From: H.M. Hubey
Message: 503
Date: 2003-03-20
Subject: | [evol-psych] In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients |
---|---|
Date: | Wed, 19 Mar 2003 14:54:35 +0000 |
From: | Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@...> |
Reply-To: | Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@...> |
Organization: | http://human-nature.com |
To: | evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com |
New York Times March 18 2003 In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients By NICHOLAS WADE Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue. They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders. Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites. Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached southern Africa from their homeland in western Africa some 2,000 years ago have borrowed certain clicks from the Khwe, one use being to substitute for consonants in taboo words. There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old. One is that the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA. They are called the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar indicating a click. ("Ju|'hoansi" is pronounced like "ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound like the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.) All human groups are equally old, being descended from the same ancestral population. But geneticists can now place ethnic groups on a family tree of humankind. Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones that split only recently from earlier populations, are younger, in a genealogical sense, than those at the ends of long branches. Judged by mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down in the female line, the Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it goes back close to the very root of the human family tree. Full text http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/social/18CLIC.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 89 - 15th March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue89.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
-- Mark Hubey hubeyh@... http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey