shape. So,
this is good evidence that we're dealing here with a
genuine root in the proto-language, because the great
variety of the languages and the fact that they're not
spoken in geographically contiguous areas means that
we have to reject borrowing as a possibility. And we
notice that a lot of these forms are not just
monosyllables. They have two or three syllables. And
we notice they have meanings which involve "eye" but
which mean more than "eye," like eyelid, eyelash,
eyebrow, eye crud that gets stuck in the corners of the
eye at night, to be jealous, as we say in English, to be
"green-eyed," except there's another metaphor in Tibet
or Burma. So, we feel responsible for giving an
explanation, an etymology, for every single syllable of
every word, if we can. And if we can't do it, then we
mark it with a symbol which means we can't do it yet,
but we'll get back to it sometime.
PETER THOMAS: By finding the same root in different
groups of languages, Matisoff begins to identify
patterns of relationships among the Sino-Tibetan
family. Occasionally, there's a language that doesn't
quite fit. For example, the language of Thailand. There
are hundreds of Thai words that are identical to
Chinese. Thai has often been classified in the
Sino-Tibetan family, but by comparing roots, Matisoff
demonstrated more compelling similarities between
Thai and the neighboring family called Austronesian.
For example, "eye" in Thai is "taa," not "mik." Likewise,
the root for "eye" in Austronesian is "mata." Perhaps
the similarities that Thai shares with Chinese are due to
borrowing, not descent from a common ancestor. This
distinction is critical.
JAMES MATISOFF: The further back in time you go, it
becomes very difficult to distinguish between
inheritance from a common ancestor and borrowing
from another group, especially in a family where there
are few historical records and where the written
histories don't go back very far. Also, it becomes
increasingly difficult to distinguish descent from a
common ancestor or borrowing from sheer chance,
accident, and any two languages taken at random in
the world will show a certain percentage of apparent
similarities, even in basic vocabulary. That's because
there's only a limited number of sounds in human
languages, and there are certain built-in constraints on
the form of human language, which makes accidental
resemblance quite possible, and frequent, in fact.
PETER THOMAS: So, understanding why words are
similar is essential to determining relationships among
families. Although the exact number of language
families has yet to be determined, most linguists
recognize at least two hundred. Some of the principal
ones in addition to Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and
Austronesian are Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Dravidian, and
Australian aboriginal. One area of the world where the
language picture is particularly complex is the
Americas. With so many native languages facing
extinction, linguists have been more involved with
recording these languages than classifying them.
Here, along the ancient shores of Flathead Lake in
northwestern Montana, Salish speakers from the
Flathead Indian reservation are trying to prevent their
language from disappearing. These are some of the
last fluent speakers of Salish, a language known to
have been spoken in this region for thousands of years.
GERMAINE WHITE: Salish is one of the languages
that's targeted not to survive, and that's frightening to
me, because we carry our culture, we carry our
tradition, we carry our history, the very history of who we
are, through our language, and that's what it is we're
doing here at language camp, we're trying to put our
language in context, in cultural context, to create a new
generation of fluent Salish speakers.
PETER THOMAS: Today, on the Flathead reservation,
there are approximately sixty-three hundred tribal
members, yet fewer than one hundred are fluent Salish
speakers. Unfortunately, of the remaining speakers, the
vast majority are elders. Historically, Salishan was one
of the most extensive language families of the
Northwest. Linguists believe there were no fewer than
twenty-three distinct languages in the family. By the
eighteenth century, at least one hundred thousand
speakers spread over twenty-two million acres, from
southern British Columbia to western Montana. Then,
Salish speakers had their first encounter with whites, a
friendly meeting with Lewis and Clark in 1805.
