[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Tue Jan 21 15:31:53 UTC 2020

I think that at least some of the discussion here, such as the Givón/Newmeyer/Gell-Mann & Ruhlen idea about SOV as the original clause order, pertains not so much to founder effects — bottlenecks affecting distributions — but to whether the current distribution of typological traits is a stationary distribution. That is, whether the current distribution is dependent on the initial state or not. Independence indicates that it is a stationary distribution, which is good for inferring typological universals but means that the initial state is not inferrable. This is no matter whether the initial state is one language (monogenesis) or many, or gesture-dominant or vocalization-dominant, or whatever. Conversely, if the current state is not a stationary distribution, then it is harder to infer typological universals; one would have to factor out the effects of the initial state somehow.

Elena Maslova brought attention to this issue around  20  years ago with a number of interesting papers and presentations. Although she subsequently left the field, her website is still live (I just googled on “Elena Malsova linguistics” and found it). In a presentation at Harvard in 2002, she argued that SO~OS and VO~OV are at their stationary distribution, hence the Givón et al. hypothesis is disconfirmed in her model. In an unpublished paper with Tatiana Nikitina, Maslova argued that the ergative-accusative typological distribution was not (yet) at a stationary distribution. Specifically, there is a higher frequency of ergative languages than would be expected in a stationary distribution in her model.

Bill

On Jan 21, 2020, at 7:29 AM, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

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Many thanks, Michael, for making it so concrete! I had been aware of the Givón-Newmeyer idea (1979/2000) that SOV was the original clause order, which seems to have been taken up by Gell-Mann & Ruhlen and a few others more recently.

But that was not a claim of a current universal tendency being influenced by Proto-World (or a founder population), because there is no clear evidence for a universal (S)OV tendency. OV languages are the majority, but VO order is well represented on all continents (https://wals.info/feature/83A; though less so among genera and top-level families than among languages).

It is certainly a possibility that the relatively few human languages that were spoken 50 kya were more uniform than the languages spoken today, but is there any reason to think that this was actually the case? Around that time, most parts of Africa, and all of southern Eurasia plus Indonesia and Sahul are known to have been inhabited (see a nice map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settlements). Why would the few languages spoken at that time have been more similar to each other than they are now? Many people think that languages existed 150 kya or earlier, and there were other Homo groups (Denisovans, Neanderthals, and probably others) that may well have had languages as well.

And yes, it may be that the rate of change was somehow lower in earlier times (even though people did of course move around, have contact with other groups, replace them, etc., just as they are now), but it however slow the change has been, it has led to great differences between languages (both grammatically and lexically), while at the same time, many grammatical types recur in different continents. And for all we know, lexical forms are more stable than grammatical types, so if there were any very early retentions, we would expect them in superstable words.

Bickel & Nichols (2020) do not seem to find specific structural features associated with hunter-gatherer languages, and they conclude:
"Until such relations [between food procurement types and linguistic types] are demonstrated, typological generalizations drawn from modern languages can be assumed to be valid for all of the history and prehistory of language... frequencies and distributions, but not principles or defaults or constraints, have changed since the Paleolithic." (2020: 73)
However, my question was about *universals*: So what kinds of logically possible language types are there that might have NOT developed because there was not enough time, or because change was too slow over the last 50 kya? If the earliest languages had [OV ~ case ~ suffixing morphology], then this is precisely the kind of type that is not greatly overrepresented today (as noted above). There are surprisingly many OV languages lacking object marking (Sinnemäki 2010), and there are good functional reasons for more object marking in these languages than would be expected by chance.

What I was looking for was claims that clear universal tendencies (e.g. that all languages have demonstratives, or that all languages with subject indexing use it with action predicates) were inherited from an earlier much smaller population ("Proto-World", or some bottleneck population), and that the non-existing types have simply not developed because there was not enough time. In other words, I was looking for concrete claims (not just a vague possibility) which would imply that, in order to assess universal probabilities, we must also take into account the effect of incomplete diversification from the original founding language(s), in addition to the well-established skewing effects of genealogy and geography.

Best,
Martin

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

Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2020. Linguistic typology and hunter-gatherer languages. In Güldemann, Tom & McConvell, Patrick & Rhodes, Richard A. (eds.), The language of hunter-gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=cm_IDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA67&ots=CvnierJexx&sig=4zxJc2tKUt7T8uqmZBSUQTxIPwo
Sinnemäki, Kaius. 2010. Word order in zero-marking languages. Studies in Language 34(4). 869–912. (doi:10.1075/sl.34.4.04sin<https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.34.4.04sin>)

On 20.01.20 22:45, Michael Cysouw wrote:

Whatever/When “Proto-World” was, it surely had a founder-effect in the sense that the original population of speakers was small, and whatever language-structures these people starting using were surely just a small selection of the many different possibilities that human language can have. Then, in the first tens of thousands of years that human language was around, the number of languages and the population of speakers for each language remained small. So there was a lot of possibility of founder effects here too.

Just to put things in perspective:

- immediately post-glacial (10kya) the total worldwide human population was in the order of 1-10 million
- even today the median number of speakers per language is in the order of 10-100 thousand speakers
- taking upper (10M humans) and lower (10K speakers per language) estimates for an upper boundary, this means that 10kya there were maximally 1000 languages, possibly much less.
- Estimates for human populations before the last glacial maximum are much less clear (but see e.g. Atkinson/Gray/Drummund 2008), but 100kya we are probably talking more about 10K humans in total, i.e. just a handful of different languages. By 50kya there are probably still clearly less than 50K humans in total in the worlds, i.e. a few dozens of languages.

In my opinion there is intriguing (though surely not conclusive) evidence that the few languages that started it all off would show rather different typological profiles as a sample of today’s languages (e.g. the citations by Harald, or hidden in some of my own work Cysouw 2002; Cysouw/Comrie 2012;2013). Some possibilities that might be considered for EHLS (“early human language structures”) are: much less fixed order, OV-type order (when fixed order is used), possibly some verbal morphology (with case only coming later?), no tone, no voicing oppositions.

It is even more difficult to speculate whether correlations between linguistic characteristics are also influenced by these early processes, i.e. are contemporary correlations between linguistic types an effect of founder effects? My guess is that most typological correlations are *not* influenced by EHLS. However, the contemporary statistical correlations between [OV ~ case ~ suffixing morphology] might be an example of such an effect of early human language structures.

Given the small number of humans and the small number of languages, my guess would also be that the rate of language change would have been much smaller for most of the history of human languages. There was simply not much pressure to introduce much change (less contact, less need for social separation, in total less interactions because simply fewer people).

What seems rather clear is that the development of languages with more than 1M speakers is recent (I would guess that there were no languages with more than 1M speakers before the last glacial maximum), and that the development of such large speaker communities has had a profound impact on the typological profile of these languages.

best
Michael

=========

Quentin D. Atkinson, Russell D. Gray, Alexei J. Drummond (2008). mtDNA Variation Predicts Population Size in Humans and Reveals a Major Southern Asian Chapter in Human Prehistory. Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 468–474, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msm277

Cysouw, Michael & Bernard Comrie. 2013. Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages. In Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson & Alan Timberlake (eds.), Language Typology and Historical Contingency, 383-394. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Comrie, Bernard & Michael Cysouw. 2012. New Guinea through the eyes of WALS. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 30. 65-95.

Cysouw, Michael. 2002. Interpreting typological clusters. Linguistic Typology 6(1). 69-93.

--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig

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