Question about languages (for Piotr)

_{Salvador Cordova

June 19, 2014

Culture, Evolution}

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Piotr is a professor of linguistics. I was curious to hear his view on the phylogeny of human languages. It is clear many human languages evolve and split off into dialects and maybe form their own new language from a common ancestor language.

However, I’m of the opinion despite some language phylogeny, there is not one universal common ancestor language. In Harold Morowitz’s book Emergence he points out the general belief language appeared suddenly on the scene in human history in several widely dispersed geographical regions at around the same time. Even he found such a coincidence astonishing.

Many people of faith accept the Tower of Babel account which essentially says there are independent language lines that emerged suddenly by a miraculous act of design.

Beyond that, I would definitely accept the hypothesis of human intelligent design of novel languages. For example, the Korean written language has a date affixed to the official sponsoring of its alphabet. And there is language design and some independent origin in cryptographic “languages”. And in the world of modern communication and computers, there are definitely times when a language or “dialect” was considered invented.

Many of the languages in the world of computation first have layers that are driven by the hardware (machine language) and then a layer put on top (assembly language) and then higher language (compiled and interpreted language) on top of that, and even language layers above that.

I’ve been studying the grammars of DNA, and it seems also there are DNA grammars that seem to have independent origin and design. For example there seems a clear divide in the grammars of a Eukaryote and a Prokaryote. They seem to have independent linguistic origin if one is willing to look simply at the linguistic constructs and the necessary hardware needed to implement each language.

DNA grammars of Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes may have some commonality (like the 64 codon to amino acid table), but definitely have distinct differences that suggest independent origin of the grammars. To change the low-level language of each, one has to change the hardware, but the gradual physical transition from one mode of language to the other seem implausible.

Human written and spoken languages do not have such hardware barriers as found between cellular architectures. A child can be brought up to learn any of the existing human languages on the planet. But it still seems to me that human written (and likely spoken languages) have at least of few lines of independent, intelligently designed origin.