Gradually, Native American communities came under
the influence of the settlers and missionaries that soon
followed. The Jesuits were the first "black robes" to live
among the Salish. Initially, they were welcomed. Adults
went to church and children went to their boarding
schools. But tensions mounted as priests demanded
that the Salish children speak English, forbidding them
to use their native tongue. It took only a hundred years
for a language which had thrived for millennia to be on
the verge of extinction. Today, support for the tribe's
effort to renew the language and preserve its cultural
traditions is growing among the members. On a
mountainside deep in the forest, Chauncey
Beaverhead harvests cedar bark in the same careful
way his grandfather and great-grandfather did a
hundred years ago. Back at the campground, parents
look on as their children painstakingly try to master the
handicrafts that were once essential survival skills for
their ancestors. But as the children concentrate on
making their baskets, surrounded by sounds of English
and Salish, another very important project is taking
place. The tribe has invited linguist Sarah Thomason to
work with them on a written record of their language
and customs.
SARAH THOMASON: When I first started working on
Salishan languages, reading about them, my main
interest was historical. I'm a historical linguist. I wanted
to find out about the borrowing situation in this part of
the country and neighboring parts of Canada. But when
I started working with the tribal members, with elders on
the reservation, I found that what they wanted and
needed was somebody who could help them with their
preservation efforts. All right. [Salish], and that means?
SALISH ELDER: It's getting daylight. Early, early
daylight.
SARAH THOMASON: Could you say it once more,
please?
PETER THOMAS: Without a fairly complete written
record, the death of the last native Salish speaker
would mean the permanent loss of the language.
Thomason has been working with this group of elders
to create a Salish/English dictionary, as well as to
preserve descriptions of traditional life for future
generations.
SARAH THOMASON: They get themselves decked
out?
SALISH ELDER: Mmm-hmm. Yes.
SARAH THOMASON: Like for the war dances?
SALISH ELDER: Right. Decked.
SARAH THOMASON: OK. So, let's go over it and see
how many mistakes I've made, so you can correct me
so I don't get it wrong. [Salish] They finished the canvas
dance. [Salish] It's getting light.
PETER THOMAS: Nearly half of the tribal languages
known to be part of the Salishan family are already
extinct. Salish has thus far been spared. The loss of so
many languages is an obstacle to understanding the
full richness of the linguistic history of the Americas. Of
the sixteen hundred languages once spoken here, only
a third exist today. It's estimated that these languages,
both living and extinct, might include as many as two
hundred language families, but despite this scant
amount of evidence, there is no lack of determination to
draw a complete picture of the languages of the
Americas. At Stanford University, one linguist who has
been intrigued with the language puzzle of the
Americas for many years is Joseph Greenberg.
JOSEPH GREENBERG: What keeps me going is a
curiosity about the whole thing, and I'm attracted, as a
matter of fact, to areas of the world in which
classification has not yet been accomplished to
people's satisfaction. There are always new
etymologies to be discovered, and in doing that, it's
very much like detective work.
PETER THOMAS: Many years ago, Greenberg
received worldwide acclaim when he applied his
detective skills to classifying the thousand languages
of Africa. Although the African languages had been
recorded for centuries, very little systematic study had
been undertaken.
JOSEPH GREENBERG: In Africa, it was obvious that
there were, first of all, a very large number of
languages, a great many unresolved questions, and it
seemed to me that the sensible thing was to actually
look at all of the languages. I usually had preliminary
notebooks in which I took those elements of a
language, which, on the whole, we know are the most
stable over time. These are things like the personal
pronouns, particularly first and second person, names
for the parts of the human body, and words for
important objects in nature that are part of everyday life,
like fire, water, house, and so on. I would look at a very
large number of languages in regard to these matters,
and I did find that they fell into quite obvious groupings.
PETER THOMAS: Linguists had already postulated
three language families, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo,
and Khosan. Greenberg's analysis revealed a fourth,
Nilo-Saharan, which had been considered part of
Niger-Congo. This new family suggested a fundamental
connection between languages that appeared
extremely different. For some, the reclassification
provided important insights about African migrations.
MERRITT RUHLEN: Linguistic classifications tell you
about history. Each language family represents one
historical event. Once you have an overall classification,
then you can make certain historical inferences from
that classification. This is exactly what Greenberg did in
Africa, where he showed that the very widespread
Bantu group in southern Africa was most closely related
to languages that weren't Bantu but which were almost
Bantu, semi-Bantu, found in Nigeria. And from this
classification, he hypothesized that the Bantu family had
spread from the area of eastern Nigeria throughout all
of what is now southern Africa. So, this historical
inference was made once he understood what the
proper classification was of these languages.
PETER THOMAS: Encouraged by his new picture of
the relationships among the language families of
Africa, Greenberg spent the next thirty years trying to
solve the complicated language puzzle presented by
the Americas.
JOSEPH GREENBERG: Nobody had premised more
than anything other than the very large number of
groups. There were no widespread groupings. So, I
began to take the common words, write them down, so
on, and look at them. And eventually, I put them into
notebooks, and the notebooks are like the ones I have
here, in which you have the names of languages down
one side, and down the other. One can get eighty
languages in a notebook like this. And across, I have
various words in English for which we find translations
in the American Indian languages. So, for example, on
this page, after having finished putting the numerals in, I
have the pronouns, so I have "I" and "thou," the second
person singular pronoun. But, the notebook is actually
fairly extensive and contains hundreds of words in a
very large number of languages.
PETER THOMAS: Taking a word like "blood,"
Greenberg wrote down its translation in language after
language. When he discovered a clump of similar
words in different languages, he tried to confirm the
link by looking at other words in those languages. The
results led Greenberg to a radical reinterpretation of the
language families of the Americas. Instead of
hundreds, he posited only three families: Eskimo-Aleut,
Na-Dene, and the most notable, Amerind, a new
super-family which drew in languages spoken from the
Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Greenberg's new
classification and his methodology met with strong
scientific criticism.
JAMES MATISOFF: Eyeballing data is prescientific, or
nonscientific. There are so many ways you can be led
astray, because very often, words look as if they have
some connection, and they have no historical
connection whatsoever. It's just chance. And, on the
contrary, words which you never -- might never have
thought have any connection, do, in fact, come from the
same root. So, even in languages which we know well,
like our own native language, our judgments, unless we
just look something up, are liable to be absolutely
wrong, our judgments on whether things are related or
not. How much the more so when we're dealing with
languages we have no academic or personal
knowledge of, and which have been badly recorded, for
the most part, and when we're trying to reestablish
relationships which go back untold thousands of years.
The potential for error is enormous unless you have
some methodological constraints to guide you every
step of the way.
PETER THOMAS: But sometimes, regardless of
approach, historical linguistics is faced with an
unsolvable puzzle. There is one language in Europe
which has baffled scholars for centuries. Sarak looks
like a typical French village, but its graveyard holds a
linguistic secret. Inscribed alongside the French is the
mysterious language of the Basque people. The
language is called Euskara, and it has resisted any
classification so far. It is called a language isolate, an
orphan among languages with no known relatives. The
land of the Basques straddles the borders of France
and Spain. No amount of analysis has been able to link
Euskara to French, Spanish, or to any European
language, nor, in fact, to a language anywhere in the
world. How could this linguistic isolation come about?
Perhaps it was the fierce independence of the Basque
people, their resistance to outside invaders and their
strong history of oral tradition. But, whatever the reason,
the Basque language has withstood centuries of
influence. Scientists have wondered whether a
biological comparison between the Basques and their
Indo-European-speaking neighbors would reflect that
isolation as well.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: What we ordinarily do in
biology is, really, bilateral comparisons, but we do them
all, all the possible ones.
PETER THOMAS: Geneticist Cavalli-Sforza of
Stanford University was a pioneer in the search for
notable biological indicators.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: They must realize that there
is a degree of relationship, and that it's very important
to take that into account. Otherwise, you cannot do
anything.
