The Proto-Human language (also Proto-Sapiens, Proto-World) is the hypothetical direct
genetic predecessor of all the
world's spoken languages. It would not be ancestral to
sign languages
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...
.
The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
. It
presupposes a monogenetic
origin of language, i.e. the derivation of all
natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some time in the
Middle Paleolithic period. As the predecessor of all ''
extant'' languages spoken by
modern humans (''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
''), Proto-Human language as hypothesised would not necessarily be ancestral to any hypothetical
Neanderthal language.
Terminology
There is no generally accepted term for this concept. Most treatments of the subject do not include a name for the language under consideration (e.g. Bengtson and Ruhlen
). The terms ''Proto-World'' and ''Proto-Human'' are in occasional use.
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized ...
used the term ''Proto-Sapiens''.
History of the idea
The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis was that of
Alfredo Trombetti
Alfredo Trombetti (16 January 1866, in Bologna – 5 July 1929, in Venice), was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century.
Career overview
Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy ...
, in his book ''L'unità d'origine del linguaggio'', published in 1905.
Trombetti estimated that the common ancestor of existing languages had been spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Monogenesis was dismissed by many linguists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the doctrine of the
polygenesis of the human races
and their languages was widely popular.
The best-known supporter of monogenesis in America in the mid-20th century was
Morris Swadesh.
He pioneered two important methods for investigating deep relationships between languages,
lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a ...
and
glottochronology Glottochronology (from Attic Greek γλῶττα ''tongue, language'' and χρόνος ''time'') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.Sheila Embleton ( ...
.
In the second half of the 20th century,
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
produced a series of large-scale classifications of the world's languages. These were and are controversial but widely discussed. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated:
"The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family."
Notable American advocates of linguistic monogenesis include
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized ...
,
John Bengtson
John D. Bengtson (born 1948) is an American historical and anthropological linguist. He is past president and currently vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and has served as editor (or co-editor) of the jour ...
, and
Harold Fleming.
Date and location
The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of
Alfredo Trombetti
Alfredo Trombetti (16 January 1866, in Bologna – 5 July 1929, in Venice), was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century.
Career overview
Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna. He was a member of the Italian Academy ...
,
who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, or close to the first emergence of ''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
''.
It is uncertain or disputed whether the earliest members of ''Homo sapiens'' had fully developed language. Some scholars link the emergence of language proper (out of a
proto-linguistic
The origin of language (spoken and signed, as well as language-related technological systems such as writing), its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study th ...
stage that may have lasted considerably longer) to the development of
behavioral modernity
Behavioral modernity is a suite of behavioral and cognitive traits that distinguishes current '' Homo sapiens'' from other anatomically modern humans, hominins, and primates. Most scholars agree that modern human behavior can be characterize ...
toward the end of the
Middle Paleolithic or at the beginning of the
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...
, roughly 50,000 years ago.
Thus, in the opinion of
Richard Klein, the ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern humans or
Cro-Magnons
Early European modern humans (EEMH), or Cro-Magnons, were the first early modern humans (''Homo sapiens'') to settle in Europe, migrating from Western Asia, continuously occupying the continent possibly from as early as 56,800 years ago. They ...
).
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Ca ...
(1998) argued that vocal languages must have begun diversifying in our species at least 100,000 years ago.
In 2011, an article in the journal ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'' proposed an African origin of modern human languages. It was suggested that human language predates the
out-of-Africa migrations of 50,000 to 70,000 years ago and that language might have been the essential cultural and cognitive innovation that facilitated human colonization of the globe.
In Perreault and Mathew (2012), an estimate on the time of the first emergence of human language was based on
phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
diversity. This is based on the assumption that phonemic diversity evolves much more slowly than grammar or vocabulary, slowly increasing over time (but reduced among small founding populations).
The largest phoneme inventories are found among
African languages
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families:
* Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Souther ...
, while the smallest inventories are found in South America and Oceania, some of the last regions of the globe to be colonized.
