Reconstructing man's first language
From: Hakan Lindgren
Message: 1881
Date: 2000-03-16
Thank you for letting me join CyBaList!
I found this site a couple of months ago. Since then, I've been reading
Cyril Babaev's
essays on early Indo-European - there are the most informative I've
ever seen on this
subject. I would like to start by asking a question - I hope you will
forgive me if it's a
long one.
I've seen that some people, like Joseph H. Greenberg and
Patrick C. Ryan, are
trying to join all the language families of Earth into one single language
tree. They say
they will be able to tell how all languages are connected to each other
and how they
have developed out of one primordial language - they even claim that
they can
reconstruct the words of this first language. What is your opinion
of this? Do you
consider this to be real science or mere speculations?
I'm asking this because I can't imagine how this could
ever be possible. The wish
to discover mankind's first language is understandable, interesting,
even beautiful,
but also, I believe, very naive. These people say that they are able
to reconstruct a
language that was spoken 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. The oldest written
evidence of any language is from 1800 BC - before that we don't know
anything
about any language (only a few languages have a long history of writing
that allows
us to study them as far back as that - for most languages of the world,
I guess there
is no written evidence until they were colonized by Europe and adopted
the Latin
alphabet, which means we have no traces of them before 1500 AD).
Also, I doubt that the languages spoken today can
tell us much about the first,
primitive stages of human speech: not even the few "primitive" tribes
left today
speak primitive languages. For example, the Eskimo or Inuit language
has a more
complex grammar than Latin, with a fascinating number of inflections.
Still, without the slightest hesitation, Ryan tells us
exactly what syllables man's first
language MUST have had, what words MUST have been included in its vocabulary
(the names of body parts) and how these words OUGHT TO have sounded.
How
can he be so sure? Is there any scientific evidence that there was
only one
primordial language - a language that all present languages can be
traced back to?
People like Greenberg compare words from many unrelated
language groups,
trying to connect them with each other. I haven't tried this myself,
but I imagine it
will be easy to find a lot of similar words when you allow yourself
to associate
freely among the five or six thousand languages of Earth. When there
are so many
languages some words will probably look the same even though they are
not
related (both the Americans and the Chinese call mother "ma" - does
this mean that
their languages are related?). Let's say you've found that the word
for "finger" is
similar in ten unrelated languages from different parts of the world.
That means there
are ten languages that support your theory and 5990 languages that
do not fit your
theory. And if you manage to find a handful of similar words, how do
you know if
this is a clue to the global relationship of languages or just a mere
coincidence?
I'm not saying that we should not try to investigate the
relationship of all
languages. I'm sure we will find many interesting things when we look
for hidden
structures that are common to all human languages - but I think we
are only able to
walk a few steps down this path. We will never be able to walk all
the way down
to the beginning and say "this is what the first language sounded like".
Myself, I
would very much like to know the languages spoken by the people who
painted
the caves in southern France (15,000 to 30,000 years ago) and not just
what their
languages were like, but also what stories they were telling, their
myths and their
jokes - I just think we will have to live without ever knowing this.
All the best,
Hakan Lindgren
Vallingby, Sweden
e-mail: h16255@...