Imprensa: "Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one"

Tue Aug 7 22:09:45 UTC 2007

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Headline:  Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one
Byline:  Moises Velasquez-Manoff Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 07/19/2007

Around 50,000 years ago, something happened to our ancestors in
Africa. Anatomically modern humans, who had existed for at least
150,000 years prior, suddenly began behaving differently. Until then,
their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins,
the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and
as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think
was gestural.

But then, "almost overnight, everything changes very rapidly," says
Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in the Anthropological Sciences Department
at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Humans began making much
better stone tools. They started burying their dead with
accouterments that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo
sapiens, the "wise" apes, began creating art.

"People started having imagination at this time much more than they
had earlier," says Dr. Ruhlen.

Many scientists think that fully modern human language enabled this
"great leap forward." Language enabled abstract thought, the deciding
factor in archaic humans becoming - well, us. And because scientists
surmise that language arose only once, they believe that before
leaving Africa to colonize the world, all humankind spoke one
language. Linguists have dubbed it "proto-world" or "proto-sapiens."

A multidisciplinary team of scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in
New Mexico is working toward reconstructing that mother of all
languages. Headed by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the
international Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is
developing a freely accessible etymological database of the world's
languages (http://ehl.santafe.edu/intro1.htm). Where possible, EHL
linguists are attempting to reconstruct - and then compare - ancestor
languages, moving ever closer to the first human language. Viewed by
many linguists as a fringe movement, the project has attracted much
criticism. Many linguists say that historical languages cannot be
studied beyond an 8,000-year threshold; they change too much, they
say. Some take issue with the project's methods: A few words shared
among reconstructed languages doesn't prove a familial relationship,
they insist, especially far back in time.

Languages change constantly. Speakers invent or borrow words to suit
their needs. But for reasons not completely understood, some
languages change more than others. Italian, for example, has remained
much closer to ancestral Latin than French. Lithuanian has many words
that almost exactly match Sanskrit, which was spoken 3,500 years ago.
And some language "families" like Afroasiatic retain words in common
even after more than 10,000 years of divergent evolution.

"That time limit is totally wrong," says John Bengtson, vice
president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory
in Cambridge, Mass. "Languages that have been separated 8,000 years
get down to a low percentage of common words. However, that low
percentage seems to be very stable."

And there begins EHL's approach. Within languages, linguists think
that because certain words - including the pronoun "we" and the
number "one" - form the basis of a functional language, they are much
less likely to change or be lost. EHL linguists begin by comparing
this "basic lexicon." They include "words that are thoroughly
essential and must have been in human language before significant
cultural advances were made," writes EHL team member George
Starostin, a linguist at the Russian State University for the
Humanities in Moscow, in an e-mail.

Using this method, EHL has grouped all the world's languages into 12
linguistic superfamilies. They've tentatively grouped four of these
superfamilies, which include languages of Eurasia, North Africa, and
some Pacific islands (and maybe languages of the Americas as well)
into one super-superfamily dubbed "Borean." An ancestor to a large
share of today's languages, Borean was spoken some 16,000 years ago
when glaciers covered much of Europe and North America, they say.

EHL linguists use several methods. One - the most controversial, but
not the most widely used, says Starostin - involves matching words
and meanings across languages. For example, Ruhlen and Bengtson have
noticed that a word roughly corresponding to "water," which they
render in proto-sapiens as "AQWA," appears in many languages. In
Latin it's "aqua"; in Japanese, "aka" means "bilge water"; in
Chechen, meanwhile, "aq" means "to suck"; in an African Kung dialect,
"kau" means "to rain"; and in Central American Yucatec, "uk" means
"to be thirsty."

But critics look at etymologies like these and see only problems.
They're too loose with meanings and sounds, they say. And too many
alternate explanations exist: Maybe the word was borrowed from one
language and spread to the others. Perhaps it's onomatopoetic, a word
that sounds like what it is. ("Cock-a-doodle-doo" is an onomatopoetic
word that appears in similar form in many languages, but that doesn't
prove relation.) Finally, the shorter the word - in some of the
languages, just one syllable rather than two or three - the greater
the possibility of a chance match.

"You've presented this list of words, but it looks like you can
explain these lists in several different ways," says Lyle Campbell, a
professor of linguistics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
"Their data is really easy to challenge, and it's really easy to find
words that are similar to one another across languages."

EHL linguists argue that they're only doing exactly what Sir William
Jones, who first postulated a common ancestor for classical Greek,
Latin, and Sanskrit, did in the 18th century. (Indo-European, the
eventual result of Jones's initial observations, is perhaps the most
widely accepted language family.) Historical linguistics begins by
observing similarities that occur more frequently than dictated by
chance, they say - and they're just starting.

The comparison to Jones also underscores another argument central to
EHL's endeavor. The further one moves back in time, the more related
languages should resemble one another, they believe. "It is more
risky because you're comparing two or more hypotheticals to arrive at
an even more hypothetical construction," says Mr. Bengtson, "but we
think it's still a valid thing to try to do."

Human genetic evidence appears to support EHL's basic assumptions.
The human genome indicates that all humanity traces its ancestry to
as few as 1,000 individuals who lived between 50,000 and 60,000 years
ago. This small founding population may explain how the capacity for
language spread so quickly. "Bottlenecks play a very important part
in human evolution," says Ruhlen. "This was the first major
bottleneck."

Genetics also suggests two separate migrations out of Africa. One
followed the south coast of Asia, ending up in Australia at least
45,000 years ago. The other took the land route through the Middle
East into Central Asia, where they went both west into Europe and
east, eventually reaching the Americas.

Very tentatively, EHL has grouped the world's languages into three
super-superfamilies corresponding to these migrations: those that
correspond with the coastal route, which include Papuan languages;
those that correspond with the land route out of Africa, descendants
of Borean, the best reconstructed; and the "click" languages spoken
by the San, or "Bushmen," of southern Africa. Scientists think that
the San most resemble the first modern humans. Their language, almost
unique in its use of click sounds that perhaps other early languages
lost, may best conserve traces of proto-sapiens.

Recently, EHL further refined its hypothesis. How could the
16,000-year-old Borean have engendered the lion's share of Eurasian,
North African, and American languages? Some 20,000 years ago, at the
peak of the last ice age, the world lost much of its linguistic
diversity, they argue. Advancing glaciers pushed humanity south,
mashing linguistic groups together. As in later periods of human
history - like now - only a few languages emerged from that mixing.
Borean, they say, was one of them.

(c) Copyright 2007 The Christian Science Monitor.  All rights reserved.
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