PETER THOMAS: Cavalli-Sforza was interested in
exploring historical relationships among different
populations by examining their genes, rather than their
languages. Would his research team find the Basques
as unique as the linguists found them? If the Basques
are as isolated as their language suggests, this
isolation might also show up in their genetic makeup,
blood groups, DNA patterns, and so on. New
techniques now make it possible to carry out much
more detailed analyses of individuals and populations
using just a few living cells, in this case, cells from a hair
follicle. The DNA pattern not only distinguishes the
Basques from their neighbors, it suggests they must
have been among the earliest people to settle in
Europe.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: Basques were recognized
as genetically different a long time ago. Basques are
so different that they must have been proto-Europeans.
Basques were probably the descendants of cultures
that have made all those beautiful painted rock
paintings in the southwest of France and in the north of
Spain.
PETER THOMAS: These cave paintings, many of them
located in Basque country, were painted fifteen
thousand years ago. Since the genetic data suggests
the Basques have been a distinct group for thousands
of years, isolated from other peoples, it may have been
their ancestors who painted these caves during the last
Ice Age. Although this conclusion is speculative,
Cavalli-Sforza is trying to use these techniques to solve
other linguistic puzzles, including Greenberg's
controversial classification of Native American
languages. DNA samples from may different tribes in
North and South America were collected and analyzed
in Cavalli-Sforza's lab at Stanford. He believes his
results provide a strong confirmation of Greenberg's
groupings.
LUIGI CAVALLI-SFORZA: When we took all the data
from American natives, they clearly fell into three
classes, and they correspond exactly to the linguistic
families that have been postulated by Greenberg. Not
only that, but the family which is most heterogeneous of
all genetically is the one that is linguistically more
heterogeneous of all.
JAMES MATISOFF: Even if it's true -- Let's accept, for
the sake of argument for a while, that the New World
was settled by exactly three waves of immigrants, the
Amerinds and the Na-Dene and the Eskimo-Aleuts.
Let's even assume that's true. What is there to show
that they were linguistically uniform when they migrated,
or that they didn't change their language dozens of
times, if the language wasn't creolized, that they didn't
abandon their language and adopt a new one? We
can see that people can change a language within a
generation. It happens all over the world. Suppose
some future linguist ten thousand years from now was
looking at the DNA from United States fossils. He
would be very confused indeed, because he would find
all kinds of racial genetic strains which wouldn't tell him
anything about the fundamental linguistic unity of the
country, that we all speak English now.
PETER THOMAS: One good example of language
change occurring in less than a generation can be seen
in Philadelphia. Here, a team of linguists has carried
out fieldwork over the last twenty years to see at what
rate English words change, and why.
WILLIAM LABOV: When I first came into this field, I was
interested in finding out how language was changing,
as it was used in everyday life, and these tapes that you
see here are part of the archives of this room going
back to 1963 when I did a little study in Martha's
Vineyard. Because I noticed on that island that people
were saying "sight" and "fight" and "right" going back to
what seemed like a seventeenth-, eighteenth-century
pronunciation. Philadelphia we chose as a community
where almost all the vowels were changing, and I came
here to try to find out, if I could, why language was
changing. The nineteenth-century theories about it
would argue that it was either the people at the bottom
of the heap who were changing it because of laziness
and ignorance, or the people at the top, because they
had such prestige. But we'd found out that the opposite
was true, that the sound changes were in the hands of
the people who were the most important local people.
Ann Bower is one of the field workers who began this
study with me in the 1970s. Celeste Sweeney is one of
her most important contacts, the center of a social
network here in south Philadelphia. In every
neighborhood, you need to know the people who are
the central figures so that you can understand how
society works and who influences who.
PETER THOMAS: Ann Bower and Celeste Sweeney
have become close friends over the years. They talk
with each other in a relaxed and informal way.
ANN BOWER: Your mom made abolind. How did she
do that? How did she make that?
CELESTE SWEENEY: Well, then, when she would
make sauce, gravy --We call it gravy, you call it sauce.
And she would put gravy on top and then the sausages.
And then, like some people, they used to eat it on a big
board.
WILLIAM LABOV: In the last fifty years, there have been
massive changes in American English.