The authors used data from the colonization of Southeast Asia to estimate the rate of increase in phonemic diversity.
Applying this rate to African languages, Perreault and Mathew (2012) arrived at an estimated age of 150,000 to 350,000 years, compatible with the emergence and early dispersal of ''H. sapiens''.
The validity of this approach has been criticized as flawed.
Characteristics
Speculation on the "characteristics" of Proto-World is limited to
linguistic typology, i.e. the identification of universal features shared by all human languages, such as
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
(in the sense of "fixed or preferred sequences of linguistic elements"), and
recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathemati ...
, but beyond this nothing can be known of it.
Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret (born 27 July 1941), who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate li ...
has hypothesized that Proto-Human had a very complex consonant system, including
clicks.
A few linguists, such as Merritt Ruhlen, have suggested the application of
mass comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison. The method is rejected by most linguists , though not all.
Some of the to ...
and
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of c ...
(cf. Babaev 2008). A number of linguists have attempted to reconstruct the language, while many others reject this as
fringe science
Fringe science refers to ideas whose attributes include being highly speculative or relying on premises already refuted. Fringe science theories are often advanced by persons who have no traditional academic science background, or by researchers ...
.
According to
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical ...
and Ruhlen (2011), the ancestral language would have had a basic order of Subject (S) - Object (O) - Verb (V) or
SOV.
Vocabulary
Ruhlen tentatively traces a number of words back to the ancestral language, based on the occurrence of similar sound-and-meaning forms in languages across the globe. Bengtson and Ruhlen identify 27 "global etymologies".
The following table lists a selection of these forms:
Based on these correspondences, Ruhlen
lists these roots for the ancestor language:
*''ku'' = 'who'
*''ma'' = 'what'
*''pal'' = 'two'
*''ak
wa'' = 'water'
*''tik'' = 'finger'
*''kanV'' = 'arm'
*''boko'' = 'arm'
*''buŋku'' = 'knee'
*''sum'' = 'hair'
*''putV'' = 'vulva'
*''čuna'' = 'nose, smell'
The full list of Bengtson's and Ruhlen's (1994) 27 "global etymologies" is given below.
:
Syntax
In a 2011 paper,
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical ...
and
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized ...
argued that the ancestral language had subject–object–verb (
SOV) word order. The reason for thinking so is that in the world's natural language families, it is typical for the original language to have an SOV word order, and languages that evolve from it sometimes deviate. Their proposal develops an earlier one made by
Talmy Givón
Thomas Givon (also known as Talmy Givón) (born June 22, 1936) is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the Unive ...
(1979:271–309).
Languages with SOV word order have a strong tendency to have other word orders in common, such as:
*
Adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Tra ...
s precede the nouns they modify.
* Dependent
genitives precede the nouns they modify.
* "
Preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s" are really "postpositions", following the nouns they refer to.
For example, instead of saying (as in English) ''The man goes to the wide river'', Ruhlen's Proto-Human speakers would have said ''Man wide river to goes''. However, half of all current languages have SOV order, and historically languages cycle between word orders, so finding evidence of this order in the reconstructions of many families may reflect no more than this general tendency, rather than reflecting a common ancestral form.
Criticism
Many linguists reject the methods used to determine these forms. Several areas of criticism are raised with the methods Ruhlen and Gell-Mann employ. The essential basis of these criticisms is that the words being compared do not show common ancestry; the reasons for this vary. One is
onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
: for example, the suggested root for 'smell' listed above, *''čuna'', may simply be a result of many languages employing an onomatopoeic word that sounds like sniffing, snuffling, or smelling. Another is the
taboo
A taboo or tabu is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, sacred, or allowed only for certain persons.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
quality of certain words.
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeri ...
points out that many established proto-languages do not contain an equivalent word for *''putV'' 'vulva' because of how often such taboo words are replaced in the lexicon, and notes that it "strains credibility to imagine" that a proto-World form of such a word would survive in many languages.
