[language] [Fwd: Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long]]

Sun Mar 23 23:13:43 UTC 2003

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [evol-psych] Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of
the Ancients [long]
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:45:01 +0000
From: John Goodrum <goodrumj at olympus.net>
To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com

African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the
History of Click Languages.
Alec Knight, Peter A. Underhill, Holly M. Mortensen, Lev A.
Zhivotovsky, Alice A. Lin, Brenna M. Henn, Dorothy Louis, Merritt
Ruhlen, and Joanna L. Mountain
Current Biology, Vol. 13, 464-473, March 18, 2003.

This article is available free after registering at:
http://www.current-biology.com/home.isa

Larry Trask wrote:  (mixing posts)

>>Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient
>>mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say
>>language changes far too fast for that to be possible.
>
>In fact, all respectable linguists believe this, and with good
>reason. Only a few fantasizers hanging around the fringes take
>seriously the idea that we can recover some of the properties of the
>ancestral Mother Tongue of all humans from the properties of modern
>languages.

I'd guess that the extent to which a language conserves its elements
correlates to some degree with its lack of contact with other
languages.  I imagine that even an isolated language would change
drastically over time, but it might also retain some of its features
much longer than a non-isolate.  And if not, how would we know that?

>>There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very
>>old.
>
>Here we go with the nonsense.  Apart from a few special cases like
>creoles, all human languages are equally "old", and no language is
>"older" than any other.  An assertion that one language is older than
>another is meaningless, and it shows merely that the speaker doesn't
>know what he's talking about.

To use a fish analogy, I suppose sturgeon are not "older" than the
cichlid species of Lake Victoria, yet they've maintained essentially
the same form for 100 million years, while some of the latter have
been around for only a few thousand or less.  These obviously didn't
pop into existence from thin air, but I think it's pretty reasonable
to say the cichlid is the "younger" of the two.

>Since the time of King Alfred, English has changed so drastically
>that King Alfred could understand nothing of our speech, if he could
>hear it, and we can't even understand the written English of his day
>without learning it as a foreign language. But declaring English to
>be "extinct" is hardly an appropriate response. Nor does it make a
>lot of sense to declare Old English to be "extinct".  If it went
>extinct, then where did modern English come from?

If Old English isn't extinct, don't we have to say that Homo erectus
isn't either?

>The authors point out that the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi separated
>from the rest of us very early -- fine -- and from this they conclude
>that the languages of these two peoples must be exceptionally
>conservative.  But, by the same token, the rest of us separated from
>these two groups very early, and so *our* languages ought to
>be the conservative ones.

The authors infer from genetic data that the Hadzabe and the
Ju|'hoansi separated *from each other* very early, so that the clicks
in their current languages may be conserved features.

>Apparently we are meant to suppose that those ancient click speakers
>trotted from Africa to Australia -- without passing through Asia,
>Indonesia or New Guinea? -- and carried their clicks with them, which
>is why the Lardil tribe had a click -- they had only one click -- in
>their ritual language.  Nonsense.  Damin was invented, and Australian
>languages do not have clicks, nor is there any evidence that they
>ever had clicks.

I couldn't find any mention of Damin, or Australia, in the original
paper so this must be a contribution of Mr. Wade of the NY Times
(normally a pretty good science writer, IMO).

>We don't need any of these fantastic scenarios.  We know that Bantu
>languages have overwhelmed most of the southern half of Africa in
>the last 2000 years or so, obliterating most of the earlier languages
>in the process.  The few surviving remnants, the click languages
>under discussion here, have clicks because clicks were what we call
>an "areal feature" of southern Africa before the Bantu expansion.
>That is, clicks were common in the area because they had spread from
>language to language by contact -- just as some of the intrusive
>Bantu languages have now acquired clicks by contact.  There is no
>puzzle here that needs to be explained, and the authors are merely
>confusing themselves with their wild interpretations.

I'm not familiar with Knight, but I wouldn't usually expect wild
interpretations from Underhill, Zhivotovsky and Mountain.  These are
well-known and respected researchers.

A few paragraphs from p470:

"The two independently inherited DNA segments each reveal variation
that provides evidence that San and Hadzabe are among the most highly
divergent of African (and therefore global) population pairs.
Considered without population genetic and linguistic context, such
divergence might be consistent with a number of scenarios, including
separate, independent invention of clicks by ancestors of San and
Hadzabe; gene replacement without language replacement; borrowing of
clicks by one group from the other; or independent retention of clicks
since early in human prehistory.

Two lines of evidence, rarity of clicks in human languages and
complexity of the shared repertoire of clicks and accompaniments,
suggest that independent invention of clicks in San and Hadzabe
populations is an unlikely explanation for the observed genetic
pattern. With regards to complexity of click repertoires, each click
language includes a particular set of clicks and accompaniments. Some
languages include larger sets than others do, but these sets do
overlap. The clicks integral to Hadzane largely overlap with those
clicks integral to Khwe and San languages. The hypothesis of
independent invention, as it applies to the languages of the Hadzabe
and San, lacks linguistic support...

...[Another] a priori explanation of sharing of clicks by San and
Hadzabe in the context of genetic differentiation is linguistic
borrowing. Xhosa, for instance, while uncontestedly a Bantu language,
incorporates some clicks borrowed from Khwe or San languages. The
extensive population contact required for such click borrowing,
however, leaves a genetic signature through gene flow, as has been
well documented. The minimal genetic similarity between San and
Hadzabe consists of sharing the NRY M2 mutation. Data herein and
elsewhere strongly suggest that M2 has been introduced into
click-speaking groups by non-click-speaking neighbors. In addition,
gene flow leads to short, central branches for admixed populations,
contrary to Ju|'hoansi and Hadzabe differentiation. Finally,
distortions of the tongue required to produce click consonants inhibit
borrowing of the full repertoire of clicks by adult nonnative
speakers. The Nguni language, for instance, includes a click system
that is far less deeply integrated and complex than the systems of
Hadzabe and San languages. Deep mtDNA and NRY divergence between San
and Hadzabe is contrary to expectations under a scenario of borrowing
of clicks by Hadzabe from San.  Current genetic and nongenetic data
are inconsistent with three of four a priori explanations for sharing
of clicks without genetic similarity."

So why, if clicks are so rare, and if indeed these groups have been
isolated from one another for so long, do they both have clicks?  The
authors' suggestion that they're a conserved element of what was once
the same language seems to me to have some merit.

************

On the question of the minimum size of the ancestral human population,
if anyone cares here are a few references:

FJ Ayala, A Escalante, C O'hUigin, and J Klein
Molecular Genetics of Speciation and Human Origins
PNAS 1994 91: 6787-6794.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/15/6787

N Takahata
Allelic genealogy and human evolution
Mol Biol Evol 1993 10: 2-22
http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/10/1/2

Li, W. and Sadler, L.
DNA variation in humans and its implications for human evolution.
Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, 1992. 8:111-134.

JG

News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 90 - 22nd March, 2003
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue90.html

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Mark Hubey
hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey

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