CELESTE SWEENEY: Believe me, we ate properly.
WILLIAM LABOV: In the history of English, the vowels
have always been the ones that move, and the
consonants have stayed put. And over the course of
time, small changes add up into great changes.
ANN BOWER: Your dad wasn't working during the
Depression, though?
CELESTE SWEENEY: No, not at all. He worked for a
guy in a shoe store. My father used to make shoes. He
was a shoemaker. He made all -- the whole shoe. And
it got so bad that they were paying him in postage
stamps.
ANN BOWER: Son of a gun.
WILLIAM LABOV: We're taking the word "bad" to
"bed," the word "out" to "a-out," to "a-out." You notice
that "go" moves to "gao" to "gao." You notice that "two"
goes from "two" to "teo." In the meantime, "sight" and
"fight" are becoming "sa-ight" and "fa-ight" or "soight"
and "foight." There are other changes that are just
beginning to appear, where "a" as in "maid" and "pain"
becomes "maid" and "pain," so that "snake" and
"sneak" then sound the same. So, we have a rotation of
the whole vowel system which is happening in different
ways in different cities in the United States, and in
England, too.
PETER THOMAS: By measuring changes in Celeste's
speech patterns for over a decade and comparing her
results to those of other Philadelphians, Labov has
been able observe language change in action. But,
how important are these apparently small changes in
pronunciation to the overall history of languages?
WILLIAM LABOV: Whatever the forces that are
producing this change, they must be very powerful,
because they really do interfere with understanding. Our
current research is dealing with cross-dialectical
comprehension, and we've taken three cities, Chicago,
Birmingham, and Philadelphia, which are becoming
more and more different. And we find, indeed, that
people do not understand the sounds in the dialects of
other cities, and even within the city, the older people
don't understand the younger people when it comes to
using those sounds. So, that's the process which
several hundred or several thousand years ago led to
the gradual differentiation of languages and the loss of
intelligibility. I'm not saying it's going to happen in the
United States, because there are other factors at work
there, too. But, we can trace that day-to-day change
which ultimately leads to two different languages.
PETER THOMAS: If English shows significant change
within a single decade, the implications for linguists
who are trying to study a language believed to have
been spoken fifteen thousand years ago are enormous.
Yet, an effort is underway to do exactly that. One of the
leaders of a controversial group of linguists who believe
in the Nostratic theory is Vitaly Shevoroshkin. This
theory claims to identify an ancient superfamily of
languages from which many of today's language
families have descended. It wasn't until the 1960s in
Russia that the Nostratic theory was approached with
modern linguistic techniques by Vladislav Illytch Svitch.
He believed he could work back in time from several
reconstructed languages six thousand years old to find
a more remote common ancestor, a language he
called Proto-Nostratic. Today, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, an
original member of this Russian group, is convinced of
the importance of his mentor's work.
VITALY SHEVOROSHKIN: He could see and find in the
chaos exactly things which fit, and that is the most
important thing in linguistics, because there are so
many data. And, he managed to establish precise
sound correspondences between these Nostratic
words in different languages and make other things
like reconstruct grammar and semantics and lexics and
so on. So, it was something which was done in a very
precise way, and that's why it is so great, I think.
PETER THOMAS: The search for an ancestor
language begins with modern-day words. Comparing
"water" in English, Russian, and other related
languages suggests a common ancestor. Six
thousand years ago, "water" was probably "wod." The
Russian group goes farther. They start with several of
these reconstructed languages. For example,
comparing six thousand-year-old words for "water," the
Russians argue for the ancestral word "wete," which
they believe belonged to a language spoken about ten
to fifteen thousand years ago.
COLIN RENFREW: If there really were a Nostratic
language family which would embrace a whole series,
include Indo-European, it would include the Semitic
languages, in fact the larger Afro-Asiatic family
including the languages of North Africa, it would
include the Altaic languages and so on, it would be a
vast area which would be populated by people
speaking languages descended from Proto-Nostratic.
