Hi Folks

Thought you may be interested in this. It is at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html

Regards

John

"In Search of the First Language"

PBS Airdate: 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."

NOVA is funded by Prudential.

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best in medicine. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And
viewers like you.

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.

English
Latin
Greek
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,

English
Latin
Greek
Sanskrit

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,

English
Latin
Greek
Sanskrit

two
duo
dúo
dva

ten
decem
déka
dasa


and "h" in Greek appears as "s" in English, Latin, and Sanskrit.

English
Latin
Greek
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.

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