Using the criteria that Bengtson and Ruhlen employ to find cognates to their proposed roots, Lyle Campbell finds seven possible matches to their root for woman *''kuna'' in Spanish, including ''cónyuge'' 'wife, spouse', ''chica'' 'girl', and ''cana'' 'old woman (adjective)'. He then goes on to show how what Bengtson and Ruhlen would identify as reflexes of *''kuna'' cannot possibly be related to a proto-World word for woman. ''Cónyuge'', for example, comes from the Latin root meaning 'to join', so its origin had nothing to do with the word 'woman'; ''chica'' is related to a Latin word meaning 'insignificant thing'; ''cana'' comes from the Latin word for 'white', and again shows a history unrelated to the word 'woman'. Campbell's assertion is that these types of problems are endemic to the methods used by Ruhlen and others.
There are some linguists who question the very possibility of tracing language elements so far back into the past. Campbell notes that given the time elapsed since the origin of human language, every word from that time would have been replaced or changed beyond recognition in all languages today. Campbell harshly criticizes efforts to reconstruct a Proto-human language, saying "the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area."
[Campbell & Poser (2008:393)]
See also
*
Adamic language
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the ''midrashim'') and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden. It is variously interpreted as either the language used by God ...
*
Borean languages
*
Linguistic universals
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research i ...
*
List of languages by first written accounts
This is a list of languages arranged by age of the oldest existing text recording a complete sentence in the language. It does not include undeciphered scripts, though there are various claims without wide acceptance, which, if substantiated, ...
*
List of proto-languages
Below is a partial list of proto-languages that have been reconstructed, ordered by geographic location.
Africa
*Proto-Afroasiatic
**Proto-Semitic
**Proto-Cushitic
**Proto-Berber
* Proto-Niger–Congo
**Proto-Bantu
Europe, Near East, and Caucas ...
*
Origin of language
*
Origin of speech
*
Polygenesis (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, polygenesis is the view that human languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another. It is contrasted with monogenesis, which is the view that human languages all go back to a single common ancestor.
...
*
Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...
*
Recent African origin of modern humans
In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans, also called the "Out of Africa" theory (OOA), recent single-origin hypothesis (RSOH), replacement hypothesis, or recent African origin model (RAO), is the dominant model of the ...
*
Universal grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hu ...
References
Notes
Sources
* Bengtson, John D. 2007
"On fossil dinosaurs and fossil words" (Also
HTML version)
* Campbell, Lyle, and William J. Poser. 2008. ''Language Classification: History and Method''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*
* Gell-Mann, Murray and Merritt Ruhlen. 2003
"The origin and evolution of syntax" (Also
HTML version)
* Givón, Talmy. 1979. ''On Understanding Grammar''. New York: Academic Press.
* Greenberg, Joseph. 1963
"Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements" In ''Universals of Language'', edited by Joseph Greenberg, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 58–90. (In second edition of ''Universals of Language'', 1966: pp. 73–113.)
* Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. ''The Languages of Africa'', revised edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Published simultaneously at The Hague by Mouton & Co.)
* Greenberg, Joseph H. 1971. "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis". Reprinted in Joseph H. Greenberg, ''Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method'', edited by William Croft, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
* Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000–2002. ''Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1: Grammar. Volume 2: Lexicon''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
* Klein, Richard G. and Blake Edgar. 2002. ''The Dawn of Human Culture''. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
*
* Nandi, Owi Ivar. 2012. ''Human Language Evolution, as Coframed by Behavioral and Psychological Universalisms'', Bloomington: iUniverse Publishers.
* Wells, Spencer. 2007. ''Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project''. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.
*
External links
* Babaev, Kirill. 2008
"Critics of the Nostratic theory" in
Nostratica: Resources on Distant Language Relationship'.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Human Language
Human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
Middle Stone Age
Linguistic theories and hypotheses
Evolution of language
Linguistic universals
Paleolinguistics