If one follows the divergence hypothesis that one can
trace them back through time to a common origin, it
would mean that somewhere, there would be an area
where Proto-Nostratic was spoken at a particular time,
perhaps ten thousand years ago, or a little more.
PETER THOMAS: Another Russian Nostraticist
working today is Aharon Dolgopolsky. Here, in the
midst of one of the oddest collections of dictionaries
and grammars in the world, he is trying to recreate a
complete grammar, syntax, and vocabulary for the
Proto-Nostratic language. He starts with words he
believes are more resistent to change over time.
AHARON DOLGOPOLSKY: Linguists know that what is
called the kernel vocabulary is usually stable. For
instance, the word for "water," as you know, in English,
is just the same as in German and as in Russian. So,
we know that in which meanings we can expect to find a
word which has been preserved for thousands of years.
Well, it includes body parts, the words for water, and to
eat, to be, man, et cetera.
PETER THOMAS: Using this method, Dolgopolsky
argues, he has reconstructed over a thousand
Proto-Nostratic words. They vividly evoke for him the
rhythm of the life lived fifteen thousand years ago.
AHARON DOLGOPOLSKY: Through the telescope of
the vocabulary, we can discern a hunter who is -- is
following, "dersa" [Proto-Nostratic], the tracks, "gorki,"
"guti," "mirio" [Proto-Nostratic], of a beast, "kuru"
[Proto-Nostratic], is casting a spell, "kuru," "shugia,"
and is trying to hit, "tapa" [Proto-Nostratic], the target
and is afraid of missing, "mena" [Proto-Nostratic] it.
Among the animals he hunts, "hakra" or "harka"
[Proto-Nostratic], there are different kinds of antelopes,
"oro," "gula," "guru" [Proto-Nostratic], et cetera. He
knows a lot about the anatomy of animals: "meat,"
"hamesta cilia" [Proto-Nostratic], "marrow," "eimla"
[Proto-Nostratic], "spleen," "lepa bayga." Some words
are connected with spiritual culture, such as the
meaning "to make magic, to use magical forces:"
"arba" [Proto-Nostratic].
PETER THOMAS: This picture that Dolgopolsky paints
of the Proto-Nostratic world is controversial and not
widely accepted. In fact, most linguists argue that any
attempt to come up with a language spoken fifteen
thousand years ago is pure speculation. At the
University of Pennsylvania, Professor Donald Ringe
takes issue with the Nostratic approach.
DON RINGE, JR.: As far as I can tell, the observed rate
of basic vocabulary loss in languages imposes a limit
of about ten or twelve thousand years. That would be
about as far back as we can reconstruct
proto-languages using scientific methods, and it
should come as no surprise that all the
generally-recognized language families --
Indo-European, Algonquian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, that
sort of thing -- began to diverge and diversify within that
window of the past ten thousand years.
PETER THOMAS: For Ringe, the problem is this. As
an ancient language gets passed on from generation
to generation, the population shifts. People move away,
mix with others, or divide into different groups. Changes
in the language accumulate. New sounds and new
words appear, until after ten thousand years, there is no
way to be sure that any of the original words are left.
But, Nostraticists argue that there are core words, like
pronouns, which resist change, and it's these specific
words they look for in each language family. For Ringe,
even if particular words are alike in a variety of
language families today, the similarity is not proof that
they have survived from some ancestral language.
DON RINGE, JR.: When you have most of the original
words lost and only a few remaining, you really can't tell
the difference between resemblances which are real
and reflect a common source from which the
languages derive, and the resemblances that are
simply kicked up by change, static, statistical noise, so
to speak. There is a real limit, as we go back in time,
on how much we can reconstruct.
PETER THOMAS: Most linguists set a limit on
language reconstruction of ten thousand years.
However, fossil evidence suggests our modern human
ancestry can be traced back one hundred thousand
years. Could this fossil record shed any light on when
language originally evolved?
