SOV original word order?

[Matthew Dryer]

I agree that proposing a word order for the original human language is 
going pretty far out on a speculative limb.  I think it is impossible to 
conclude even for more widely accepted language families what the word 
order of the proto-language is.  Word order is so easily changed due to 
contact that even in a family where all languages are SOV, it could 
easily have been the case that the proto-language was SVO and that a 
change to SOV spread throughout all the languages in the family early in 
its history when the languages were in close contact with each other.

On the other hand, if all the current languages in a family are SOV, 
then the best answer to a “pearly gates question” regarding the original 
word order is that it is most likely SOV.  (A pearly gates question is 
the following.  Suppose you die and go to the Pearly Gates and St. Peter 
asks you a question and tells you that if you answer the question 
correctly you get to spend the rest of eternity in heaven but if you 
answer it incorrectly you spend the rest of eternity in hell, and 
crucially, if you refuse to answer the question, you spend the rest of 
eternity in hell.)

So suppose the pearly gates question is “What was the dominant order of 
subject, object, and verb in the original human language?”  While most 
of us might want to refrain from answering, that isn’t an option with a 
pearly gates question.  And given the current distribution of word order 
in the world, any answer other than SOV would be foolish.  The 
distribution of SOV versus SVO in the world in quite striking in that 
although the two orders are about equally common, SOV is much more 
common in small language families, suggesting that there was a time a 
few thousand years ago when SOV was by far the most common word order in 
the world.  (This assumes that there was an original human language. 
But if St. Peter were to ask the question, which presupposes that there 
was, then we could assume there was.)

So, I would also say that the idea that there was a single original 
human language and that that language was SOV probably has a higher 
chance of being true than any claim about the human mind that any 
generative syntactician has made in the last 30 years, and (though this 
is probably more contentious) than any reconstructed forms for 
Proto-Indo-European being correct.  There’s a lot of highly speculative 
work in linguistics.

One might concede that even if their conclusion might be true, some of 
the assumptions they make about remote genealogical classification that 
underlie their argument are more questionable and that in science it’s 
not enough to be right; the evidence that one is right is more 
important.  Perhaps, but I don’t think their argument depends much on 
the particular assumptions they make.  I think that most assumptions 
about genealogical classification would lead to the same conclusion.

Matthew Dryer

Peter Bakker wrote:
> Dear typologists,
> 
> This rather amazing news item:
> 
> http://news.yahoo.com/original-human-language-yoda-sounded-201403614.html
> 
> appeared to be based on this article in Proceedings of the National 
> Academy of Sciences:
> 
> 
> *The origin and evolution of word order*
> 
> *Murray Gell-Mann* 
> <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Murray+Gell-Mann&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>
> *Merritt **Ruhlen* 
> <http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=Merritt+Ruhlen&sortspec=date&submit=Submit>
> 
> 37596410. Contributed by Murray Gell-Mann, August 26, 2011 (sent for review
>       August 19, 2011)
> 
> *Published online before print October 10, 2011, 
> doi:10.1073/pnas.1113716108*
> PNAS* *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. *October 10, 2011*
> 
> This is the abstract:
> 
> *Abstract*
> Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, 
> attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language. If 
> that is so, then this language—like nearly all extant languages—most 
> likely had a basic ordering of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) 
> in a declarative sentence of the type “the man (S) killed (V) the bear 
> (O).” When one compares the distribution of the existing structural 
> types with the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, four 
> conclusions may be drawn. (/i/) The word order in the ancestral language 
> was SOV. (/ii/) Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of 
> syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO 
> and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO 
> occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion. 
> (/iii/) Diffusion, although important, is not the dominant process in 
> the evolution of word order. (/iv/) The two extremely rare word orders 
> (OVS and OSV) derive directly from SOV.
> 
> 
> I thought this article could be both interesting and surprising for 
> students of word order typology.
> 
> Peter Bakker
> 
> 
> Peter Bakker 
>                                                                     email: 
>  linpb at hum.au.dk <mailto:linpb at hum.au.dk>
> Department of Linguistics 
>                                                 tel. (45) 8942.6553
> Inst. for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics       
> Aarhus University 
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> 
> 
> 
>