mopc

There is a third way: that the first modern humans had language roughly as today´s 100K years ago, an that all modern languages are descended from it, but due to language evolution rates, all traces of the parent language have been erased.

I personally, based on extensive study, think that it´s unlikely that the initial homo sapiens sapiens population lacked language when they started spreading out 100,000 years ago.

Besides, linguists have been looking for the Mother Language in the wrong place, i.e., vocabulary comparisons. Vocabulary changes with time and eventually becomes totally different. If any trace of the Mother Language exists, it´s in the STRUCTURE of languages.

Similarities in the structure of all languages have been found: it´s either due to an innate language mechanism in the brain, or common ancestry, or both.

J-D

Why?

J-D

Why do you describe that as a 'third way'? How do you think it is different from the first of the two possibilities I described? I can't see any difference.

lpetrich

I think that mopc's third possibility is the most likely one, if only for the reason that every human society has had spoken language with the exception of subcultures like deaf people who cannot easily acquire it. There is also evidence of brain specialization for different language features; it almost seems that we have a "language instinct".

Also, language commonalities can reflect shared circumstances, such as counting on one's fingers leading to base-10 number systems.

But there are plenty of differences in details. Most words have no connection to what they claim, and sound-imitation words are often remarkably variable. Most languages have noun-like and verb-like elements, but preferred word order ranges widely:

Subject, Verb, Object:
SVO
SOV
VSO
VOS
OSV
OVS

Adjective-Noun:
AN
NA

Adposition-Noun:
AN (preposition)
NA (postposition)

...

Languages vary widely in gender/classifier systems:
None
Masculine/Feminine
Common/Neuter or Animate/Inanimate
Masculine/Feminine/Neuter
Several: Bantu languages, Chinese (with numbers and the like)

Some languages often use adjectives as nouns (Latin, the Romance languages, etc.), while English speakers prefer "<adjective> one"; Japanese speakers can give adjectives verb endings, meaning "to be <adjective>".

J-D

except that we still haven't established that it is a 'third' possibility distinct from the first one.

spin

Hmm, perhaps all religions are descended from the religion of those first humans, but due to religious evolution rates, all traces of the parent religion have been erased.


spin

Alf

Many of these "similarities" is simply an inherent part of information passing. Verbs are often used to describe actions - what is happening or happened or going to happen. Nouns are used to describe things or persons, who is making it happen or who is affected by what is happening. Adjectives further describe details about the things or persons and adverbs describe details about the action.

Of course, not all verbs are "actions". In linguistic a verb is usually classified as "that which is affected by time", i.e. you have a past, present and future tense of verbs. Even this is not absolute as languages such as chinese do not have tense expressed by a single verb but rather uses sentence structures etc to express tense. Not surprisingly you therefore also often find that many sentences in chinese lack verb, something that is considered impossible in english. For example the common greeting "Ni hao" has no verb, "hao" is an adverb and how can you have an adverb without a verb? Well, in chinese this is possible, but in indo-european languages that would be unthinkable.

Nouns is similarly often defined as "that which changes form depending on number, gender etc" and again this definition is not absolute as there are langauges where the words do not change form but things such as number and gender is either not expressed or expressed through sentence forms.

A sentence in traditional forms are often considered to have to have a subject, a verb and very often an object. The verb is the "action", the subject is who performs the actions and the object is who is affected by the action. However, a sentence such as "Run!" has only a verb without subject. Imperative form is as such an exception where not even subject is required and as already mentioned, some languages such as chinese does not even require a verb if the verb is implied. Chinese also often omit the subject if the subject can be inferred from the context. Thus, this subject verb and object formula doesn't always work. However, when it works you can classify languages according to what sequence they put these and so you get SVO languages such as modern germanic languages etc. Also, remember that you also have case. Languages with case such as german, russian, finnish and latin you can essentially mix the elements in whatever order in a sentence. The case indicate if the noun is a subject or object etc so sentence order is unimportant. Contrast this with caseless languages where the order of the nouns in the sentence determine if they are subject or object and it is only in these cases that the SVO or SOV etc comes into play.

My point in all this? Well, if someone were to meet an alien from another planet my guess is that if you studied his language you would find that he too had something that functioned as a verb, as a noun etc and he too would have sentences with subjects, verbs and objects and adjectives and adverbs and prepositions etc. He might lack verbs if they could be inferred from the context etc but they would still be there as they could be inferred. SImilarly, he might lack subject or object if it could be inferred from context. Also, you might find that just as with earthly languages a word may function as a noun in one context and a verb in another etc. Thus, such similarities between languages are worthless in concluding a common origin.