Comments

YET upon becoming obscure in the bush they dumbed down including their language. so they replaced a normal language with hoots and hollers.
The people you call "bushmen" are speakers of the Khoisan languages in southern Africa. Khoisan is a collective term for at least three different language families with many members. They are no more "dumbed down" than any other language on the planet. They have big vocabularies, large (sometimes even extremely large) phoneme inventories, rich inflectional and derivational morphology, and complex syntax. To say that their speakers have "replaced normal language with hoots and hollers" is unbelievably stupid, and racist to boot, no matter if you understand it yourself. It's a simple matter-of-fact statement about your offensive comments, not an attack on your character.Piotr_{June 21, 2014
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Piotr your accusation is false and unthoughtful. You must have other reasons for it and not from what I said. thewre are racists but simply opinions about others that are right or wrong and done with truth or malice. anyways i will repeat my point so you can;t so easily get off the racist shot at me. i'm not saying bushman are inferior races. i'm saying they are of ORIGINALLY regular language groups that were no different then any others. YET upon becoming obscure in the bush they dumbed down including their language. so they replaced a normal language with hoots and hollers. Yes they can be so defined as primitive by the time they were discovered. THEREFORE they are not evidence of a very old people group who didn't get a better language. just a segregated people who got more primitive. Its true and fair. Not a reflection on race or genetics. just being out in the boonies too long. You shouldn't use these forums for attacks on peoples character when you fail, I presume, to simply understand simple points. your just jumping at words and not paying attention to the concept. Just like evolutionists do in failing to understand biological concepts.Robert Byers_{June 20, 2014
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Another interesting example of how native speakers develop a lack of awareness about breadth of sound is that no American English speaker pronounces an intervocalic “t” correctly...
Since intervocalic T-voicing is a perfectly normal, regular feature of North American English, there's no reason to call it incorrect. In fact, it would be a bad idea not to use it if you want to sound like an American or a Canadian. In my department, in Practical English courses, students learn to speak English with a native-like mainstream British or General American accent (they are divided into "British" and "American" groups). Of course those whose target accent is American have to master T-voicing; otherwise an important feature of American English would be missing from their pronunciation. Likewise, those whose target accent is British are encouraged to glottalise at least some of their /t/'s, use intrusive /r/'s, etc.Piotr_{June 20, 2014
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One of my favorites . . . Professor: "In English, a double-negative in a statement can mean a positive or an intensifier, but a double-positive never means a negative." Student in back of class: "Yeah, right." -QQuerius_{June 20, 2014
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Classical Greek can have up to 60,000 forms for a single verb, in order to indicate all of the different breadths of meaning.
Up to 60,000? Where did you take it from? Classical Greek had up to 230 finite forms for a given verb stem (plus 66 duals, if you want to include them, but the dual was already obsolete in late Classical times). If you add complex modal forms (perfect subjunctives and optatives), the total count will exceed 300, but not by much. You can increase it artificially by adding non-finite forms (infinitives and all the possible declined forms of participles), but even so I'd put the total at a few hundred max, not tens of thousands. As for dumbing down, languages have existed for tens if not hundreds of millennia and somehow have not degenerated. "Total complexity" is hard to measure, but there is no universal law causing languages to become either simpler and simpler or more and more complex. What is lost in one part of the grammatical system may be made up for by gains elsewhere. For example, English has radically simplified its finite verb forms, but complex verbs (practically unknown in Old English) have meanwhile developed into a neatly symmetrical system with sixteen "tenses" and two voices for each (at least in theory).Piotr_{June 20, 2014
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The comment about Bushmen does seem to be off. In general, however, languages don't necessarily improve in precision but ubiquitously "dumb down" as time goes on. Classical Greek can have up to 60,000 forms for a single verb, in order to indicate all of the different breadths of meaning. Modern Greek only in theory holds about a hundred and that's including all of the clunky auxiliary constructions. Even in English, where we try to make up for lost declensions, the "dumbing down" is obvious with examples of us trying to reestablished precision where we've naturally given it up (I.e. - ye to you to ya'll to ya'lls to ya'llses). Piotr failed to mention that the same language is represented with different characters without necessarily any fundamental underlying changes. Greek again is a great example, wherein the earliest written Greek was not an alphabetically based system pulled from the Phoenicians at all, but rather a syllabary, namely Linear B. Add to that Hieroglyphs have been used both pictographically and alphabetically. The pre-French Vietnamese did not use Latin characters. And do not forget that "Chinese" doesn't just mean different dialects, but arguably some separate spoken languages which use the same writing system. Japanese uses its own syllabary AND Chinese characters. And you can transliterate any foreign word into "English" script without any alteration of meaning. That being said, our transliterations tend to miss the boat because Americans don't make or hear certain sounds as part of a language, which does lead some ignorant people to believe that unfamiliar sounds in another language (like clicks) are somehow indicative of inferiority, which is absolutely not the case. A native English speaker cannot hear the difference between a non-aspirated initial "p" and a "b" and thus Peiking and Beijing are our attempts as approximating a written representation which nears best the same word for the same city. Another interesting example of how native speakers develop a lack of awareness about breadth of sound is that no American English speaker pronounces an intervocalic "t" correctly; and no one but a linguist or linguist wannabe like me would ever notice. Check yourself and naturally pronounce the following: little, fitter, fatter, bitter, batter, butter, liter, mitre, etc. You will have spoken each "t" as a very low soft "d". Cockneys pronounce the same letter as a glottal stop in the back of the throat. And an Oxford professor might pronounce each one as a very heartily clear crisp "t." But somehow we would all understand each other, not just in writing, but in speech, and never be the wiser.jw777_{June 20, 2014
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Piotr, Many thanks for you informative comments and links to your blog. A special thanks for your devotion to your discipline. Without understanding of languages and ancient languages in particular, we would know so little of our rich past. I love learning about ancient history and decoding the ancient writings is very important to our ability to reconstruct what happened in the past. Most of my exposure to linguistics was from Computer Science and Chomsky's influence on computer languages. But also because of my interest in ancient history (especially as it relates to the Old Testament), I gained a deep appreciation for the enormous labor in decoding ancient writings. Thank you again!scordova_{June 20, 2014
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Piotr:
There is very good molecular evidence of common descent in biology.
And that same evidence points to a common design. Go figure...Joe_{June 20, 2014
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Piotr @10, I disagree with you quite often. However, your last comment about Robert Byers is right on. He is a product of religious discrimination and racism so prevalent amongst MOST religions today. I was raised as Catholic, so I was a witness of that first hand. BTW: I doubt very much "English" is Roberts' mother tongue. He is likely of "Pilipino" descent.kevnick_{June 20, 2014
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Robert Byers:
