Hakan asked
> What is "the anomalous position of Khoisanid languages"?
Whilst claiming "phonemic uniqeness" is a dangerous course (I can
remember a story of how Noam Chomsky claimed that there was one
possible human phoneme that was found in no human language, until at
an international cnference on the subject, he was refuted by one
young
Papua New Guinean linguist who showed that such a phoneme was indeed
found in the Papua New Guinean Highlands) The Khoisanid languages
have
a set of phonemes unique in the world. Their "clicks" are so
destinctive, that they have been used to set the language family
apart
from all others.
> Also: how do we know there were three times as many languages 8 500
BC? 15,000 languages at a time when the world population was much
smaller than today - this figure gives a new perspective to language
diversity and development, but before I accept it wholeheartedly I
would like to know some more about the story behind this figure.
The reference came from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. They
record, for instance that "there are over 37,000 language names
listed
in the 12th Edition of Ethology. The number listed in the Index to
the Atlas of the World's Languages (1994) is 6,796. The
International
Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Bright) lists 6,604 but this includes
some 300 extinct languages. These surveys generally use data from
the
1970s and 1980s."
As Terra Lingua shows, the rate of linguistic loss at present can
only
be compared to the rate of species loss through extinction and
errosion of biodiversity.
Grimes (Ethnologue) gives the following statistics
Asia 2034 (31%)
Pacific 1341 (21%)
Americas 949 (15%)
Africa 1995 (30%)
Europe 209 (3%)
Total 6,538 (100%)
In answer to "how many languages have there been?" the Encyclopedia
states "Based upon what is known about the rate languages develop
from
a common origin, it is possible to speculate on the number of
languages which may have existed since the emergence of a human
language facualty. Cautious estimates suggest 30,000; radical ones
over 500,000. A plausible 'middle of the road' figure is 150,000".
There are a number of factors that contribute to language loss. For
instance, it would appear that a major historical factor has been the
formation of states. For example, pre-Roman Italy had a linguistic
diversity that was almost Papua New Guinean. There were four very
different languages in Scicily alone. Sardinia seems to have had
three. Spain was similar. It was the rise of states that led to the
end of this linguistic diversity, everywhere. One finds traces of it
in odd ways. China for instance had whole language families, vaguely
mentioned by name in Chou times that have wholly disappeared.
Another major reason for the loss of languages has been the
population
explosions caused through the spread of agriculture. Thus the
Middle East, today split between Turkic, Iranian and Arabic, in the
mesolithic perod once probably had a linguistic diversity found
today only in the Caucasas. The pygmoid language family, now
almost wholly submerged beneath the Bantu survives in just a few
words
found in isolated pockets. It would seem that the spread of Turkic,
Uralic and Indo-European language families, caused the extinction of
many indigenous tongues, of which a few isolated relicts survive
(like
Basque, Ket and Gilyak). Even in isolated areas language extinction
occurs. For instance Saami today speak a Uralic language. And yet
it
has been shown culturally that this language arrived late, after they
had already come to live in their Arctic home. It has been shown, on
the basis of graves in Norway (where this is a political hot-potato)
that the Saami probably travelled up the West Coast of Norway from
9,000 BCE, being genetically closely related to the Maglemose culture
that developed as the pre-Neolithic Ertbolle culture that underlies
Germanic. They thus may have had a language distantly related to
"Folkish" which some linguists find beneath German.
There is a great deal of effort to fit such language isolates into
the
grand schema of language families (eg. Nostratic) and there may be
some truth in this as ultimately we are all related. But the
branches
of Nostratic that survive are only a few of the many that once
existed, Glen's wonderful phylogenic tree not withstanding.
Hope this helps
John