Another issue is about words that imitate animal sounds. Of course, there are significant differences in modern language. For example in norwegian the word for "crow" is "kråke". Just as the english word this is an imitation of the sound the bird makes but also just as with english we have then applied the rules of our language upon that sound so that while english who expresses plurality by adding an s makes "crows" for many crows, we use the norwegian grammar rules and add "r" at the end and write "kråker" for many crows. Also, the english word has a distinct english flare to it while the norwegian has a similar scandinavian flare to it. However, at its basic these words share a common origin due to both being indo-european germanic languages but also if you go to other languages where people live in areas where crows live and where they form the word for crow based on the sound the crow makes you will find that same "k-like" sound followed by "r-like" sound followed by some vowel or "a" or "o". One should also keep in mind that vowels are such that they slide over each other, there is no hard and distinct point where a sound is "a like" and no longer "a like". It is gradual and as such a and o are fairly similar to each other.

The reason for this is obvious - this is similar to the sound the bird makes. When a primitive man were to explain to his buddy that he had just seen a crow he probably did that by trying to imitate the sound the crow made in order to get his buddy to understand it was a crow he had seen. This is the most likely explanation to some of these words. The wrods would therefore naturally be similar even if they had independent origin.

Also, to answer a previous question of why I think that multiple independent origins is more likely than a shared common origin. Simply because it is more plausible. A common origin requires that the basic languages was present before the human race spread out. Do we have any indications that language as used by modern humans was in use some 100 000 years ago? Unfortunately, writing wasn't invented then so it is hard to say. Either way, it is not something that I consider to be set in stone and I can easily change my mind later, I just find it more plausible at the current time that languages have multiple independent origins rather than a single shared common origin.

Alf

The Evil One

Not so much. For instance, the preceding sentence, and this one. Clearly "impossible/unthinkable" overstates the case somewhat.

For example, the common greeting "Hello there" has no verb, "there" is an adverb and how can you have an adverb without a verb?

it's not defined that way by any competent linguist

consider the sentence "Steve saw Bill on the bus", and tell us who is affected by the action.

German has very strict V2 order in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. Latin has SOV unless something is shifted forwards for emphasis. The degree to which word order is free in case-heavy languages is an active research issue in linguistics.

Given that adverbs, adjectives and prepositions are far from universal in human language this seems a bit of a stretch.

Yes, the vocal tract had reached its final form before that point; Broca's area is known to have been present in H erectus.

One should display caution in commenting on matters of which one does not know a great deal.

mopc

Cool thread. Good to know several people here know their linguistics, such a neglected and misunderstood science.

When I stated above that perhaps all languages derive from an original one 100K years ago and all traces have been erased, some pointed out that iy might be pointless thinking that way since it's unfalsifiable.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that there were such abrupt breaks in human populations so that one poplulation had to totally reinvent language. Kids need parents, and learn language before they clean their butts.

Thus my point was that there was indeed, most likely, a continuous transmission of language from the parent population in Africa 100/130K years ago until all human populations today, unless we can somehow infer that "feral children" can survive relgularly without learning anybody's language, procreate and generate their own tribes.

And unless of course we can infer that the parent population still lacked language. Which is brutally unlikely given modern understanding of the issue. The parent population seems to havehad everything we do now in terms of mental capacity.

And as I said, maybe by looking into minute detail in syntax and phonetics (not cognate comparison) we might be able to see if there is some common descent in all languages, or not.

mopc

Expanding, in the case of the 'feral child tribes' scenario, we know from Nucaraguan Sign Language and other cases that children do create language from scratch given enough children surviving together for several years. So we know it's possible, but how likely is it that all or most modern Language Families derive from proto-languages that were invented Feral Child Tribes? Or were those proto-languages themselves derived from proto-languages?

I find the second hypothesis far more likely.

A Feral Child Tribe (FCT) is unlikely to exist, most children simply die alone. Even if a large number of children are left alone and survive till procreation age for some reason, they and their descendants would have to fight for survival battling much larger and developed tribes (except for language, since
at least 2nd generation FTC people would be 100% linguistically developed).

Maybe at an early date, before there were many people, FCTs could manage to become large and survive all the way till today. But anyway there is nothing pointing that feral children have a serious chance of survival and procreation. Even if a few managed to survive until adulthood, there would have to be a lot of feral children to create an entire population.

Thus I infer that except for maybe very few isolated cases, all Human Diaspora Languages have descended from an unbroken chain of children acquiring their society's/parent's language, even if we cannot prove it by comparing the languages themselves.

Even if we can find several undoubtable Language Universals, that by itself would not prove the Unbroken Chain Theory (UCT), for it we know that deaf children can reinvent language that seem to conform to Universals, thus feral children could to it too.

The only evidence for UCT would be the negative evidence we have of the unlikelihood of FCTs to ever arise.