Bushmen etc simply because of primitiveness LOST their original language abilities.They are not signs of a older language but a dumbed down one from their original.
Robert, everybody knows you are an out-of-the-closet racist; no need to remind us of it all the time. I don't think someone who can't figure out when to use a or an as the indefinite article in his own mother tongue should talk about "dumbed down" languages.Piotr_{June 20, 2014
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When I look at the various writing systems (some read left to right, other right to left, and then others top to bottom), and the various writing styles, it is hard to imagine that all came from a singe writing system. Independent origins seems the more reasonable interpretation.
Things like direction change easily, and may be used inconsistently even for one and the same language. For example, archaic (pre-Classical) Greek was written sometimes right-to-left, sometimes left-to-right, and sometimes in a manner known as boustrophedon (= 'ox-turning', as in ploughing): alternate lines were written in opposite directions, with the letters reversed after every turn. We know that the earliest version of the Greek alphabet was an adaptation of the Phoenician consonantal script (the Greek themselves were aware of that). The Etruscans learnt to write from the Greek colonists in Italy, and the Romans took the idea from the Etruscans. The Cyryllic script, as used for Russian, Bulgarian or Serbian, was also a development of the Greek alphabet. The Runic script of the early Germanic peoples was an imitation of one of the North Italic alphabets of Etruscan origin, etc. And so, a number of alphabets (Greek, Etruscan, Latin, Runic, Cyrillic, plus a few others) can be traced back to Phoenician (which itself developed from still older writing systems used in the Middle East in the 2nd millennium BC). All the transitions are pretty well documented.Piotr_{June 20, 2014
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Writing was developed several times independently (though not too many times — many commonly used writing system can be reduced to a common ancestor), but writing is very recent compared to speech.
Thank you very much for your response. When I look at the various writing systems (some read left to right, other right to left, and then others top to bottom), and the various writing styles, it is hard to imagine that all came from a singe writing system. Independent origins seems the more reasonable interpretation. It is truly amazing to glimpse at the various writing systems throughout known history. Here is the alphabet of one writing system. http://ocala-chc.wikispaces.com/file/view/Cuneiform_Alphabet.jpg/245875701/Cuneiform_Alphabet.jpg With respect to the sounds of spoken language, actors in old movies have very slight accents that no longer seem common in the USA, certainly not accents that are heard in modern movies. And these changes happened in less than 100 years. The way words are pronounced seems very changeable indeed.scordova_{June 19, 2014
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The bible says there was and only would be one original language. it probabbly was a pure representation of thoughts into sounds. At babel this was suddenly distorted into, i think, 70 languages. Language is just segregated combinations of sounds. Bushmen etc simply because of primitiveness LOST their original language abilities.They are not signs of a older language but a dumbed down one from their original. Babies are case in point that we don't think in language but only in thoughts. language is a clumsy way to describe our thoughts. Thats why tones of voice are more important and so the origin of music. language is just sounds to express thoughts.Robert Byers_{June 19, 2014
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There are any number of completely lost languages, including the "Atlantean" (people living along the European coast of the Atlantic Ocean) that preceded the arrival of the Indo-Europeans (aka Ayrans). On the other hand we have the living language of the Bushmen, which consists of clicks and whistles and is probably very old. But more interestingly, baby humans form thoughts before they are able to speak. In fact, they clearly form thoughts before they are born. So in what language do baby humans think? Since they begin thinking before they have heard any language spoken, it seems reasonable that the language is programmed in, and that all humans for the entire history of our species start out using the same language. And then they learn the language of their parents as their second language.mahuna_{June 19, 2014
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Interesting discussion. I'm not sure if the fundamental question is being addressed here about "language" in the broadest sense versus languages. Like Piotr noted, we can only take comparative analysis of languages back so far (although it is really exciting and entertaining to reconstruct proto roots). Once you reach language families, going beyond gets very speculative. It's still fun. It's just no longer remotely science. What I would be more interested in is a discussion about how the concepts underlying language came about: tense, mood, person, gender, number, subject, object, parts of speech. Languages are just collections of sounds and/or symbols which minds correlate to the concepts. How did such precision of conception come about? Then why bother codifying sounds and symbols connected? The inception of the sounds or characters themselves are completely arbitrary.jw777_{June 19, 2014
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PS: I discussed these things on my linguistic blog last year: http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/04/too-many-to-communicate.html http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/04/one-big-family-evidence-please.html and in this series: http://langevo.blogspot.com/2013/04/and-now-for-something-completely.htmlPiotr_{June 19, 2014
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Sal, The truth is that we simply don't know if all languages go back to a single common ancestor. Writing was developed several times independently (though not too many times -- many commonly used writing system can be reduced to a common ancestor), but writing is very recent compared to speech. I wouldn't be surprised if spoken language turned out to be older than 500,000 years, while the oldest written texts (linguistic "fossils") known so far (from Mesopotamia and Egypt) are barely older than 5000 years. Common descent (both in biology and in linguistics) cannot be simply assumed -- it has to be argued for. There is very good molecular evidence of common descent in biology. In historical linguistics, we use the so-called comparative method, which has its limitations, given the the high rate of horizontal diffusion (borrowing), imperfect replication, and complex recombination patterns (you don't simply learn your language from your parents -- lots of other people contribute to your linguistic development, and of course a single speaker can be multilingual). As a result, linguistic evolution is fast and quite messy. With our best current methods, we are able to detect shared ancestry (and reconstruct some features of the common ancestor) at a time depth of maybe about 10 thousand years (for well-documented language families). Most of linguistic prehistory is simply invisible to us. I am deeply sceptical of methods such as "mass comparison", and most "long range" work in historical linguistics is either obviously flawed or very tentative.Piotr_{June 19, 2014
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Apologies for my lack of clarity and confusing prose. The question: "Are there several independent origins of human language?" It seems this is in evidence particularly for written language. It doesn't seem that all spoken and written languages evolved from one single language. If there are several ancestral languages that began independently, any estimate on how many? Thanks for your reply. PS I have an interest in linguistics because of my computer background and current exploration in DNA grammars, but I have a passing interest in human languages as well. I spoke Tagalog when very young, and then was forced to speak English when my mother said, "no presents for Christmas if you don't speak English." Oddly, my memory of this confrontation at age 4 got translated into English in my memory, I can no longer recall the exchange in my native language and I can no longer pronounce Tagalog words without a heavy American accent.scordova_{June 19, 2014
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I'll be very happy to answer your question, Sal, but what is it? :)Piotr_{June 19, 2014
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