CHRIS STRINGER: One of the fundamental questions
at the moment in anthropology is how far back do we
have to go in time to find a common ancestor for the
shared pattern of humans that we find all over the
world? Well, here we've got a reconstruction of a skull
and jaw from a specimen found in Ethiopia in 1967 at a
site called Omokibish. This specimen is probably over
a hundred thousand years old, and my work, and that of
colleagues, has shown that this is an anatomically
modern specimen, and there's quite a bit of evidence
now that points to Africa or perhaps the Middle East as
the place which has the earliest occurrence of modern
people. Modern human language must have been in
existence by forty thousand years ago, because we
have evidence of complex human behavior by that time
in early modern people. For example, in Europe, the
Cro-Magnons had clearly complex social systems,
symbolic behavior, art, many of the things which we
associate with modern humans and hunter-gatherers all
over the world. And so, I feel that by that time, there
must have been full language of a modern human type.
But, to go back further, it becomes more difficult to
track the existence of such a complex language. I
would guess that such a thing was, at least in the early
stages of development in these populations, a hundred
thousand years ago in Africa.
PETER THOMAS: But fossil evidence gives us no help
in solving the puzzle of what kind of language our
earliest ancestors spoke. Still, some linguists believe it
is possible to trace human language back in time even
further than the Nostraticists. By looking for connections
among all the language families of the world, they try to
reconstruct a mother tongue, possibly spoken from forty
to a hundred thousand years ago.
MERRITT RUHLEN: Now, using traditional methods of
comparative linguistics, linguists have been able to
show that there are many language families around the
world. If one simply compares these language families
among themselves, in other words, look at the words
which have been identified by scholars in those
individual families as characteristic of those families,
one runs across the exact same word in family after
family after family. Two of the most famous have
become "tik," meaning "one" or "finger," and "pal,"
meaning "two." You find these two roots in family after
family after family, and I think that there is no way to
explain why you find these roots as well as many others,
except to hypothesize that they all derive from one
common source.
PETER THOMAS: Another example Ruhlen offers is
the word "maliqa." Appearing in English as "milk," the
word form shows up around the word with meanings
which are associated with milk, or suckle, or breast, or
throat. For Ruhlen and a few other linguists, this is
compelling evidence that deep in the mists of time,
there was one word for something like "to suckle, "
which has survived in each of the world's language
families. But, to his critics, a few isolated examples do
not make a convincing case.
AHARON DOLGOPOLSKY: It's quite possible there
are some very --well, very impressing examples, but
impressing examples is one thing, but serious
reconstruction, in order to make it, we must first
reconstruct all kinds of languages. This is one thing.
That's why I think that it is probably feasible, but just
today, it is probably too early.
DON RINGE, JR.: It seems overwhelmingly likely to me
that all human languages derive from some common
source. I think most linguists would agree with that. I
think we would all be shocked if anyone ever came up
with hard evidence that all human languages don't
derive from some common source. But, unfortunately,
that's not the issue. The issue is whether we can offer
objective proof that all human languages derive from a
common source, or whether we have to be content to
believe it.
JAMES MATISOFF: Even if we accept, for the sake of
argument, the Nostratic theory, and say that the time
depth is fifteen thousand years, fifteen thousand is not
forty thousand, and it's not two hundred thousand. You
just cannot go back. There were glaciations in between
there, too, by the way, and all kinds of catastrophes on
the global scale between two hundred thousand years
ago and now. How could anything have been left of that
presumed original linguistic unity, even if it did exist?
Still, it's nice to think about. It's very nice to think about
the days before Babel, when everybody spoke exactly
the same way. But, it's a dream. It's a belief. It's not
scientifically testable, one way or the other.
PETER THOMAS: Gazing upon these silently evocative
images from the past, it's only natural to want to know
more about these artists and their message. It's easy to
imagine that a people who could visually symbolize
their world could also speak a complex language. New
clues to the past continually emerge as we compare the
world's languages and trace their relationships back in
time. Language is the mirror of our humanity, and only
by studying its many reflections will we ever fully know
ourselves.
END
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